It seemed like winter was never going to go away up here in Wyoming. It started to snow two weeks before Halloween and never got above freezing until the end of April. So around the first warm day at the end of April, I met up with Kim just east of town to head out for our first dualsport rid of the season. I was out of shape and pretty stiff from lack of activity over the snowy months, so I was looking forward to stretching out and unwinding for a change. The first half of the ride went nicely as we covered two track and county routes. But somewhere in the middle, while climbing some switchbacks, on our way to some panoramic views, I tried to climb a rocky steep line up a righthand turn, and when I backed off the throttle for a second, the mighty 501 flamed out and stalled. That's what I get for running the old gas that was still in the tank, and not bumping the idle up. I tipped to the downhill side, and my foot couldn't reach anything, so over I went, with the weight of the machine slamming me into the rocky surface. My right forearm was the first thing to contact the rocks, and I was sure that I broke that. The rest of my right side just hurt from the impact. I pulled my trapped right leg out from under the machine and got up, carefully checking my arm as I stood there. Kim had no idea that I crashed, and was up top, taking pictures As I stood there, I realized that my right leg was feeling worse and worse as the minutes ticked by. I had no idea of what happened to it, so when Kim returned and picked up my bike, I tried to resume the ride. A couple miles later, and I realized that the right knee had gone non-op, so I could neither ride, or even walk properly. So we turned around and went back to the staging area. It turned out that I had somehow managed to get my knee bent in some direction other than what it was designed to bend, and pulled a bunch of ligaments and tendons in the process. And I knew that would be a long time in healing....maybe up to six months or so. (the arm bone healed up with just a little bump in it.) Fast forward six weeks to last Saturday. Knee still a long way from healing, but the weather had been so nice, and I was tired of being cooped up in a little apartment, so I was determined to go for a ride. Mr. 501 had fresh gas, and I bumped the idle up (to where it was supposed to be anyway), and we were off for another ride. It had been raining every single day for the last couple of weeks, and the prairie was awash in green and flowers were blooming. This time we headed south of town, staged just off a somewhat paved road. where we headed east on easy smooth dirt. Then the road got muddy as we wound our way up into the mountains, and we reached our morning objective, Pine Butte. Great scenery up there, and we had passed an abandoned ranch on the way up so we stopped to inspect and explore that on our way down. There was also a faint jeep trail leading our from there, so we followed that and Kim's online map to hook enough of these abandoned tracks together to make our way back to the truck. It was a beautiful day, with temperatures in the low to mid 60s, breezy to windy and partly cloudy....but luckily the clouds never piled up into any thunderstorms. We had a little bit of everything, smooth dirt roads, muddy climbs, mud and water crossings, rocky meandering faint trails. No knees were injured during the ride, although my right knee was pretty sore for the next couple of days from suddenly getting trail use for a few hours. We are already planning our next scoot, so stay tuned.
