Stories tagged: track

This past weekend Sam and I went up to Salt Lake to ride at the Jordan River OHV park. It has 3 MX tracks and 1 grand prix track. I was pretty excited since this would be the first MX track I'd ever ridden on.

The first thing I noticed when we got there was that I was the only guy on a quad. Everyone else was on a dirt bike. I'm still not sure if this was a sign of things to come, or if dirt bikes are just that much more popular in Utah.

After surveying the scene we found that the 3 MX tracks are are divided into novice (less than 125cc has right of way), beginner (greater than 90cc), and advanced (greater than 125cc Motorcycles only).

Since we both could, we both headed for the beginner track to see what this MX hype was all about. After the first turn there was a nice tabletop that got me pretty excited about how things were looking. After the second turn I ran into the mud. This track was had some very muddy sections. Two small jumps were totally unjumpable due to the mud, and one huge tabletop that should have been the biggest air of the whole track was trashed because of the mud.

After we both did a few laps, and repeatedly hit a long step-up at the end of the track Sam decided he wanted to see if the advanced track was in any better shape. Night and day difference. The advanced track was well groomed, had no mud and had about 3 times the amount of jumps. While many of the jumps were above Sam's current skill level, he ended up spending the rest of the day there because the track was in such better shape.

I hope you can feel the frustration pouring out of my words. If we are both riding quads, Sam and I are very similar in skill level. However, since he just picked up dirt biking, I am a much better rider on a quad than he is on a bike. Being delegated to the beginner muddy track while he was able to ride on the nice advanced track soured the experience further for me. It's clearly not a matter of keeping up. I'm not a great track rider, and I don't have the best track quad, but I'm still a better rider than many of the dirt bikers I saw there.

I'm hoping that I just hit the park on a bad day, and the beginner track is usually in far better condition. I do want to go back again some time (hopefully just after the beginner track is groomed) so I can experience the track with my riding ability holding me back not the riding conditions. However the fact that by the end of the day I'd only seen one one other quad riding MX made me think that this wasn't an isolated experience. Quad riders weren't coming then leaving early, they weren't showing up at all.

I hope Sam chimes in with his thoughts on the advanced track as well as the beginner track.

I did find that for track riding my Z is really underpowered. The one nice tabletop that wasn't muddy had too short a runway for my Z. No matter how hard I tried the furthest I could jump was about 5 feet before the down slope. I'm sure on a 450 I could have easily cleared it.

Overall I had a lot of fun, but not nearly as much as I feel like I could or should have. It's not somewhere I'd go every weekend especially with the $10 per rider fee and the hour drive. However I would like to go once or twice a year just for the experience. I hope in the future they do a better job of grooming the beginner track. As well as either letting ATV's on the advanced track, or building ATV's their own advanced track.

Saturday Jed invited me to go riding. His sister Katie has a friend who is building a track up Goshen Canyon, so he decided to go camping with them. I ended up driving there in the morning.

We got ready to ride and Jeds brother Will told us that we weren't supposed to ride on the track. This made us kind of frustrated, since it was the whole reason we came. We decided to explore the surrounding trails instead.

Let me tell you something that really frustrates me. We ride down this trail that goes up and over the mountain. We get to the bottom on the other side, get ready to turn around and see a sign that tells us the road we just came on is restricted to motorized vehicles. I promise there was no sign where we started. I try my best to only ride on designated trails.

I know that there are lots of people doing their best to shut down as much of the world as they can to ATV's. It just frustrates me when there are no signs, or more likely, someone has vandalized the signs and torn them down. The guy who owns the track did say that it was private land, but the owner doesn't mind people riding on the trail, at least on his side of the mountain. So hopefully we didn't contribute to the negative attitudes towards ATV's.

Anyway back to riding. This "Illegal" trail we rode on was pretty cool. It had some really steep and rocky sections. Jed ended up flipping a rock lose and doing a 180 on his bike. I know it kinda hurt when is handlebars hit him in the side, but I must admit it looked pretty cool from behind.

