Surtch Pherther switched off Escape Artist and leaned it on its stand at the T-junction of Ourantah Ridge Road and the rural highway between Trapper and Portcullis.
Ahead, to the east across the asphalt, badlands lay in wait, known to Surtch only through paper maps and hearsay, a rumorland–a land of rides to come. And behind him? Well, behind stretched 45 miles of the most delicious dirt he’d ridden yet, a finer way from point A to B-b-b-beyond, a tool and a toy–a promising path to his riding future. In fact, Surtch was already speculating how to extend the experience, how to nudge the dirt–by linked like routes of rocks and dust–closer to the City of Contradictions.
Civilization seems to self-assess somewhat by the amount of pavement it lays, to equate progress with wildness subdued, dirt covered, and curves tamed. It might then be the two-wheeler’s duty–civil disobedience moto style–to bypass the straight with twisty and the paved with dusty, leaving the slabs and their vanishing points to cagers and deadline riders.
That morning, Surtch had broken camp, scarfed down breakfast bars and parfait and cold coffee, bidden his folks goodbye, and coasted Escape Artist down toward the boat ramp, hanging a left just before. There, San Cosme Reservoir Road reached far to the tip of a sloped spur, then sharp-turned south, switched to gravel, and scampered up past thorny shrubs, sagebrush, and quaking aspen stands that tremble-filtered the harsh light for undergrowth of tender grasses and wildflowers and small ferns…
Soon it sprinted–a rutty, pocked, dirt traverse–through a lodgepole wood across a craggy mountainside toward a jumble o’ junctions where Surtch had U-turned the year before for poor dirt legs, throb-throb-throbbing in his full-faced head from having his wisdom teeth yanked just days before, and mind-fog and body-blahs from half a week of juggling painkillers…
It leapt through meadows and mixed forests high above San Cosme Creek–a creek to which a younger self and his brother and their dad had tromped through autumn-tan and -brittle brush in a frigid late fall to cast for brooks and browns but catch zilch…
It dashed past a shadow of a two-track down which on that same long ago trip the three had driven dad’s ’72 Ford “Blue Ox” Bronco and eaten hash browns with onions and lemon-peppered pork chops before a bonfire and slept like dead in their bags through a mute night to wake the next morn to half a foot of snow and they miles in on a “closed” road…
It hopped left and right in switchbacks tight to San Cosme Peak’s shoulder where Surtch wrong-turned twice but soon got on track for a change of scene to gray from green, to sparse pines among rabbit brush and sagebrush again and a clay soil road that went greasy from a cloudburst, causing Escape Artist to waggle about and to about go down, spooking a passing sheepdog but not the Peruvian shepherd or the pro horse he rode by on, the only creatures (short of Mr. and Mrs. Ed, of course, of course) that Surtch had seen all afternoon…
And finally it scrambled up to the last stretch of Ourantah Ridge, to the north of which the land rolled soft and somewhat green toward dinosaur digs and toward pumpjacks keeping time in fieldlings of oil and gas and toward the vast Cairn Mountains’ rock pile peaks, and to the south of which the earth broke jagged-dramatic toward coalfields and more dino digs and the Bucksaw Cliffs flanking a clayscape waste and toward–afar–the vivid desert of sandstone and dunes.
Back at the T-junction, Surtch switched on Escape Artist, heeled up its stand, and pressed its starter. By highway, the nearest town was 30 miles off. About 110 farther–through Lupo Pass and South Middlefield, past Keetstone Lake and the Silvervale roads, and over Big Canyon summit–waited the City of Contradictions, surely facing fitful sleep through another sultry summer night.
But for his hunger for a cheesesteak with fries and coffee at Pemm’s Hash House in Trapper, the lateness of the day with its shadows already presenting and the typical chill already making the usual threats and more cloudbursts abrewin’, and the guarantee that large game would soon again be jaywalking after dark, Surtch would’ve U-turned and gone back the way he’d come.
Oh well–he’d be back. Yes, Surtch Pherther would be back. For Ourantah Ridge Road had changed everything.
Was a specific road or stretch of road a game changer to the development of your skills or confidence as a rider?