Thunderbirds are Go!

The success of any group ride depends primarily on the character of its participants, and how they get along.  By that measure, the Thunderbird Ride, organized by Jared Zaugg, was superb, bringing together an interesting mix of folks, from wealthy collectors / museum owners, to world famous artisans, to racers, to journalists and filmmakers, to folks who simply love bikes.  Of course, #2 critical point for a good ride is Location, and the Thunderbird Ride had me at ‘Moab Utah’, the heart of everything magical in America’s canyonlands.  Third on the list would be the mix of bikes, and again, the Thunderbird scored on variety, combining world-class customs by Shinya Kimura and Max Schaaf, several vintage Triumph/BSAs/Moto Guzzi/Harley-Davidsons, a couple of newer/hotted up Harley-Davidsons reserved for long-traveled guests from Austria, and a pair of vintage choppers.  The photos tell the story: this was a mix not found on any other ride, as rallies tend to be all antiques, or all choppers, or all new bikes, with rarely a mix of everything on wheels.

A sticking point for group rides is pace: some folks ride fast, some cruise: some bikes will cruise at 75mph, and some bikes feel flogged at over 60mph.  Jared Zaugg addressed the issue in a morning rider’s meeting…which I misinterpreted as ‘ride flat out’.  The speed differential wasn’t really an issue; we all had maps, and are all experienced riders.  It did mean some of us didn’t see others except at meal stops or vista overlooks.  But for me, in the hundreds of rides/rallies I’ve attended, road clumping has never been a priority, although I get that it’s important for folks who prefer to ride together.  That makes me a road loner, although when another rider matches my pace and inclinations to stop and take photos, I’m happy for the company.  When I’m riding solo (ie when my pillion buddy Suzie stays home), my pace hots up, and the selection of like-throttled riders narrows.  This year I got lucky, and found a fellow maniac or two who take maximum riding pleasure from tilting at corners and thundering through the landscape.

So, what is the Thunderbird Ride?  Jared Zaugg explains:  “The Thunderbird Ride was created as an annual invitational motorcycle ride, limited to less than 20 international participants, with the aim of bringing together diverse professionals from across industries in a uniquely uncommon and highly memorable setting. Each year the route will be different and always awe-inspiring, with a focus on the Rocky Mountain states of the Western US. The route of this year’s inaugural event went through the Canyonlands and Navajolands of southern Utah, also referred to as the Four Corners region of the American Southwest.”

I drove to Utah with Gary Boulanger, a former editor at The Vintagent who moved on to Cycle World, and now is Editor in Chief at the Silicon Valley Business Journal. A real job! Gary parked his lovely blue BMW Toaster Tank R75/5 beside my bitsa 1960s Triumph Tracker in my van, Sic Transit Gloria, and we headed southeast to Utah, stopping for a night on the ‘loneliest highway in America’ (Hwy 50) at Ely NV.  As Gary intended to ride with his prisoner-stripe denim, it seemed apropos to kip at the Jailbreak Motel, in ‘Cell 122’.  Their restaurant had a similar theme, using actual jail cells as dining booths, a gimmick I found strange, given the likely percentage of former inmates as clientele in this remote gambling haven. The food was jail-worthy, too. Joe Bob says give it a miss.

Arriving early in Moab the next day, we made a side trip to see Corona Arch – similar to Delicate Arch on the Utah license plate – stopping to admire a wall of petroglyphs en route.  The arch required a 40min hike on a well-marked trail, and was worth the effort, as the whole landscape was wind and water-sculpted red sandstone, and one easily understands the feeling that ancient spirits reside within those canyon walls.  Returning to our motel, our Ride group finally coalesced at dinner nearby, where Jared’s son Jude, just returned from a 2-year mission in the Philippines, surprised everyone by conversing fluently in Tagalog with our waitress.  I’ve known Jude since before he was born, taking up space in his mother Brooke’s belly: isn’t it great to see them grow up?

Early Saturday morning we found Gary’s BMW was a non-starter,  proving once again my axiom ‘it’s always BMWs that break on a vintage rally.’ Several of us looked the Toaster over, including Shinya Kimura, who shook his head ‘No’.  Luckily, Kevin Bradburn hauled five bikes in a huge trailer, including two hotted-up late-model Harley-Davidsons for Attila and Sabina Scheiber, owners of the Top Mountain Museum in Austria, who easily won the Furthest Traveled award.  Kevin’s other options included a beautiful Shinya Kimura Moto Guzzi creation, a pre-unit Triumph, a Sportster for Jared to ride, and the ‘Black Panther’ from Max Schaaf – an exquisite old school ‘skinny tire’ Panhead custom chopper.   With no bike to ride, Gary looked over the available options, pausing momentarily to examine the Black Panther, as I seconded Shinya’s ‘No’.  Gary would ride my bitsa Triumph Tracker (1963 frame, 1971 motor / forks / wheels), which I’d only done a few miles on, and I would take the Black Panther.

