Sportbike NW: Day 3

“Stonehenge,
Where the demons dwell,
Where the banshees live,
And they do live well.”
-Spinal Tap

Motorcycle dealers usually have a few demo weekends each year, where the latest models are available for test rides. Aprilia, BMW, and Triumph all brought fleets of demo bikes to Sportbike Northwest. I set my sights on riding the Triumph 675 Daytona. The earliest available time was 10:30, which gave Carry and I time to walk to the store for lunch supplies, me time to shave, and in general have a relaxing morning. At the appointed time, I joined other demo riders in the awning of the huge Triumph trailer. I think the entire Triumph product portfolio was available, including the monstrous Rocket III, an American-style cruiser powered by a 2.3 liter motor and sporting a 240mm-wide rear tire. The Bonneville Thruxton, with its chrome upswept meggas and low clip-ons, was a crowd favorite.

It was a diverse crowd. Interestingly, you could almost tell what people were going to ride by aligning motorcycle stereotypes against the available bikes. I was archetypical sport bike rider – a skinny guy in full leathers – and I was on the Daytona.

The woman to my right in jeans and a leather jacket emblazoned with the name of her riding club went straight for the Speed Triple. The older woman in chaps mounted the Rocket III. And a guy in an Aerostich one-piece adventure suit threw a leg over the Tiger, Triumph’s pseudo dual sport. Reinforcing the sport rider stereotype, when David’s Triumph ride came up, he hopped his armor-clad self on the Daytona.

The charcoal grey Daytona felt completely different from the SuperFriend. It was tall. I could just get the balls of my feet on the ground. It was compact. The clip-ons felt like they were directly under my shoulders, unlike the stretched out position on my Ducati. And it was quick. A clumsy throttle hand had the 120 hp triple doing it’s Top Gun imitation – full afterburners baby! It also had a terribly vague clutch. There was no change in the lever feel when the clutch started to engage. I stalled it about five times trying to get it out of the parking lot.

I’d never been on a demo ride before, and this one had its share of drama. I was quickly getting the feel for the compact English speedster, and once on the highway, I twisted the throttle on the little triple wide open and was instantly doing 80 mph. Just as the Subaru in front of me hit its brakes. Not as in gradually applied its brakes and scrubbed off some speed, it hammered its brakes, coming to a dead stop in the middle of the road.

Triumph Daytonas have good brakes and swerve really well. Good thing I practice these things. It turns out, on a later Triumph demo ride, somebody failed to negotiate a gentle bend in the road (really – I saw the dented railing – it was a very gentle bend) and crashed a Rocket III. The rider behind (on a Tiger, I think) got fixated on the wreck and ran into it. Two demo bikes down, one rider in the hospital. Demo rides certainly put unfamiliar bikes in the hands of the unpracticed.

I returned from the ride to find Carry grinning. She spent the morning at the coffee shop drinking tea and reading a book. You see, Carry’s happiness level in the morning is directly proportionate to the amount of tea she can drink. Her happiness is guaranteed somewhere around a quart. She gleefully geared up for our ride out to the much-ballyhooed Mary Hill Loops Road.

The road was built by millionaire nutcase Sam Hill. It’s a short stretch of pavement, just about three miles long. But it has about 50 sharp curves in those three miles. I’m exaggerating about the number, but I’m not exaggerating about how this tiny side road is a Mecca for northwest sport bike riders. The road is closed to traffic, but the owners open it for special events like the Mary Hill Festival of Speed and Sportbike Northwest.

Rather than drag out to Mary Hill on Highway 14, we took a scenic side road with fabulous views of Mt. Hood and stopped for lunch in Goldendale before making our way to the cornering fest.

