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XLADV Mojave National Preserve 2018


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Wow what a great event yeah?  We ended up with close to 50 people!  It seems like we had about 15 sign up on the last two days.  We raised nearly $3k for Motorrad Angels too; about $2200 from raffle ticket sales then the rest from auctioning some of the items like the AltRider panniers.

I had such an amazingly good time!   So many great people came and made it special.  Our food was completely off the hook gourmet!  Tracy and Debra did such an amazing job with the food!

It was also nice to have both Stephen Gregory shooting photos for us as well as the legend, Simon Cudby, of Upshift Online join us.  He's actually quite an amazing rider as well.  Stephen's images will be available in a few days.  I'll put them in a gallery here on the site.

I was sorry to see a few of us had some injuries though :o  @greedyg hurt his ankle and big toe and left a day early after farting around a bit too exuberantly with @Rogers.  This guy Mark Hamilton on his AT started out with us Saturday and fell and hurt himself about 5 miles into the track and went home.  Then Sandro fell and hurt his shoulder and I gave him a ride back most of the way to San Diego.  Then one of the Bulgarians hurt himself too but not too bad.  I guess those things happen though.

Got a ton of photos and video I'll share soon but keep an eye out for the hashtag #xladvmohave2018 on social media.

 

 

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 We had a great time.  Thank you for having Bear? and I?   2 thumbs up???? to the chefs,  tracks/routes,  and riders!  Great meeting so many riders and reconnecting with others.  Till next time time,  thanx again all!

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47 minutes ago, Trinie said:

 We had a great time.  Thank you for having Bear? and I?   2 thumbs up???? to the chefs,  tracks/routes,  and riders!  Great meeting so many riders and reconnecting with others.  Till next time time,  thanx again all!

Hi there Trinie, sorry I did not have the pleasure meeting you. That was a cool setup you had. I had a big smile watching you ride with the "pillion bear" off road.

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Another fantastic ride at the tail end of desert riding season!! Mojave National Preserve is freeking huge and vast. At 1,600,000 acres (2500 square miles), it is one of the largest units of the National Park System in the contiguous United States. 

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What can I say, Nice people, great riding area, and the food was fantastic! Tracy and Debra deserve a lot of credit. They worked their butts off feeding everyone! I'm just sorry I could only stay for the one day Saturday.

I’m used to events where I don’t know anyone. For this one I had a hard time finding someone to ride with that wanted to ride at a mellow pace yet advanced tracks. I ended up going at it solo. I'm hoping in the next few season's I'll have my beast, actually ride it to the event, and ride with like minded riders!
 
To give you an idea of what kind of bikes are running, here is typical of what to expect. This is a KTM 1290. It’s the trophy truck of adventure bikes.160 horsepower and the only time you see it is when it’s parked. The guys who own these are very fast and skilled young bucks and they average over 60mph across rough desert. In some spots they do in excess of 100mph!! It can be a unforgiving bike when ridden slow. It’s meant to be ridden fast and hard. Come to think of it, it’s also unforgiving when ridden fast. When something goes wrong on a 500 + pound bike in the dirt…….. It’s not hard to figure out! One thing to remember is your wallet cannot purchase the experience and skills needed to ride one of these slow or fast!!
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Some of us had just run of the mill dual sports. I trucked mine in but a few guys actually bagged up the XR's, KLR650's, etc and rode here!! I'm still very Impressed how well a KLR can be setup for travel. It has the added bonus of being reliable as an anvil!! I'm sorry I forgot your name but I really liked your very well sorted KLR!!
 
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For most of the guys this is the ride of choice. BMW GS. There were more of these at the rally than any other bike. Great for the road and pretty fair in the dirt. 125HP and close to 600lbs stripped.  Hope he removed the panniers before venturing in the dirt!!
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And here is the bike I’m saving for. Yamaha Super Tenere!! Just about 100HP and 600lbs. Mine will be setup different but I’m very impressed what this bike can do!! There was only one of these at the rally. The guy who owned it was just an average rider like myself. He was able to go anywhere the KTM’s, BMW's or myself could go. I met up with the him at lunch and he was enjoying himself and loving the ride!! BTW all that luggage was stripped off for the ride. And it looks more loaded than it is. His helmet and jacket are set on top to dry. This is a very well sorted Tenere. And the IMS footpegs!!! WOW!!
 
