Here is what I posted on a local oregon board about the ride…
This is a very long ride report. Those who like summarized stuff, just go to another thread, lol...So, my friend from Klamath falls has been talking for a very long time now how he has wanted to take the loop from redmond, to sisters, old mckenzie highway, loop through the aufterhide, go to oakride, and then loop under and back to redmond.
Well, he said “Riding season is almost over, lets do it!” so we planned it out and figured we’d do that yesterday so we did.
So he left late, got here at roughly 1:00. We started packing up, suited up and headed out till I realized “Oh crap I can’t find my keys.” so we searched everywhere, only to find them somehow under my PILLOW? I know there is a tooth fairy right? But they either have bad vision and the tooth fairy needs contact lenses or … I dunno how they got there.
We spend 30 minutes looking for my keys, once again delayed, we got out the bikes, got them started and I got out my digital camera which I had bought 3 hours PRIOR (Some of you may remember that thread i posted, right?), well, the camera wouldn’t start up, the screen was flashing, and pictures came out distorted. Thinking “WTF?” we took it back to freddies and got a new one. All was well, day started out weird…
We finally get fueled up, and headed out. We had a ton of fun on the way. We got going through the twisties, weren’t riding like madmen but were definitely having fun. We hit the Dee Write observatory, few other places, and even found some covered bridges (of which I post my ride pics tonight) Finally at some point by blue river we met up with a new rider on a yellow daytona 955, beautiful bike. He rode behind us for a while and eventually my friend pulled over to let me know our next waypoint, the other guy rode off.
We hit a few more waypoints, eventually hit the aufterheide and ended up seeing that rider on the daytona at least another 2 times on and off.
After several hours of twisty fun, we finally made it to Oakridge. We got to subway and what would you know, mr daytona 955 was there! I went inside to check it out, and as i was ordering found i had no wallet. Apparently it was dropped at our checkpoints or a deer is now chewing on it.
Either way I was worried, freaked out and had no gas money now, not to mention my friend just paid me the $50 that i was supposed to get from some pants i sold his friend for riding. So my credit cards, security card from work along with almost $100 in cash, my driver’s license, gone.
I was PISSED.
My friend is outside talking to the daytona guy and I get outside and tell him, he said "Hey no worry, its late, but lets try to find your wallet, we’ll hit all the checkpoints we went on because there was no public eye there so if its there, it’s STILL there.
We passed back the opposite way through oakridge, took a shortcut, and started checking places for it. Nothing, finally we were on the aufterhide.
It was about 10:30, late, dark, and we took turns leading because it was somewhat tedious and boring to be in front ALL the time, not to mention it was nice to not have the stress of hardly seeing around those tight corners with the wussy light of the Ninja 250. We both were riding little 250 Ninjas.
Well, it was his turn to lead, and I was going at a steady pace, not fast, not slow, probably around 40mph. My friend was about 60-75ft in front of me, I wanted to get closer so I could see better but before I could all I saw was his tail light moving back and forth. I thought “SHIT, he’s dodging a deer or something.”
Next thing I know, I see his bike going straight where there is a very sharp corner. No sooner did that happen and I saw the horrible movement of a bike going off the road, into the woods. I said “OH MY GOD!” and immediately got on the brakes, stopped on the road, took off my helmet shouted to him. He was up, he was okay, but there was no one around, no one to help us and we had to get his Ninja 250 off of the gravel embankment and back up the hill.
Both of us are complete computer nerds, so you can imagine it wasn’t the easiest task for us to try to PUSH the ninja up the hill. We stopped and I said “Ok, obviously, we might be able to push it up the hill but then we’ll both be sore and its going to be painful if not dangerous for us to ride back physically exhausted.” he agreed, and he said “Ok, lets put our heads together and figure something out…”
So he got the idea to have me park the bike at an angle so the light was flooding not to our backs but to the front of us so that we could see the embankment and see if it was steep or flat so that we could find where to push the bike, where not to.
So I left the headlight on for about 10 minutes so the battery didn’t die… i held the side of the bike that was facing the embankment, he had the bike in gear and lightly gave it throttle, a little clutch and got it as far up as we could get it without it sliding, causing us less labor, physical stress so that we could save it to pull it up the hill because we KNEW we were going to have to.
Finally, we got it 3/4 of the way and ended up taking turns having someone hold the side of the bike so it didn’t fall down the hill. Basically at this point you have a very very steep slope, the ninja was standing upright, if someone didn’t hold it, it’d go careening down the hill and would have hit a tree and we’d be back to square one. So anyway, we took turns lifting on the grab bar to pull the tail up, and then the bars.
Slowly but surely we got the bike up the hill. IT was a STEEP hill and felt nearly impossible to get it back up the hill, so it took us quite a while. After it was all said and done we checked the damages.
He was fine, his gps was fine, his tank bag got thrown a bit far, but all was fine… Tires were good, no suspension seemed damaged but the upper fairing was cracked where he had previously repaired it and his windscreen was split almost in half.
So we got back on our way. At this point no one had driven by, we had no way to contact home and now it was very late at night. I knew Katie would be worried at this point as we figured by the time we’d be home it would be almost 1:00 am.
My friend was testing his alignment, took his hands off the bars at a lower speed, bike was straight, everything was fine. When we stopped he said his forks were out of alignment before, he said the bike actually rode BETTER now? wtf? I actually kind of laughed when he said that…
So long story short on how it happened… at night he prefers to stay on the wider line of corners so that it is easier to see, as do I sometimes. However, any of you that have ridden the aufterheide know how much gravel is on some of those corners. I was maintaining a middle line because I was afraid of hitting gravel, he apparently either forgot, or took it a little TOO wide, hit gravel and lowsided into the forest. When I asked him he said “I think i was going a little too fast, a little too wide, and it fishtailed and lowsided faster than I could react.”
We had a wonderful ride, but so many weird things happening randomly, good and bad. The ride was great, but the events throughout the day were shitty.
So word of advice for anyone on the aufterheide, if it’s your first time, go slow, watch for gravel because its all over the place on the outside of the corners and sometimes in the middle centerline. Some of the corners just crawl up on you pretty easily. Awesome road, awesome ride, we had a blast yesterday and my friend is truly lucky he came out with purely cosmetic damage and was a bit shooken up, as was I. It could have been MUCH worse.
Be careful out there everyone, just remember not to outride your lights and that gravel is harder to spot at night. The aufterheide seems to take down riders like the cookie monster and chocolate chip cookies every year, be careful, ride it safe and try not to be one of them. My buddy is lucky it only scratched up his bike for the most part and that he came out okay.
Needless to say, when I got home, my fiance was angry at first till we explained, and then she was just happy we got back all in one piece.