Volume 50, Number 1
Volume 50, Number 1
UP FRONT
MARK HOYER
THE “50” IS A LITTLE BIT MISLEADing, because we’re not actually there until about a year from now, but, hot damn, a full five decades of Cycle World magazine is coming up fast. Looking forward, we’ll be celebrating this in several ways by looking backward, revisiting some of the amazing machines and experiences previously captured on these pages.
I’m certainly not alone in admiring Joe Parkhurst’s vision in ’62 that led to the birth of the modern motorcycle magazine. And I am honored to be carrying on the CW tradition of mad motorcycle enthusiasm in print and excited to be rolling it onto all the digital platforms out there.
For me, the best part about it all remains riding motorcycles with other people. That was Joe’s number-one thing, for sure. Which is why he started a purely fun industry event called the Trek. It’s our chance to take many of the great people we work with all year in motorcycling and go out to do what nobody ever gets enough of: riding.
Ex-racers, most of the editorial and art staff, the salespeople, advertisers and even a few non-motorcycle-biz stars who also are riders, like Lyle Lovett and Matt LeBlanc, all have been invited to gather at some faraway place every year since Joe put on the Trek the first time in 1975. The beauty of his idea was that this was simply not business. There are no pitches for stories between editors and PR reps, and all the salespeople and VPs of Whatever hang up their business cards. We just go ride, because even in this business, it is way too easy to succumb to the day-to-day grind and not go riding.
After stints in Baja and Arizona, the Trek for the last 10 years has run in the Sierras near Yosemite. Saturday is either the Big Adventure Day or the Do Nothing Day, depending on your state of mind and how thrashed you are from Friday (or Friday night...). I usually attack a very difficult trail called Dusy Ershim. It’s 30 miles long and starts at 8400 feet, rising to 10,000-plus. Fourwheelers generally take two to four days to traverse it; on dual-sport bikes, we need only a few ass-kicking hours of first-gear rock-bashing.
This year, racer Jonah Street was on hand at the Trek. Street has won Dakar Rally stages and finished in the top 10 overall, plus he won the Rally Mongolia in 2010 and has multiple wins in Baja. Our own Off-Road Editor Ryan Dudek usually makes it to the Trek, too. Dudek, if you hadn’t noticed, is also an accomplished rider. Like, when off-road racing legends Johnny Campbell or Ty Davis need a teammate for the Glen Helen 24 Hour and they want to win, they call Ryan. And they win. Or, when Dudek goes with KTM to the Erzberg Rodeo in Austria, not only does he qualify on the front row alongside the best off-road riders in the world, he finishes 28th. I went to Erzberg to watch this “race” a couple of years ago and simply finishing is a miracle. It’s the most brutal concentration of two-wheel punishment I’ve ever witnessed. Anyway, I bring this up because Street and Dudek were doing Dusy, and I decided for once to take it easy because I wasn’t interested in being the boat anchor on that ride.
Breakfast came and went, Street and The Dude were long gone, so I milled around the parking area in front of the lodge and came across our own Corey Eastman. It was his last Trek because he is leaving CW after accepting a marketing job with Husqvarna. He’s been the Trek Master for more than a decade and usually is trying so hard on Saturday to make sure everyone else is having a good time that he doesn’t get out on the trails himself. But, he was feelin’ freer than usual, so we each grabbed a lunch bag and headed for a trail called Swamp Lake.
We got off on the right foot by taking the wrong trail to the wrong lake. But it was a great trail and a great lake. After lunching, we contemplated the 40-mile range offered by my borrowed Husky TE250, and also considered his supertanker of a KTM 525. I could always get gas from him, so we decided to ride to the Swamp Lake Railhead, “Just to have a look.”
It was incredible: traction like Velcro from overnight rains, a canopy of trees and a winding undulation that sung and swung like your favorite melody. So when we hit the first boulder-field hillclimb and stalled our bikes 17 times each on the way up, we were sure it was an anomaly. Sure enough, following that, there was some more of that magical winding trail. And another near-vertical boulder field.
After we both made it to the top and caught our breath, we had one of those threshold moments on the trail. The unspoken tension was clearly there as we both waited for the other to perhaps suggest, for any number of rational reasons, that maybe we should turn back. I might have seen fear in his eyes, and he might have seen it in mine, but our goggles were too fogged up.
But you can’t quit because it’s hard and, anyway, how hard could it possibly get, right? It never freakin’ let up for the entire 14 miles. It was the single hardest trail I have ever ridden. At one point, I struggled and struggled up another terrible hillclimb, only to find a descent on the other side that looked twice as hard. I bashed down, made it to smoother ground and waited for Corey. I heard his bike run, then stop—over and over—just like mine had done. Then I saw his front wheel appear and, just like me, as soon as he saw the downhill, his head and shoulders sagged, revealing exhausted despair.
But he survived. And we never gave up—not in the rain, not in the mud, not with light-headed exhaustion and not after finishing the entire contents of our Camelbaks long before ride’s end.
It was a great last Trek for Corey and one of the great rides of my life. If I’d simply stayed at the lodge and rested like my aching bones had told me to do Saturday morning, the day would have dissolved into the oblivion of my past. Instead, the feeling and wonder of movement and balance, the struggle, the victory—all will live on vividly in my memory for the rest of my life.
For nearly 50 years, Joe’s been right: Make it a day to remember. Go ride. □