I have to say though, that this trail really helped impress me with how good a rider Jed's wife Tiffany is. Some of these sections were quite steep with rocks all over the trail. There was also a long section that was very off camber. She kept up with us and didn't complain a bit. I know my wife would have made me drive up some of the hills.

I did say this was about a track didn't I? When we got back from our little private property excursion, we drive towards camp and see Will and his friend racing around the track that we were told not to ride on. Apparently he was wrong, and we could ride on the track. It's a good thing too, because there were no trails around. Everything trail but the one we had gone on was gated.

The track is pretty sweet, however it isn't quite finished yet. First of all it has no jumps. This kind-of disappointed me because I love jumps. One S turn about 3/4 of the way through the track wasn't quite finished yet and had some rough spots. It was also very very dusty.

I've never ridden on a real track before so I was pretty excited to give this one a try. This track had some crazy turns. There were 2 U-turns on the down hill slope of very steep hills. I have to admit my first lap around the track I wasn't ready for how steep the hills were nor for the turn I would have to make on them and I went off the track both times. Despite my set backs, I was able to get around the track faster than Jed on his bike, Katie and her friend on a Raptor 660, and Tiffany on their 400ex.

After our first race we lined up with Will and his friend on their CR450's, Jed on the Raptor, and me on my little Z. Let me just say that power makes a big difference. There are a few straight-away's that go up some hills and the bikes and Jed were able to really pull away from me. I tried to catch them in the corners but between the golf ball sized rocks Will was spraying at me and the dust so thick I couldn't see 5 feet in front of me I decided I really didn't mind losing this 1 lap race.

Jed, Will and I then did 2 Timed laps each. Will went first and did his first lap in 2 minutes 35 seconds. I went next on and did 2:38. I must admit it felt pretty good to be so close behind will. Jed then did a lap on the raptor at 2:36. For lap 2 Jed rode his 400ex and got 2:51. Will got 2:33, and I shaved a second off to get 2:37.

For comparison one of the top racers in the country did the track a few weeks earlier and got 2:18, and Katie on the raptor was able to do a lap in 3:05. That means I'm about as much better than Katie, is a Pro is better than me. I think I can live with that.

I have to admit the competitor in me really wanted to beat Jed. It did make me feel a little better to know that on a similarly CC'd machine I beat him by 15 seconds, and and he only beat me by 1 second on the Raptor.

After our timed laps we headed back to camp for a snack. We asked the owner if we could use the bobcat sitting there to build a Jump. He said yes, so we tried to build a table top out of a bunch of dirt that was lying around, but the bobcat was having issues. The track owner then came over and started to build us a jump with his back hoe. He was making good progress, but then started too feel paranoid about people suing him for using this jump on an unfinished track. So he stopped.

He turned a dirt pile into the worlds smallest table top. It was OK to jump off of, but definitely not what we had in mind. Will found a way to jump off the side and land on the jump which was pretty sweet on his bike. Jed and I kinda just drove over the jump a few times. I tried to actually jump it twice, and came as close to crashing as I have in a long time. We're talking landing on 1 tire leaning completely the wrong way and getting slammed forward on to the other corner of your quad. This was a bike only jump it seemed.

I know Tiffany got several pictures of us hitting the jump, although she missed me almost crashing because she was too busy waiting for me to die. I'll try to get Jed to post the pictures.

When the track is done I think it will be awesome. They are hoping to have it ready so it can be used for WORCS this fall. There will also be at least one more track added to the area. I hope to go back in a month or so when things have come closer to completion and there are actually jumps.

Well since no one would go riding with me yesterday I went by myself. I got there and the track was empty, which was good because I had forgotten my goggles and dealing with other people's dust probably would have ruined the trip. I forget how rough that track is. There are just a million little bumps everywhere. I got several blisters even with my gloves on, and my back and arms are pretty sore today.

