Baja The Even Harder Way
Continued from Baja the Hard Way here.
DAY 5: A truck and a bike
196 miles from Las Cruces to Todos Santos over this day and the next
“I have caught, probably, too much air, in my vehicle,” said Adlai, who’d gone through a water trough at 85 mph earlier that day — (“It was fine. Some noises, obviously.”) We’re sitting in an outdoor cafe, vintage music playing. I’ve had my first shower in four days. “And the subsequent damage is a rear shock that is blown out. And a parking brake got pulled out. Probably during travel — air travel — and I am leaking fluids from the front end, and I don’t know where it’s coming from.”
“To be fair,” said Casey, “I do believe it was a recipe for disaster, because there was a lot of frustration in the morning, and throughout the afternoon.”
Serving as the support vehicle for his brother Patrick on the motorcycle, Casey and Adlai have had to accommodate.
There had been too much stopping and waiting, too many issues with the bikes, and by the time they had a chance to hit the gas and climb the rocks they’d come to crawl, there was a lot of, as Casey describes it, pent-up aggression.
Whether it’s a bike breaking down or stopping to check on someone else, “the bikes always slow us down, is what we’ve learned,” said Casey.
“I’ve come back to the camp every single time,” said his brother, Patrick, “super late, and just high as a kite on adrenaline, just pumped.”
“I feel like any day you make it back to camp, Pat, is a win,” said Casey.
The first night had not been a win.
A night in the desert
All day, the three riders on motorcycles had been blasting past cars on the part of the track that was upgraded dirt road, hard pan, and salt flat.
When riding on dirt, I learn, you have to move the bike a lot, leaning to the side to take turns and leaning back on soft sand. You stand on your pegs a good bit of the time, for stability and to see ahead, so it’s basically like holding a squat position for hours.
“We were just flying,” said Patrick, “and so our confidence was real high. And then we hit the soft sand.”
He’d gone through a couple sandy spots with no problem. He was just getting up to speed, about 30 mph, when he lost his rut, hit some deep sand, got the wobbles, and, not quick enough on the clutch, got chucked about 15 feet from the bike, with a tuck-and-roll landing.
Even the more experienced riders fell a few times. Pat lost count at 15. Usually, he found a way to step away from the bike as it went down. Just once, he tried to save it and went down with it; he landed on his wrist and snapped off his high-beam control. He’s also fractured his bone, but he won’t realize that for months.
Why even try the Baja XL, 10 days off-roading — which many feel is challenge enough — on a bike?
“For me, I think it’s just a personal test. It’s like, can I do it? I want to know if I can do it,” said Pat, who’s a civil engineer by education and a naval architect by trade, fixing warships for the Navy. “I get the enjoyment of it, too, there’s nothing like it. When you’re when you’re in that zone and just ripping on the trail — when the terrain is matching your skill level, and you’re just pushing it a little bit, so you’ve got that adrenaline surge. Yeah, there’s nothing like it. I’ve got ADHD pretty hard too, so, you know, the whole dopamine thing.”
By the time the three on bikes found themselves at a turn at the second dry lakebed, all the cars had passed them, and they were on their own. They were nervous about fuel. They knew they were supposed to go east, but it looked like if they went south, they’d be able to get to what appeared to be civilization. They had GPS, but they didn’t have the nav points loaded. (“Amateur hour,” admits Patrick.)
“So we decided to go for it,” said Patrick. “And that was the wrong thing to do.”
They made a 30 km jaunt in the wrong direction, in the kind of deep, soft sand that requires attention from every muscle in his body to keep the bike upright. By the time they realized how bad their call had been, it was 4:30, starting to get dark, they had used their reserve of three liters of gas between them, and Patrick felt as if he’d endured a few rounds in a kickboxing ring.
Hence he found himself bivouacking literally 100 miles from anything, in Mexico, with a questionable amount of fuel to get to the highway, shivering under an emergency tarp, without the sleeping bag or tent his support vehicle had packed, while coyotes howled all around him.
