Crash #3
You couldn’t possibly cover all 3000 acres of the Texas – Oklahoma trails through the woods, dunes, hill, creeks and grasslands in one day. It was dirt bike riding heaven and in the days before GPS, it was easy to get in so deep in the twisting and turning trails that it took a while to find your way back to camp. Munster Texas... it was a great place to get away from it all.
I was in to riding with the fast guys and it was a total rush getting into a rhythm slicing back and forth , up and down where ever the trail led us.
There were a few lesser experienced guys that were going to ride with us on the second ride and they were sure to hold things up. We headed out and at one point I had to stop to readjust my clutch lever, so I had to blaze on back to the back of the pack. After poking along behind this wobbling rider that was not in any big hurry, I kept looking at a good point to smoke on past him and work my way back up to the front.
There wasn’t much room, but I downshifted and cracked the throttle wide open to pass the guy. My bike came up on the power and with a blast of speed I was about to rail right on past. The rider had no idea what was going on and closed the door on my passing line to the point where I had to drive into a rut. The rut ran along a rusty barbed wire fence and it grabbed my front wheel. It was deep enough that I couldn’t steer out of it and with all the outward momentum, I was going down. Down! down, down Hard! on the ground.
I did a spectacular face plant in the sand
in an out of control fashion while trying to avoid tangling with the rusty barbed wire fence. When my full face Bell moto 3 helmet hit the sand, it snapped my neck back so hard that they told me I was out like a burned out 4 watt light bulb for twenty minutes. I was totally knocked out cold and we were in never never land and a long ways from the camp.
The next thing I remember, is that I was sitting on the back of one of the other guys bikes and they were trying to hold my arms in place or tie me in place and going to somehow get me back to camp. I slowly came around and wondered what the heck happened. Everyone was sooo relieved, they didn't know what to do. I was really groggy for a few minutes and we all just took a break until I was able to wobble back to camp on my own bike.
After chilling for a while and eating something, I was soon ready to go back out for another ride, but they insisted that I go home (100 miles) and get checked out. Of course they were right, getting knocked out is nothing to mess around with.
One of the guys drove with me and I made it back home.
I was tired and beat up, so I unloaded my bike and layed down at around 4PM ( I didn't know you weren't supposed to go to sleep after a concussion).
Monday morning came around and I woke up rather confused around 9AM Monday morning. I couldn’t figure out what day it was for a minute and then realized that I should have been to work at 7AM ! Wow, what happened?? ! 17 hrs of sleep..
I called the boss and took the day off to go to the doctor to have the barbed wire scrapes on my rib cage checked out.
After a tetanus shot and three days walking around in a fog, I was fine.
The bike >
Ok, someone else post some good crash stories ... I have more of them but we need something more interesting here!!