I had a blast though. There are basically 3 good jumps. One is on the north side of the track. You hit a little berm going north which sends you east into the jump. It's basically just a big roundish hill, but you can get some decent air on it. The scary part is if you hit it too fast you can clear it, although i've never quite hit it that fast yet. I did miss the landing to the left a little bit once, which was pretty scary. The second jump isn't big or anything it is just smooth and fun. It is a little double near the entrance.

And the best jump of course is the big one in the middle. You just have to make sure you hit it going south west and not south. If you hit the side that seems like it would be the most natural jump it almost always throws you sideways, and the landing is pretty flat. But if you it it going south west you can get some pretty decent air. I did have it throw me sideways a few times when I hit it on a tad wrong angle. Landing on the front right tire is pretty scary, but I pulled out of it every time I'm sure it helped with the blisters. Most of the time though, it is an awesome landing. I must have hit it over a hundred times, and I was only riding for about an hour.

No pictures since I was alone. Maybe next time I can con someone into going with me. Like I said before, it's not as fun as West Mountain, especially since it is so small. But at 5 minutes away it can be a good quick hour of fun.

I've been waiting to write about this trip till I got the pictures up, and I was too lazy to encode all the video for the web. I finally did it today though. There is a compilation video and a few pictures in the gallery.

We had a good time. Jed and Sam were on their bikes and I was on my Z. There are a ton of crappy jumps there, so at first we were kinda disappointed in the place. But if you looked hard enough, you could find some pretty fun jumps. Nothing spectacular, but fun none the less.

There were some pretty steep hills near the track, and one of them turned out to be a pretty fun jump. I think it is the one we got the most video's of. Sam never did it on his bike, but did hit it on my Z.

Jed hit the table top a few times, and said it wasn't nearly as scary or cool as we thought it would be. I was too chicken to hit in on the quad because it had these metal beams poking out the jump and the landing. The bikes could fit between them, but I couldn't really on my quad.

There is a pretty sweet double that I want to try again once I get my shocks upgraded. I'm not positive I can get enough speed, and if you watch about half way thru the video you'll see me not clear it. It is my official nemesis.

Towards the end of the day we found a little jump that had quite the lip for a landing. It took me a while to talk myself into jumping it. And in the end of course, it turned out to be quite an easy jump. Jed and Sam both cleared it. Although the first time Jed did you can barely see in the video him casing it pretty hard.

Not the best place to ride, but not bad either. I'd rate it better than the SF trackthing, but miles behind the dunes. Still, for a short 3 hour or so trip, it was pretty fun.

I've been dying to go riding but didn't have much time, definitely not enough to go to the dunes. So I decided I'd try that little track/field off of highway 6. Jim said he could spare an hour so we headed over. I forgot he doesn't have a truck anymore, which made it even nicer that it was a close trip. We were able to just do 2 trips from my house to haul the quads over. It took about 20 minute to get both quads from my house to the track. This obviously would have been faster with a trailer, but I don't have one.

I've known about it for years, but always thought it was private property. Well I asked my neighbor, and he said he rides it all the time and has never seen any signs. So I'm guessing whoever owns it doesn't care.

It's not the best track. There are whoops everywhere. Almost every jump is has a horrible runway of whoops. But for 2 hours of fun, I can't complain at all. The one jump that produced the best pictures, had a lip that easily threw you off balance to the right, and the landing was a little slanted to the left. This can make for a pretty crappy landing. If you hit it just right though, it wasn't bad.

My biggest problem is the shocks on the Z are set up way to light. I was definitely maxxed out on my landings. I'm hoping once I get my Elka's I can risk a little more air time. The EX handled the landings better, but I'm so used to the Z that it felt weird getting on the EX and I wasn't very comfortable flying with it. I'm sure if I spent the whole day on it i'd be OK, but I'd rather ride my own quad.

Not a bad place to ride for a quick trip, I hope to make a habit of riding there for an hour or 2 after work. Waiting one or two or even three weeks to ride is killing me.