“And I just thought to myself like, yep, I did it — I overstepped my bounds. I have pushed that envelope to the max. What the hell am I doing out here?” Patrick said. “Like, if I get out of here tomorrow, I’m gonna frickin’ ride the highway the rest of the way. This is absolutely insane.”
He called out to Adlai and Casey on his Garmin inReach, a mini handheld GPS satellite communicator.
In the morning, Adlai came to the rescue, meeting them at the edge of the salt flats, bringing gas and breakfast burritos.
“I could have kissed the man,” said Patrick.
That second day, they took the highway all the way to the next campsite, and Patrick passed out in his tent at 7.
By far the most difficult
Pat’s been riding for about 20 years, mostly on the street. He only started riding on dirt about five years ago.
“It’s a challenge for me, but the bike is so good at what it does that it gets me through the hardest stuff. And then when things aren’t in alignment, I just crash and have to do the 580-pound squats.”
That’s how much the bike weighs, loaded with gear.
He’s done some mountain trips before, mostly fire roads and truck trails.
“They weren’t nearly as gnarly as some of the stuff we’ve been on,” said Patrick. “This is by far the most difficult trip I’ve ever done.”
Patrick has been riding along fellow motorcyclists Dominic and Chris. Dominic’s side saddlebag caught fire the first day, roasting his sleeping bag. Chris had taken a 40-mph spill over the handlebars, when the road went from hard pan to soft sand without warning, as roads in Baja tend to do, and his shoulder ached. His bike was banged up, the throttle not having any return on it. Dominic was trying to operate his front wheel with three plugs and a patch.
The day before we sat at breakfast, they were antsy to get on the road, about 100 miles, or two hours to the campsite in La Paz.
About a mile down the road on the highway, Dominic in the lead, something fell off the back of Dominic’s bike and whipped into the back wheel. He swerved all over the road, while Chris hit his lights and honked his horn to warn other drivers. Pat tried to hit his lights, but he’d broken his high beam control off the first day.
They pulled off onto the small shoulder, semi trucks passing a foot and a half away. Pat’s kickstand had already broken, so he just leaned his bike into the concrete divider. The thing wrapped around Dominic’s tire like a nylon octopus was his backpack, lodged into his gear, its contents ripped and mangled.
“Looks like the world’s largest hamster just went to town on the thing,” said Pat.
Whereas Pat was expecting they’d ride about 90 mph that day, the accident took the mood down to 65.
Now it’s my turn
And now, I would be getting on the bike. They had graciously brought an extra helmet and motorcycle riding suit. After a breakfast of chilaquiles and the best smoked chili sauce I’ve ever had, they conferred on the route.
Putting on the helmet and suit, I felt so alive I didn’t even care if we got lost…
…which we did.
We went down one dirt road, then tried another.
The end of one loose dirt road dead-ended at a house with a loose fence around it. A dog sat barking at us in the yard, and now is a good time to tell you that when I was 23, I was attacked by a pit bull. A few years later, though this one was my fault, I endured a few scrape wounds from the teeth of two scrappy yard dogs on an island in Lake Titicaca. Which is to say, I am very respectful of canine boundaries.
On a motorcycle, there’s no window to roll up, no door to lock. I got off the bike to lighten the load and kept looking at the dog while Patrick tried to turn the 580-pound bike around in the kind of soft sand he’d been falling in all week.
He revved the engine, sending back a storm of sand I hoped would scare off the dog.
It wasn’t until I saw the dog running through it that I realized it had done the opposite.
He pulled up next to me and I jumped on the bike, hoping we’d go faster than the sprinting animal.
Hoping we wouldn’t lose balance and go down in the sand.
Thinking about how many times Pat has tipped the bike over in sand just like this, and what would happen if the physics of a fall repeated now.
To dissociate, I photographed.
Eventually, we did pull out ahead, and I didn’t add a third set of scars to my legs.
We rode on.
We pulled up to a bar that looked closed, but I offered to go see if any people were there because I was the only one in the group who spoke Spanish. Again, in the balance of things, it felt good to be able to offer this. The woman said they’d open for us, and we decided to let our heartbeats resume a normal pace there. To help, we ordered margaritas.
