Archive for March, 2010

On an earlier trip we left Ensenada and headed out to San Felipe, forty riders strong. At the time paved roads that led to Ojos Negros ended at the pepsi stand about 10 miles east of Ensenada and quickly became two track trails. The SCORE races often use it for some current races, but back then it was a much longer route that took you up a mountain over looking Ojos, and it didn’t cut through any ranches, it was really remote, even more so than today. Once we reached the overlook we had this overwhelming ‘HALLALUJAH! Civilization!” feeling.

A little premature celebration. For the decent down we broke into smaller groups, hoping it would increase our survival rate. I selected a group of compassionate looking riders, those who might not leave me if I did break down. That was how I met Rich Rowell, and we’ve been long time friends ever since. Anyway, all of the seperate groups were now scattered all over Baja, and if there was someone who actually knew the way he was quickly long gone. Together, my group and I were trying to find out way to Independencia, short for Los Ninos Heroes de la Independencia, where we could fill up on gas. We were somewhere west of our destination, and well into our reserve tanks and getting nervous, when we came upon a small dried out lake bed- about a mile in diameter with a ranch building in the middle. Desperate for gas we rode up and called to the possible owner, but it seemed that no one was there. Sitting out in the open was a fifty-five gallon drum- with gas inside. So we siphoned some gas, terrified the entire time that the owners would show up with guns blazing. I dumped some oil in the gas tank, left five bucks sitting on the drum under a rock, shook my bike a few times to mix the oil and gas and took off in a panic. I got about 400 yards and, “Glub!”. That’s when I learned that if you are going to add oil right into your gas tank you better remember to turn off the gas tap first.

So we sat in the middle of this dry lake, under the blazing sun, for about an hour while I stripped the carburetor on my Husky. I had just bought it from Malcom, a few years before “On Any Saturday” ever came out. He was just as friendly and modest then as he is today. Of the group that had started out riding, only about twenty, roughly half, actually showed up in san Felipe. I was one of them. I just wasn’t riding. My bike had seized and spent the last forty or so miles in the back of a truck with wooden stakes for sides. And of those twenty only three or four actually tried to ride back to Ensenada. I never heard of them again, so either they made it, or they didn’t. My first two memories of San Felipe are really polar opposites. My first flight to Baja I flew over it and thought, why would anyone ever want to go to that sunbaked, two block square piece of nothing? My second encounter was when I arrived on this bike trip, and let me say, paradise never looked better.