Road Less Traveled - A Documentary by James Beatty

Day-35

August 10, 2006

The Road NOT Traveled...

We woke up bright and early, threw our gear on and headed to the bikes to get underway. Unfortunately as they had so many times before one of the bikes didn't want to cooperate. Michael's bike wouldn't start and we had to jump his battery. Our much needed time was wasting away as it takes a while to get to the Beemer’s battery. We jumped on pavement to make up time and then hit the trail in the early afternoon.

I loved riding though Oregon. The trail got tricky which added a level of fun that just isn't there on flat dirt roads, and the scenery was once again breath taking. Even though we were having fun, we had a long way to go.

Finally it seemed like we were in the clear and that it would be smooth dirt paths for the rest of the ride. Mother Nature however had other plans for us once again. A gigantic rock slide the length of a city block had swallowed up the path. Huge rocks and a sheer drop off kept us from continuing further. At first I wanted to try to just blast around it riding up the side of the mountain, but after a quick test with Michael's bike it was clear that wasn't going to happen. James came up with the idea of moving the stones to make a bridge over the rocks to the other side. Immediately I realized that this plan wasn't going to work. We had about an hour of daylight and it would have taken us a full day to move the rocks to the positions we needed them in. To my surprise Michael was also all about the idea and they went to work ignoring my pleas to move onto the next plan. Finally Michael came around and we decided to head back to the last road we were at to find away to continue.

We reached a paved road and discovered a way we could make it on the road the rest of the way. The really depressing thing was not that we had only thirty five miles to go on the trail before we were done when we got stopped or that it was now going to take us three times longer to get to our final destination, it was the fact that we were finishing the journey without finishing the trail.

Heart broken and freezing we rode to Port Orford. When we arrived it was dark and I couldn't really see the blue ocean that I had traveled so far to see. It was there roaring in the darkness. I could see little white wave caps in the distance and smell the sea air. When I got off the bike I realized that with all that we had gone through, all the ways we had to find a way to finish the trip we had finally done it. It didn't matter how, just that we had. James wasn't nearly as optimistic. It killed him that we couldn't finish that trail. I left the crew later that night and went and sat on the beach and listened to the waves come in.

Photography Copyright © 2006 Motorrad Media and Chris Rankin. All Rights Reserved.

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