“Well,” she said to me in Spanish, “just so you know, we have passionfruit margaritas as well. We grow the passionfruit over there on the fence.”
Um, what? Fresh passionfruit margaritas? I explain to the guys. We order a round.
I had never before had nor will I ever again have a taste like that. The moment wouldn’t have happened if my Spanish weren’t there. I can’t drive a motorcycle and I don’t have a truck and I can’t fix a motor and I had to borrow the helmet, but damn it, I learned Spanish, one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life, and to see Patrick’s smile made it worth it.
Camping on the beach
I pulled up to a beach in Mexico on the back of a motorcycle and started to set up camp.
That night we camped away from the group, on a nearly deserted beach. I had asked the woman at the bar if it was safe, and she assured me it was. One of my rules from travel is always to listen to the locals.
The beach rose to a hill you had to climb to see the water, too steep to park on top of. The guys wanted me to camp down near them, but the only way to see the ocean first thing in the morning would be to camp on top of it, about 100 feet from where they could park. I knew there was no way I wasn’t sleeping to the sound of waves, waking up on top of that hill overlooking the ocean.
I had a whistle, a lock on my tent zippers to foil the element of surprise only, and I put my murder stick next to my sleeping bag. I did not think I’d need these things, but I also knew the genre of our lives can shift brutally, no matter where you are.
I couldn’t find my phone, which I always use to fall asleep to some sort of meditation or book. Tonight, I had the waves on the rocks. I slept through the night.
In the morning, I unzipped my tent as if opening a present. It was exactly the painting I’d imagined in the car.
I felt exactly what I came here to feel.
Before I had time to think about how cold it was, I dove in for an early morning plunge.
I could have been in an emergency room getting a dog bite stitched up. But I was instead here.
And the last 24 hours had felt the way you fear life will stop feeling, once you get older.
Day 7: Second day in civilization
Since we were so close to Cabo, the organizers had allowed for an extra day to rest, repair, and re-up on food and sundries.
We looked on the map for a place to grab lunch, picked the first open restaurant we saw.
We magically pulled up to a chic white resort overlooking the sea.
Inside, the floor opened up to a sunken seating area, and the sky glimmered off the waves.
We were suddenly back in Cabo-land, resortwear and sunglasses, clomping in wearing motorcycle boots.
I felt something in me: I will one day have a writing retreat here.
Off in the distance, grey whales jumped and splashed, and why can’t I just stay where I’m safe? Why must I take these chances? For moments like this, I guess. At home, there’s a zero percent chance for delight like this.
We rode that day through gorgeous views, me back in the truck, as it was too dangerous on the bike with two people. Patrick was exhausted.
We took his bike into the shop, where he and the mechanic, who was supposed to be taking the day off, switched out a problematic tube.
Everyone wanted to get out of Cabo. We were only near it, but Cabo was everything the Baja XL is not, and does not want to be.
That evening, I had dinner plans with Rex Weiner, who runs the Todos Santos Writers Workshop. I wore the one dress I had, a flowery long dress that was the least frilly I could find from a street vendor in London I found while pet sitting there.
Patrick picked me up, and, standing on the street, I delicately as possible pulled the bike suit up while tucking my dress down into the legs, feeling that wearing half-dress, half bike suit is touching the exact place in the universe I want to inhabit.
Day 8: Let’s make it interesting
354 miles from Todos Santos to San Juanico
I was at the point where I’d ridden with all the people who’d agreed to take me, and finding a ride each day had started to feel dicey. I needed people who had room for me and a bag.
The father/daughter duo Eric and Ande from Oregon agreed to take me in their truck, with the warning that they were in the competition class. Hauling ass. I could hang on if I wanted, but it would be nothing like the cruising and slow taco lunches I’d been doing.
How the competition class works
Here’s how Andrew, the mastermind behind the Baja XL, explained the competition:
“It’s very different from everything else you’ve known or you’ve heard of, in motorsports. We’re not a speed race; we’re navigational and endurance race. That means that you have to go from point A to point B every day, and you have to be able to find geo-challenges, geocaches, or navigational points in between those two, and you have to do it consistently for 10 days in a row.”