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The ride was interesting to say the least!! 
It  was a mixture of deep sand, a few short sections of whoops, cactus, rocks and rolling unimproved 2 track roads. The views are breathtaking!! But you have to be stopped or riding really slow to enjoy them. When you're on the throttle you have to give 100% of your focus on the trail ahead. Looking as far ahead as possible for obstacles and focusing on a line around them. When riding deep sand it’s all about steady throttle, very light grip on the bars, standing on the pegs, staying centered on the bike, and letting it move underneath you. As I age (I’m pushing 60) loss of motor skills and slower reflexes are the reality of life. So I have to ride a bit slower and adjust for reaction time accordingly.
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Rocks are part of any good advanced ride in the desert. And this was the easy section. It was the only rock section I could stop and take pictures!! It's right at the entry to the lava tubes.

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This was the first time I’ve ever ridden through lava rocks. You DO NOT want to fall. They are razor sharp. I actually ran a gear high and lugged through them. Did not want to chance dropping my bike or cutting my tire and getting a flat. I rode at least 2 miles through a pretty tough section (easy on my Beta but would be hard on a 500lb beast) of them. There was one brutal rocky hillclimb/downhill I was actually able to navigate a easy way through. 

I want to mention that Eric laid out a really good course that was well marked on the GPS. Unfortunately my Basecamp did not communicate so well with my outdated 76CSX. I ran out of tracks at the lava tubes.

I saw a group of jeepers and they were zero help. The dummies gave me bogus directions that likely would have caused me to run out of fuel. It was almost 90 degrees with the sun beating down on me with just over a half tank of fuel and a small 2 liter emergency fuel bottle. The problem navigating off road with just a map is it does not tell you the condition of the road or trail. Wind, rockslides, and flash floods can make any road or canyon impassable at any time in the park. There are so many roads in the park that the short staffed BLM, US forestry service, or rangers just can’t keep up with the closure notifications. 

I decided to trust the map and take the longer route to the Shell station but shortest route to the pavement. I ended up backtracking through the lava rocks and followed an old mining road out to paved Cima road. The mining road was pretty smooth but had a few miles of very soft sand that was "deep grooved" from other riders on the big bikes. It made for a twisty unnerving ride!! 

Come to find out I unknowingly followed one of the intermediate routes out of the park!! I made it to the Shell station with under a half tank. Total miles about 88 miles of dirt and 10 miles of pavement to Shell station. Due to the time and what I already went through, I called off the hard sections going back and took the direct easy way (paved/fire roads) into camp about 40 miles away.

After getting back to camp I figured I had a damn good ride and decided to pack it up and head home. 

 

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Wow what a great event yeah?  We ended up with close to 50 people!  It seems like we had about 15 sign up on the last two days.  We raised nearly $3k for Motorrad Angels too; about $2200 from raffle ticket sales then the rest from auctioning some of the items like the AltRider panniers.
I had such an amazingly good time!   So many great people came and made it special.  Our food was completely off the hook gourmet!  Tracy and Debra did such an amazing job with the food!
It was also nice to have both Stephen Gregory shooting photos for us as well as the legend, Simon Cudby, of Upshift Online join us.  He's actually quite an amazing rider as well.  Stephen's images will be available in a few days.  I'll put them in a gallery here on the site.
I was sorry to see a few of us had some injuries though   [mention=689]greedyg[/mention] hurt his ankle and big toe and left a day early after farting around a bit too exuberantly with [mention=214]Rogers[/mention].  This guy Mark Hamilton on his AT started out with us Saturday and fell and hurt himself about 5 miles into the track and went home.  Then Sandro fell and hurt his shoulder and I gave him a ride back most of the way to San Diego.  Then one of the Bulgarians hurt himself too but not too bad.  I guess those things happen though.
Got a ton of photos and video I'll share soon but keep an eye out for the hashtag #xladvmohave2018 on social media.
 
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Thanks again Eric for organizing this event and giving me a ride! Before my little mishap, I was having a great time and was feeling pretty good on the XR650L which I had just bought two days before.
I learned a couple important things on this trip and met some great people in this XLADV community.

The Update on my injuries:
After taking a long soak in a hot bath with Epsom and Dead Sea salts last night, which really helped, I Ubered to the Sharp Memorial ER. They tested my range of motion and the doc said that I still had good stability, so didn't appear that I tore any ligaments. Also took several x-rays and incredibly, they said that the X-rays were perfect, no breaks or fractures, just soft tissue trauma, which they said I should heal from pretty quick. If still have significant pain 7 days from now then go back, but I hope that won't be the case. They gave me three painkillers last night. One shot in each shoulder and a pill. Finally got some relief, but woke up this morning sore as hell and had to get my ass up to go to the pharmacy for the prescription. Ridiculous that they don't have same day delivery, but I made my way there and got a couple of goodies that will hopefully get me by.

