By Ron Lawson
Photos by Lawson and Simon Cudby 

So there I am, in full motorcycle riding gear, 20 feet underground. I am not on a motorcycle; instead, I’m floating on an inner tube in near pitch darkness. I have a paddle, but all it does is make me spin in circles. The water is cold and deep, the ceiling is low and getting lower. I’m more or less stranded and I have to pee.

At some point I expect to wake up and swear off eating barbecue ribs before bedtime. But I don’t. As weird as the scene is, it’s real, and it isn’t the weirdest thing that I will do that day. It’s day three of the 14th Annual Giant Loop Rally, and I’m doing stuff that I’ve never done before.

RALLY TIME

Adventure riding is the vaguest, most ill-defined activity in all of motorsports. It’s deliberately that way. We all know what riding fire roads is like, we know what trail riding is, and we know what racing is. We don’t, however, know what will happen if we get on our motorcycles and go, say, west as far as we can. We don’t know what we will see, what challenges we will face and what will eventually stop us. It’s called adventure, and a whole segment of the motorcycle world has developed around the concept of not knowing.

The Giant Loop Rally is devoted to that concept. Each year around 600 riders gather at Crane Hot Springs in southeastern Oregon to experience who-knows-what. Some of them ride there, some haul their bikes, and some show up empty-handed, hoping to ride a demo bike from Suzuki or Harley-Davidson. The organizers only make suggestions about what you might do. There are no marked routes, no guided rides and no real agendas. They provide a list of GPS track logs that go in every direction, but let the riders break into their own groups and subgroups to do their own thing. There are only a few scheduled events. In the evening, there are various seminars on various topics. One evening, Willem Avenant told a group of semi-sober riders all about his adventures at the Dakar Rally. He was an advocate of navigation by road book and explained how to do that. In other gatherings, there was instruction about using various smartphone navigational aids like onX and Revver.

Probably the most structured aspect of the whole event was dinner. The organizers believe in feeding people well. There was no shortage of beer, either.

AGING RACERS

This year was my first time at the Giant Loop Rally. I’ve been on lots of organized adventure rides before, but all were more structured. I was a little bewildered. Unless you give me a set start time and a designated schedule, I can just seize. Eventually, though, I learned to appreciate the free-form structure. It would be almost impossible to do it any other way. It was a crazy diverse group. On one hand, there were riders like Scot Harden and Rodney Smith who recently organized their own adventure ride. Damon Bradshaw was also there with his son Dalton. On the other hand, there were guys who had no idea what they were doing. There were new-looking bikes in pick-up trucks that were tied down at bizarre angles with rope and bungee cords. Some, as far as I could tell, were never unloaded. There’s no way you can mix Damon Bradshaw with guys who can’t unload their own motorcycles. 

My old riding buddy, Robb Mesecher, showed up, too. If you’ve been reading Dirt Bike for long, you know the name. Robb is a human lightning rod. If you’re too close to him on any dirt bike adventure, you will be struck by cosmic beams of misfortune. It’s a scientific fact that even if you ride 20 feet behind him, your fork seals will start leaking and your motor will start detonating. If you back off to 30 feet, everything’s fine. On day one there were about 10 of us on a free-form trail ride that included Robb and Belgian hard enduro rider Greg Gordinne. Greg was amazing to watch. He could ride his KTM 1290 as if it were a 125 two-stroke. Apparently, the only part of the ride that he found difficult was keeping his front wheel on the ground. Unfortunately, he was on a schedule; he had to be back to teach a riding class at 2 p.m. Robb was Robb, though, so mechanical issues and navigational problems soon started stacking up. Greg announced he had to split off on his own, and eventually our group of 10 degenerated into 10 groups of one apiece. Greg made it to his class on time, but we never saw Robb until dinner that night.

My riding partner for most of the weekend was Dirt Bike’s advertising manager, Derrek Bernard. We flew up and scrounged for motorcycles once we arrived. I ended up with a new Suzuki DR-Z4S, and he found a Beta Alp. I thought it would be a terrible mismatch. Our group included too many divergent types of motorcycles, including Robb’s Husky FE500S and the Yamaha T7s that Jason McCune and the Bradshaws had. It turned out not to matter. Bike size and capability are almost irrelevant on adventures like this. Our plan was to ride what was reputed to be the most challenging route on the list. It was beautiful and fun, but designed to be navigable for average riders on Super Teneres and GS1300s. It had nothing that could slow down the Bradshaws and Gordinnes of the world. We discovered that undemanding dual-sport bikes like the DR-Z4S and the Alp allowed Derreck and me to hang out with riders who held a considerably higher place on the adventure bike food chain.

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT

On day three, we noticed one of the rides on the list included a tour of the Malheur Cave. We asked around, but no one knew anything about it. The ride itself looked pretty easy. It was mostly dirt roads, but the cave itself was barely shown on any maps. Google couldn’t offer much help. Why not put that on our list of the day’s activities? Adventure riding is all about the unknown, right? This was even unknown to the internet. 

As it turned out, almost 100 riders had the same idea. There was a reason that so little was known about Malheur Cave. It wasn’t a tourist attraction by any stretch of the imagination. The cave had been known only in local folklore for a very long time, and the land was purchased sometime early in the 20th century by the local Masonic Lodge. Why? Beats me. The file with the “Freemasons” label in my head is almost empty. I know there’s something about secrets and world domination, but all the dust and rat droppings in that part of my brain makes information hard to retrieve. 

Apparently, a handful of old-timers had agreed to offer a cave tour to any motorcycle riders who showed up. They were completely overwhelmed with the response. All the bikes were parked at the cave entrance while an unlikely mob of amateur spelunkers descended into the bowels of the earth. Malheur Cave is actually a lava tube that formed about 7000 years ago. Today, it culminates in an underground lake, so the Masons have a few rafts tied up for adventurers who want to explore beyond the shore. By the time Derreck and I got there, all the rafts were gone, so we decided to have a little lunch and return later. Even later there were no rafts, but there were two inner tubes. That was how we found ourselves floating in pitch blackness well into the afternoon. For the record, I held my pee. I can’t speak for Derreck.

THE ADVENTURE GIG

Exploring underground caves is not a normal part of adventure bike riding. I suppose that’s the whole point. There’s no normal and, in fact, the most successful rides invite the abnormal. It’s a hard concept for a lifelong motorcycle racer like me to accept. I have too many decades of time schedules and strict regulations baked in. But, just looking at my biological clock, I know that there are probably fewer adventures in my future than in my past. I definitely want to make each of them this special.