He heads down to Baja on a scouting trip to set everything up. And, like an awe trap, he made sure to get out of his Jeep and hike to some gorgeous views in order to lure people in the competition class there.
And what kind of people choose to do the competition class?
“I’ve always been competitive, played ball most of the time growing up,” said a driver named Jim Warren I’d interviewed previously. “To have an option one way or another, I’m going to go with competitive. That’s just my nature.”
A rough start
Every morning, Andrew or one of his team members briefs everyone in the competition class, while people in the touring group enjoy their coffee. They go over the route, the weather, and any caveats for the day.
We take off in the truck, and I’m not buckled in just yet. We hit a bump, my body flies in the air, and it is pounded by the roof of the car, just a few inches about my skull.
A crunch in my neck.
A pause a moment. This might be the start of something, or worse, the end of something. This might be a moment I recount, to doctors, to my family.
I pause. Am I ok?
With a shaky hand, I put on my seatbelt. My best friend cricked her neck after waking up, seven years ago, and had to wear a neck brace while sleeping for years afterward.
Miraculously, I think I’m all right. But I am in a new genre. No slow coffee today. No long taco lunches. No margarita stops. We are on a mission. Eric had warned me.
We stop at the first clue, for a lock somewhere. The first person to find it will take the lock, so, not having found it yet, time ticking, there’s the question of whether someone else already found it and took it, or if you just haven’t found it yet.
In the bush, the seekers help each other, walk around together, but are also in competition.
I realize there’s been this entire pulsing subculture under the tranquilo one I’ve been experiencing.
At camp, Eric tells me, “You try to get stuff out of people.”
Ande does an impression of her sleuthing: “‘Like so, did you ever get that number where it was a dirt road…?’ You know what it was, but you don’t know if anyone else found it,” she said.
This is to see if they got it right, as sometimes the elements can erode numbers painted on rocks, for example, until they’re nearly illegible. Sometimes the sleuthing is to see if they’re the only ones who found it.
They describe a balance of trying to win, but also trying to help each other.
We stopped to find numbers painted on rocks, search bushes for a tag. Against my journalistic ethics, I accidentally found one of their targets.
“I like having her with us!”
On the way out, Ande helps another competitor, “Walk straight, then look for the footprints!” she yelled out the open truck window. “There’s a yellow tag.”
They discuss the next clue:
“12,636 meters from Luncheria Luba and 6540 meters from the test 611 entrance you’re heading to now as the crow flies there is a small abandoned building along the dirt road, painted with a number.”
“There’s no waypoint for it?”
A waypoint is any kind of reference, a coordinate, a solid point to head from.
There is no waypoint for this one.
All these jaunts will stick a cactus needle in the sidewall of the truck’s tire that will make it require air every few days, even a year later. Eric will also have to go to the doctor to get the cactus needles out of his foot.
Eventually, we came across a dry riverbed with one truck stuck, another trying to pull it out, and a singular local on a horse, watching. We watched too, from a higher vantage point.
Eric weighed whether he could be of any help. His truck was no stronger or better equipped than the one currently digging its way deeper in the sand. All that would have happened would have been to get another truck, theirs, stuck. But he wrestles with it. The thing you do in Baja, in off-roading, is help, when you can. But this time, competition takes over, and we head off toward the next point.
We continued on, finally getting lost in a man’s yard, seemingly at a dead end. There’s a house to one side, fence surrounding, a group of cows to our right.
I talk to the man in Spanish. He tells me to keep going.
Keep going…where?
He points toward the cows.
I ask him to repeat that please.
But yes, this was the way. We advance toward the cows, and they move, revealing a gap in the fence none of us really believe is the actual way, until it proves to be exactly that.
We arrive to the campground on a beach, at N26 15.700 W112 28.015, with 53 seconds to spare on the 13-hr. limit for the day. The team exhales, and cracks a beer among the competition, to relax a moment until the next morning, when they’ll slam on the gas again, spin sand into the sky, and play the game they came here to play.