I’ve known Max Schaaf since 2006, after spotting an amazing chopper outside a Mission District restaurant, and waiting until the owner came out, to congratulate the amazing build.  This was 8 years before I wrote ‘The Chopper: the Real Story’, and I was not especially fond of choppers, but there was no denying Max’s bike was very special and built by a master craftsman.  We talked, we conferred about our mutual blogs (he had recently started 4Q Conditioning, and I The Vintagent), and have been amigos ever since.  I had never ridden one of his creations, but had ridden on his 69 Mile Ride, and knew his machines worked.  So, no terrors on helming the Black Panther for 200 miles, but years of yoga definitely helped me ride the animal in question.

What I quickly discovered: losing 100lbs and hotting up the motor of a big Harley-Davidson V-twin meant the Black Panther was quick, and fast, and seemed happiest – mechanically – cruising at 75mph or so, despite the beating I took over bumps.  Which meant the rest of the Thunderbird gang were left far behind, barring one Jeff Leighton on his tuned Harley-Davidson Knucklehead, likewise happy to cruise at 75.  So, I had a riding buddy…which proved very useful when I ran out of gas 50 miles in, en route to Needles Overlook.  Jeff found a metal water bottle, so I was back on the road in minutes, after taking in the marvelous desert landscape with piñon trees predominating, and not much else to cover the red dirt.  With the range of the Panther determined, I knew to stop for gas before 50 miles, which worked out fine for the rest of the weekend.   The short version?  Riding the Black Panther made me feel some kinda way.  Fast motoring on a very stylish and very beautiful machine with a perfect exhaust note for 200 miles was apex motorcycling.  It also hurt, and I was glad for gas stops every 45 miles or so. The Panther handled perfectly, with easy feet-up U-turns, a real trick for a bike with 4″ extensions on the forks: I was busy texting Max with congratulations and pumping him for details, figuring this was as good a Road Test moment as any.

We stopped for Navajo tacos – unavailable outside the Four Corners region – at Twin Rocks Cafe in Bluff UT.  That enabled catch-up time for the several riders I’d not seen for a while, like Grant Reynolds (riding his 1969 Triumph with 1964 gold bodywork), with whom I’d forever-bonded on a week-long Kiehl’s charity ride in 2011 – that’s another thing a good ride will do.  Grant has left his TV career in LA (‘What Could Possibly Go Wrong’ et al) and moved to Weed CA to start a production company…in Salt Lake City.  Grant was one of three SoCal lads who’d moved to SLC in recent years, including Jeff Leighton and Andy Pappas, who rode his grandfather’s Harley-Davidson Panhead, which was a totally stock beauty.   Jeff moved his Vard Manufacturing to SLC several years ago for a host of reasons (including infrastructure costs), but Andy was a more recent transplant, leaving San Diego for the mountains of Utah, where he services giant turbines.

Even our official (Jared Zaugg) and unofficial hosts (the Bradburns) had moved from the SF Bay Area to Utah, a trend made prominent of course by the proximity of all these gents to our Moab venue, but indicative of a demographic trend; the in-and-outs of population to and from California, the leavers fed up with high prices etc being replaced by newcomers attracted to the beauty and culture.   As a 5th-gen San Franciscan, I’ve found it ultimately impossible to leave, but have watched the tides change as the artists departed in the late 1990s, replaced by job-seekers in the exploding tech industry, which leaves many parts of the City a ghost town in slow times, like now.

The shake-down ride for my Triumph bitsa had been just that: 1971 Triumph rocker boxes feature screw-in caps to insert a feeler gauge for valve adjustment, and one had fallen off.  Shinya Kimura sorted it with one of his famous lockwire repair sculptures, which I’m loathe to remove, although the dime he used to cover the hole meant it still leaked oil. No biggie. And, my bike is worth more than the day before, given the Shinya magic.  Gary carried on for the rest of the day: he’d never ridden a Triumph before, so he got the full mix of their charms: the repairable breakdowns, and the excellent ride feel. “It’s fun!” But the Triumph wasn’t charging properly, so had a total-loss battery ignition, which was totally lost by the end of the day, so we stuck it in the chase trailer.  That gave Gary the opportunity to try other bikes, and by the end of the weekend he’d ridden four, declaring it “an experience to last a lifetime.”

Let’s talk roads: the canyonlands are a mix of fairly straight 2-lane desert highways interspersed with delightful twisties as you’re ‘getting somewhere’, like a canyon overlook atop a mountain (Needles Overlook or Goosenecks State Park), or climbing a sheer cliff face on a set of dirt hairpins laid out by miners in the 1950s (Moki Dugway), or stretches of the less canyon-spectacular but more road-fabulous like Hwy 261, especially good with a fast bike.  And by then (Sunday), I was, as the ever-generous Kevin Bradburn and his son Cole (with his 1-year old Sonny in tow) had taken over the Black Panther, and I mounted Shinya Kimura’s spectacular Moto Guzzi cafe racer.  That bike, too, will get a full Road Test report in future, but as I’ve ridden several of Shinya’s bikes in ‘Kimura Canyon’ outside his shop in Azusa, I knew what to expect.  A fast and totally competent sports machine with unique, spectacular bodywork.

