Trans-America Trail

I'm next door working at Last Hurrah when the walkie goes off. He says his name is Brad and he's doing the Trans-America Trail. I get American Discovery Trail and Hayduke Trail folk quite a bit and I remember a few years ago getting some guys saying they were doing the Trans-America, on motorcycles. I tell him to get whatever he wants out of the fridge, hang out, I'm pumping water into the tanks and I'll be there shortly.

I get there and he's videoing. He's doing a documentary on the Trans-America Trail. He videos me for a couple minutes then we start talking. He's pretty stoked that Base Camp is here in the "middle of nowhere". I tell him about the Hayduke and Discovery trails people that come through here and it's good to know now there's a third for motorcycle riders across the whole country. The regular trail is 5,000 miles and with offshoots like the one he's on today, a lot more miles than that.

I ask him where he's going next and he says "Lockhart Basin". I look at his BMW and while it's a little bit of an off-road bike and he's just done 4,500 miles on it obviously he's a decent rider but it's weighed down like I've rarely seen a motorcycle with slightly off road tires. I had to go down there a couple weeks earlier and rescue some street bike guys and get them all turned around and I'm not relishing him going down there and then getting a call from a SAR (search and rescue) team asking me to go look for him. I have some work to finish and then I'll take him down. He thinks it's probably not necessary. He has traveled 4,500 miles in the last month. Many of them off road. But, he agrees.



We spend substantial time on this one obstacle and only then does it occur to me that it rained pretty good twice in the last week. Before we keep hitting out heads on the wall on this problem I should go see if there are more. The GoPro files were corrupted so I don't have the video but in short there were a couple more obstacles like the one we were doing and then two almost impossible ones even for me on a trials bike. I came back and told him he was going to die and I wasn't going any further we were wasting time and he turned around and spent the night at the lodge mutually defeated by Lockhart yet again.

I look forward to the documentary.