RawHyde Adventures Delivers

After riding motorcycles with some regularity for eight years or so, I feel that I have become a reasonably competent rider – a good balance of cautious and thrill-seeking, with tendencies to avoid super high speeds and freeways. Despite this – and due to lack of experience riding off-road – I decided that some training was in order before getting too deeply into my travels. The experiences I had at RawHyde Adventures’ Intro To Adventure and Journey to Base Camp Alpha from 30-Apr to 03-May showed me just how little I knew about handling a bike, particularly in off-road conditions. In the intervening week I’ve already had several opportunities to put these new skills to use, and have felt far more comfortable and competent than I otherwise would have.

Jim Hyde, the charismatic owner of RawHyde, started the company in 2002 with a Los Angeles to Las Vegas tour, off-road through the Mojave desert. Over the next few years, tours led to a training program designed to instill the skills necessary for off-road novices to participate in such rides. A few years later, BMW Motorrad North America asked Jim to join the limited ranks of official BMW off-road training facilities – there are currently only nine such facilities in the world.

The Intro to Adventure class has a comprehensive, well-designed curriculum, with each new skill building on prior skills learned over the course of the weekend – and each skill is presented verbally then demonstrated by an instructor, after which students have the opportunity to perform the exercise on their own. Over the course of two days of hard work, participants learn how to:

• Stand in a comfortable balanced position on the footpegs while riding off-road
• Control clutch, throttle and both brakes with finesse for given situations
• Use weight and balance to steer the bike including counterbalancing through sharp turns
• Avoid obstacles (key: look where you want to go, not at the thing you want to avoid – if you are looking at it, you’ll hit it)
• Properly use front and rear brakes for skids, trail stops and panic stops
• Climb and descend steep hills, and learn to handle stalling or getting stuck on hills
• Ride on loose slippery surfaces such as sand and gravel
• Ride through quick up-and-down terrain – gullies, rutted roads and the like

I went into the weekend with a fair amount of trepidation – my only previous off-road experience was accidental, when while on my first solo ride through WA and OR, I looked at a map and thought “Hey, that looks like a good way to get to my destination.” Briefly, it wasn’t – particularly on a K75S and without any prior off-road motorcycling experience. As it turned out, I wasn’t the only nervous one, though my nerves were quickly allayed when we got started on Saturday morning, as I found myself in the hands of competent coaches with a solid teaching plan.

In fact, there were a number of times over the two days that I looked at one of the exercises – such as peering down a single-track on a steep hill, preparing for a controlled descent – and thought that there was no way I’d be able to be successful. Not five minutes later, I was going around for my third or fourth try, tweaking it a little bit each time to feel how the bike responded to different inputs. It was fantastic!

I dropped my bike several times of the course of two days, but I expected as much – and I looked at those drops as opportunities to practice picking my bike up, as I’m sure I’ll have more chances to do so on the road.

Journey to Base Camp Alpha, which started Monday morning after the course completion the night before, provides an opportunity to immediately apply all the freshly-acquired skills in the real world. It’s a two-day ride through the scenic Mojave desert, half of the time on paved roads, the rest unpaved – hard pack, washboard filled with gravel and sand, rutted rocky hill climbs, you name it. BCA lets riders build confidence through repetition and experience in the real world, with real conditions. For example: it’s one thing to ride through a level sand pit, gravel parking lot or flat packed slalom course, but BCA puts you on roads with rocks and loose gravel in the turns as you climb and descend hills, deeply washboarded whoop-de-dos filled with sand and along a narrow, twisting hogback ridgeline.

For the Intro to Adventure, I removed all the luggage from my bike – other than crash bars and other protective hard parts, I was riding the bike pretty much as it was when I bought it. For BCA, I put everything back on. I wanted to feel what it will be like when I’m off on my own, with no safety net of other riders to help me when needed. Turns out, I needed it! I dropped my bike 3-4 times each day, from getting stuck in a wet sand crossing to descending winding gravel. Riding with the full load in the real world as opposed to the controlled conditions of the RawHyde training facility proved far more challenging. Despite the occasional frustration, I’m very glad I loaded the bike back up.

There were a lot of highlights to the BCA trip: the deepening camaraderie between the riders, the satisfaction felt when riding through squirrelly patches of sand or gravel when I felt sure I was going down. More than these, though, was when it all started to click – when I successfully and repeatedly picked a weaving route up hills and through turns. At one point as I was climbing a hill, I recognized the similarity to mountain biking on a single-track or fire road. After that, I started being able to map those old muscle memories to this new set of equipment.

BCA was a great way to cap the weekend, and to apply and solidify the skills learned over the previous two days. Prior to my arrival, I considered not doing the BCA ride, but am so happy that I decided to do it in the end.

RawHyde is a family business in more ways than one. It’s run by Jim with his wife Stephanie, with across-the-board assistance from Stephanie’s mom Susie. However, the sense of family goes beyond that: the coaches that make up Team RawHyde are definitely part of the greater family, and even the customers are made to feel entirely at home. The at-home feel is enhanced by the shared meals (everyone from students to coaches to Jim and family eating together), everyone sharing their own day’s high and low after dinner, and the bunkhouse housing.

After the four days I spent with Jim and his coaches (and family) I feel much more confident in my ability to handle my motorcycle in both on- and off-road situations. I know, this sounds like an advertisement – and in a way it is. If you ride a GS or other off-road motorcycle and want to build your skills, you really should consider taking a course with RawHyde Adventures. For those of you in Seattle, Jim Hyde will be doing presentations at Ride West BMW (June 7th) and South Sound BMW (~June 10?) on his program and what he calls “the GS lifestyle”, and is following it up with a three day Pacific Northwest Adventure Rally in Leavenworth, June 24th-26th, including an on-site Intro to Adventure offering. I strongly encourage checking out these events if you’re interested in learning how to ride off-road or build on existing skills.