Even though my trip didn't end the way I hoped for myself, it still was a great trip and had a some great takeaways:

1. ATGATT - All The Gear All The Time
Protect yourself the best you can with the proper gear. You won't always escape injury, but a couple bruises here and there is better than broken bones and being in the hospital any day of the week!

2. Honk Before You Pass!
Honk your horn, rev your engine scream and do whatever you need to do to make your presence known before you pass up the rider in front of you, so they don't cut you off when you gun it to pass.

3. Saw a lot of great bikes and mods that I could use on my two bikes to turn them into bigger and better fun machines!

4. Last, but not least, I discovered a great community with people from all over that love to share their passion of riding, help each other and have fun.

I look forward to the ride up in the High Sierras in August! Until then, ride safe and with a big fat smile on your face :-)IMG_20180505_093308.jpegIMG_20180505_093330.jpegIMG_20180505_111039.jpegPANO_20180505_112042.jpegIMG_20180505_112151.jpegIMG_20180505_112201.jpegIMG_20180505_111925.jpegIMG_20180505_134343.jpeg
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Glad to hear you'll be okay, @Sandro Andre Marino!  yeah those boots have to go and your jacket is okay but you might be able to do better.  Can't wait to ride again with you soon.  These next days will be really painful but you'll be back at it in no time I bet!

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Glad to hear you'll be okay, [mention=4230]Sandro Andre Marino[/mention]!  yeah those boots have to go and your jacket is okay but you might be able to do better.  Can't wait to ride again with you soon.  These next days will be really painful but you'll be back at it in no time I bet!
Sure thing Eric, the next time you see me, the bike & I will have some upgrades :)
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Who had a blast this weekend?! I know I did! Rolled in around 230pm on Friday. Unloaded, setup camp and took off on my Beta 500 and Matt Norton on his CRF250L around 4pm. We started off taking the intermediate 3 track in hopes to find some fun sand washes and we sure did! We ended up bypassing the southwestward turn to the rest of Int. 3 and headed toward the Mojave trail. On the way to the Mojave trail we came across a forest that seemed to be in the middle of nowhere. What a cool area we thought so we decided to rip up the trail and see how high we could get. We ended up on a bluff that was overlooking rocks that were flipping us off. 

We then got to the Mojave trail and really opened the bikes up and came across the rock cabin. Matt recently did the entire Mojave trail and saw the cabin so only I went up to look at it. It was pretty cool...so cool I wish I lived there! ?

After that we hit a two track trail southward. By this time it was about 545pm so we were trying to head back to catch the 6pm dinner. Well, 6pm came and went after hitting some sandy two track, that turned into a sandy single track and going a little farther south than we thought. At this point we were off GPS tracks so I was just leading us in the general direction of the camp. We got back to camp just in time to grub! It was DELICIOUS! 

Saturday morning we got up, geared up, topped off our bikes and headed out. We had a noob with us and wanted to see some of the scenic route so it was recommended to us that we do the easy adventure loop. It was a very scenic ride but too much highway for my liking. We stopped at a gold mine processing mill outside of Primm and found some amazing artwork. We were there a while and then headed back to camp via some two track. That's when things got interesting and I found myself in a full on drag race down a two track trail with @Bip Schkaboden on his GS. That was probably the most fun the entire day for both of us. We were hitting speeds around 70-75mph down the two track and we couldn't stop smiling after we got to the main road. We then headed back to camp. 

Sunday was great! Stephen Gregory offered to everyone some action shots out on the trail. It happened to only be me, Evan Brown and Matt Norton who took advantage of it. We had a great time and I think he was able to get some great shots. 

Overall the trip was a blast and I hope to do it again next year! 

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13 hours ago, Ballisticexchris said:

Hi there Trinie, sorry I did not have the pleasure meeting you. That was a cool setup you had. I had a big smile watching you ride with the "pillion bear" off road.

I can only imagine what it looks like to oncoming traffic and those following,  lol

Until we meet again for the first time ?

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I am happy to update everyone, that we (the Bulgarians ;) ) are both in perfect shape. I managed to hit the deepest pothole on the trail pretty hard and cut through a bush when I flew out of it, but  besides my pride I sustained no injuries :) .

Thank you for organizing such a great event Eric, everything was excellent! We are definitely coming to the next one!

