Issue link: http://trailridermagazine.uberflip.com/i/131019
time. We soon found out that the suspension on both the RM and MR were pretty much worthless; hit a rock and it would send us sideways and tumbling to the ground. Hit a log and we'd bounce off the seat and veer off the trail. Eventually, we tried going around every obstacle but the ground was so completely littered with unavoidable trail junk that it was pointless. When we encountered something impassable (a hill, a log, a water crossing), we would try and bushwhack around it, only to get tangled in the brush, hung up on something or end up too far off the course. We crashed scores of times within the first mile alone. We'd get pinned under the bike and yell for the other to stop. Once, while unable to make it up over the lip of a steep hill, we resorted to launching two bikes up and over the top. It worked! And the RM received a nice dent in the tank to memorialize the price of success. It was the only laugh of the day. We were completely over our heads. We were also terrified here we were, two kids ages 8 and 9, a hundred miles from home, alone in a vast wilderness populated with lions, tigers, bears, and child eating hillbillies, riding motorcycles we couldn't stay upright on for more than a few yards without crashing, stalling, or flopping over. After one of many meltdowns, we considered walking out of the woods because the terrain was beyond anything we were capable of dealing with. We decided to stick with the bikes in case we needed the gasoline to make a fire. A strange side story is that Fred Hoess started a few rows behind us and rode one of our bikes up a clapped-out hill. Finally, after several hours of crashing, spinning, pushing, swearing and bitching, we made it to a sandy road where we ran into another mini rider on an XR 80 that was broken down, and waiting for a sweep rider. We parked it right there and waited too, completely spent. Our Dad was waiting at a spectator point about 6 miles in and after several hours of us not showing, he borrowed a bike to go look for us. We weren't even close to making the 6 mile mark. He later admitted to crashing several times on that short stretch of trail we rode. He couldn't believe the club would lay out something so nasty. A few years later my brother returned to the same venue on his KX 80 and rode the same course. He was competing for the Mini Enduro Championship that year and earned Mini Hi Point that day. I asked him how it went (I was sidelined with a broken elbow). "It was easy." May 2013 5