We spent an ‘away’ night in Mexican Hat, beside the San Juan River canyon at the San Juan Inn and Trading Post, and those inclined towards Native American jewelry found it good; the Holidays are inevitable so prepare thee well, and I conspired with Sabina Scheiber on some gifting sleight-of-hand, keeping the element of surprise for a certain someone. No comment on my purchases, for now.

Dinner at the Inn was uneventful, barring the company, which was excellent, and gave me a chance to get to know filmmaker Michael Polish (riding a hot KTM ADV bike), Andy Pappas, and Cole Bradburn, who builds Porsches (Verve Vintage Motorworks) for events like the Peking to Paris, in which he and his father Kevin won their class this year in a 1969 Porsche 912 built by Cole.  It was good to catch up with hatmaker Chandler Scott, chat with Ayu and Shinya Kimura about the bikes they’d brought (a pre-unit Triumph chopper for Ayu, and a stock Moto Guzzi T3 for Shinya), and get they ‘why we left Cali’ stories from Shea and Andy.

The swap from chopper to cafe racer on Sunday meant turning the dial from 8 to 11, as I explored the performance of Shinya’s Moto Guzzi.  We stopped at Goulding’s Lodge, where John Wayne’s character in ‘She Wore a Yellow Ribbon’ kept a primitive stone cabin, now a museum integrated into the usual canyonland motel/restaurant/gift shop.  I was distracted by Native American jewelry shopping – found a Navajo baby rattle for my grandson Jude – and found myself left behind by the gang…an opportunity for a high-speed test to catch them up.

Shinya’s Guzzi is basically a LeMans Mk1 with Ceriani race forks and a giant 4LS Yamaha TZ front brake, as good as any disc.  Like all hot Guzzi V-twins, it handled like on rails, so with little traffic and miles of forward visibility on the desert highway, at Ton Up! speeds I soon joined the others for a planned short film of our group passing the Forrest Gump overlook in the ‘other’ direction.   The next viewpoint was near the top of Moki Dugway, a series of dirt switchbacks rising 1200′, built by uranium miners in the 1950s to transport ore between Cedar Mesa and Mexican Hat.

After the obligatory photo stop, and watching Cole Blackburn manage the Black Panther up a rutted dirt canyon(!), we leveled up to the bliss of high-country sweepers on the beautifully paved Hwy 261.  That was 25 miles of cafe racer perfection, with almost no traffic, and evidently no police presence, or likely I’d have spent my last night in Utah in an actual jail.  But no catchee monkey, and satisfied with Shinya’s handiwork, I rode the final stretch to lunch at Blanding with my fellows (and ladies – Ayu on her Triumph and Sabina on her wicked H-D Road Glide).

We’ll draw a veil over lunch (in a bowling alley), and circle back to the night before the rally, when Shea Sjoburg showed up riding his H-D Evo chopper, instead of the pickup truck he’d started out from SLC with.  The truck had thrown a fit (and its timing belt) in Monument Valley, where he’d left it after finding a replacement belt that didn’t quite fit.  As our route brought us near the spot he’d abandoned his truck, he finished his repairs and retrieved it, but hated to see his chopper miss the last 75 miles of the ride.  I volunteered, curious to experience the Evo genre of Chopperdom.  The photo above gives my Cliff’s Notes on handling – surprisingly good – and let’s just say those last miles were covered in an hour, again in the good company of Jeff Leighton on his Knuck.

Our arrival in Moab was not the end of our day, as a sunset ride was planned for Dead Horse State Park, which rivals (and perhaps exceeds) the Grand Canyon for sheer incomprehensible vistas.  We watched the sun paint hundreds of miles of 4500′ deep canyons a deeper shade of red, making a wonderful photo opp. It also meant our final 30 mile return to Moab was concluded in darkness, quickly followed by a farewell dinner, from which some of our group departed directly, while Gary and I escaped in the wee hours of the morning, taking the fast route via SLC and US 80 to our Bay Area home, 15 hours away.  It was a lot of driving for a weekend ride, but eminently worth it.  Infinite thanks to our gracious host Jared Zaugg, and especially to Kevin and Cole Bradburn, who sorted so many of us who did or didn’t know they’d need a ride!  How cool that Gary and I both got to test out four different bikes in the beautiful landscapes of Utah.  The Thunderbird Ride was a reminder that motorcycling is the best of times, made doubly special in such excellent company.