Lunch in Goldendale was fabulous. We found a big tree in front of the courthouse and relaxed in the shade with sandwiches and milkshakes. Goldendale isn’t a very glamorous town, but there was a high point. We stopped for gas at the edge of town before the dash down to Mary Hill. While filling up, I heard the most beefy-sounding motorcycle start up. I joke occasionally that I’d like the SuperFriend to sound like a 900cc chainsaw. This bike did. Craning around the pump to see what it was, I found an old guy on a Norton Commando in full café racer guise. When I say “old guy” I mean “old guy.” With deep wrinkles and a big beard, he might have been this Commando’s original owner. Solo seat, low clip-ons, black paint, and what sounded like wide-open megaphones. This was the coolest bike I saw all weekend.

How did Mary Hill go? Stressfully. The afternoon Gorge winds were howling and simply riding down the highway was a handful. When we took our place in line at the bottom of the road, the first thing the organizers said was, “Please be careful. We’ve already had a few wrecks today.” Encouraging.

My run up the hill was unnerving due to gusts of wind pushing me off my intended line through corners as well as riders coming back down the hill approaching me very near the centerline and going fast.

When we got to the top and got in line for the run back down, a siren sounded. Another crash. A large wrecking truck set off down the hill to clear the road.

While we waited for the all-clear signal and the riding to resume, another siren blew. In the time since the road was cleared, but before riders at the top of the hill could go back down, somebody else crashed.

Carry and I got back to the bottom and we decided to abandon the Mary Hill experience and go check out the full-size replica of Stonehenge, also a Sam Hill production. Just as we were leaving, David pulled up on his 748. Hearing of the many crashes so far, he wandered over to a group of riders to see what the word on the street was.

The consensus was the new sealant on the road, applied just a few days before, was getting slippery in the 90-degree heat. Suspect traction combined with a closed-to-traffic mentality had a lot of riders in over their heads and making stupid mistakes. While David went for a few laps, we made our way to Stonehenge.

Stonehenge sits on a bluff above the Columbia River. While the ridge it’s built on is barren, hot, and windy, the land immediately below along the river is lush and looks like somewhere I’d like to live. A popular tourist destination, the Stonehenge replica is a monument to soldiers from the area who died in the first World War.

We dallied for a bit, but got tired of the hot wind sucking the moisture from our ears and wanted to leave. Our plan was to ride through Goldendale and then follow a favorite route my old cycling team used to take during training camps. Just as we turned to leave, David turned up.

“How was it?”

His run up the hill had gone smoothly enough, but he was freaked out by the same things I was: “Man, I didn’t have a very good feeling about that. I was standing in line and a guy next to me wearing a one-piece leather suit riding an R1 with pretty balled up tires said ‘you know, I’m not comfortable with this’ and got out of line.”

It turns out we didn’t ride all of the good parts of Hwy 206 the day before. There was one short section on the west side of 97 that was supposed to be even better than the rest. “Do you guys want to go ride that canyon? And then head back to Stevenson?” How could we say no? We blasted across the bridge and found the bottom of the canyon road.

Those who say that heaven is the reward for those who were righteous on earth haven’t connected the dots at 90 mph through a set of river canyon sweepers. This confirms my deeply held belief that everything is better in Oregon - beer, bike racing, motorcycle roads, etc. Once we figured out where the best section was, we turned around and ran it in reverse. Approaching the end of the road, I passed David coming back up the hill taking yet a third run faster still. I think I heard a sonic boom as he passed. I certainly saw his grin through his visor. Not that I was looking.

We arrived back at the fairgrounds in time for paella cooked in five-foot diameter paella pans. Chicken, sausage, or shrimp. It was really, really good. This was the final evening of the event, and there would be a big awards presentation, raffle drawing and general mayhem over near the stage. After dinner, we stripped off the riding gear and hit the beer garden. Would you guess the brews on offer were from Walking Man? Yum.

The announcer celebrated the last few days of motorcycling by asking how far people had come to be there, giving away cans of chain lube, and suggesting the owners of the two identical red Honda VFRs that crashed on Mary Hill earlier that day get together to swap undamaged bodywork.

Out of beer money, we hit the sack to rest up for the big ride home the next day. 

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