Vlad

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Woke up this morning to find someone who attended the event processed their own refund!!!!  I was like WHAT!!!!!?  Turns out it's a PayPal glitch where for some reason I was supposed to "confirm" receipt of his payment by a certain date or else it would give him his money back and I missed it.  I reached out to him and I'm sure he will re-pay (or I'll hunt him down! :lol:).  Found one more attendee in that same situation so I made to to accept that payment too.  These are the joys of event organizing.

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2 hours ago, Eric Hall said:

Woke up this morning to find someone who attended the event processed their own refund!!!!  I was like WHAT!!!!!?  Turns out it's a PayPal glitch where for some reason I was supposed to "confirm" receipt of his payment by a certain date or else it would give him his money back and I missed it.  I reached out to him and I'm sure he will re-pay (or I'll hunt him down! :lol:).  Found one more attendee in that same situation so I made to to accept that payment too.  These are the joys of event organizing.

Remember how I suddenly canceled my attendance and was refunded exactly 30 days after I paid and had to re-register?  It's a Paypal "feature" not a glitch. Hopefully, you've accepted them all by now or there will be a lot of off-season hunting going on in the XLADV forest!

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3 hours ago, Eric Hall said:

Woke up this morning to find someone who attended the event processed their own refund!!!!  I was like WHAT!!!!!?  Turns out it's a PayPal glitch where for some reason I was supposed to "confirm" receipt of his payment by a certain date or else it would give him his money back and I missed it.  I reached out to him and I'm sure he will re-pay (or I'll hunt him down! :lol:).  Found one more attendee in that same situation so I made to to accept that payment too.  These are the joys of event organizing.

I have that with some Paypal users.  It might have something to do with whether they confirmed their account or something.  Every payment I would have to go look to make sure it was accepted and posted.  Thanks for the reminder, i need to go look...

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It was great to meet and enjoy Mojave with you all.  I have been to numerous XLADV events, and I always have a good time.  This one was no exception, and aside from the flies couldnt have been better.

I don't get many chances to get out and go off-roading, so my skills are developing slowly.  My Sand skills definitely improved on this ride.  I didn't take many pics either, but I am happy with some of the ones I did get.  The Lava tubes was awesome to see for sure, and aside from a couple of instances, I am glad that most everyone walked away injury-free.

Hope to see you all at the High Sierra ride in Sept.

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1 hour ago, Ross W said:

It was great to meet and enjoy Mojave with you all.  I have been to numerous XLADV events, and I always have a good time.  This one was no exception, and aside from the flies couldnt have been better.

I don't get many chances to get out and go off-roading, so my skills are developing slowly.  My Sand skills definitely improved on this ride.  I didn't take many pics either, but I am happy with some of the ones I did get.  The Lava tubes was awesome to see for sure, and aside from a couple of instances, I am glad that most everyone walked away injury-free.

Hope to see you all at the High Sierra ride in Sept.

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Hi there Ross, this is Chris, Right on!! You guys made it to the Lava Tubes. After chatting with you at the Shell station I was wondering what route you guys took? I'm saving hard for my Super Tenere. Maybe I can ride with you next season. Just from our short conversation, you sound like guys who ride smart and try not to get in over your head. My kind of riders!! Make no mistake, if you made it to the lava tubes via dirt, your skills are more than adequate and developing really well. Both of your bikes are really well setup adventure machines. It was a pleasure meeting you and hope to see you again.

BTW, I need to get some new riding gear!! Armoring up in a hot non vented pressure suit takes forever. Those jackets are sweet!! Vented slip on slip off protection!!

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1 hour ago, Ballisticexchris said:

Hi there Ross, this is Chris, Right on!! You guys made it to the Lava Tubes. After chatting with you at the Shell station I was wondering what route you guys took? I'm saving hard for my Super Tenere. Maybe I can ride with you next season. Just from our short conversation, you sound like guys who ride smart and try not to get in over your head. My kind of riders!! Make no mistake, if you made it to the lava tubes via dirt, your skills are more than adequate and developing really well. Both of your bikes are really well setup adventure machines. It was a pleasure meeting you and hope to see you again.

BTW, I need to get some new riding gear!! Armoring up in a hot non vented pressure suit takes forever. Those jackets are sweet!! Vented slip on slip off protection!!

I really liked my Klim Dakar pro jersey.  Its an armored jersey.  All kinds of stuff slapped my arms all day...not a scratch and my body temp was perfect.  

 

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