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Riding Safely Through Appalachia

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Tips for riding safely through our local twisties. Do these on top of your basic safety measures. This is not an instruction manual for beginners. 

Ride at a pace that is comfortable for you.

Don’t try to keep up with –or catch up to– faster riders. Why? On a motorcycle, the brain panics without warning; you could be going around a curve comfortably at 35, but at 40 get overwhelmed and crash.

The ego gratification or sense of belonging you might  get from keeping up is not worth the injuries that can permanently end your riding. Or end other people’s riding. 

We will wait up for you. We will not judge you for riding slower. We WILL judge you AND have a conversation with you for riding above your ability. You can always ride faster next year.

If you are riding with a group that does not wait for you, find a different group to ride with.

Manage your distractions.

Today’s electronics help reduce the incidence of low-sides, high-sides, and skids, but they provide a lot of data that can distract you during a ride. And, if you mount a phone on your bike, you are adding a second level of distractions. Just glancing at your phone for one second when a text or call arrives at the wrong time can make you crash.

Get into the habit of ignoring your phone and most of your dashboard during a ride.

Focus on technique; speed will follow.

You’ve probably heard the saying: “To go fast, get smooth. To get smooth, go slow.” Unless you are an incurable adrenalin junkie, good technique is more satisfying than mere speed.

Technique refers to things such as accelerating, shifting, and braking smoothly, without lurching. Choosing the best entry speed, optimum line through the corner, and correct exit point. While not crowding your fellow riders. Never EVER crossing the double-yellow on a curve. (In fact, if you do cross a double-yellow, pull over, turn off the engine, and smoke a cigarette to calm your dumb ass down.) On older bikes, it meant blipping the throttle while downshifting as you applied the front brake. Today that’s no longer necessary, but it was a challenging technique to perform smoothly, so it was fun. 

Safety first, courtesy second, fun third.

You are riding through other people’s home towns. Don’t be a jackass. If not simply out of courtesy, out of self-interest: the worse you behave, the more likely the locals will call the cops on you. 

So ride at a reasonable speed in the straights, with courtesy in towns and neighborhoods, and have your fun in the twisties. 

Leapfrog cars.

One rider at a time passes one car at a time. In a line of cars, the first motorcycle passes the first car. Period. The second motorcycle passes the first car only when the first motorcycle passes the second car.

On long straights, it sometimes makes sense to pass a couple of cars at a time, but be careful. The faster you go, the longer the stopping distance, and the worse the crash.

Don’t pass the asshole.

Some drivers are seized by an irrational compulsion to stay in front of us. I don’t know why that is, and I don’t need to.

On one ride through the Colorado mountains, I was last in a line of Ducatis. By the time I passed the car that had been holding us up, the car was doing a really dumb speed. I had to hit an even dumber speed to pass him. As luck would have it, about a mile later we ran into road construction that stopped all traffic. So I dismounted and approached the car politely. He rolled down his window. I asked him if we had done anything to upset him. He said No. His wife, however, was looking pretty heated, so I wondered if she was the reason he’d sped up. When I said that accelerating that way puts us all in danger, and asked if in the future he wouldn’t mind just letting us pass, he said he didn’t realize he was going that fast. When his wife started talking, he rolled up the window, so I waved and returned to my bike. 

The more we tailgate them, the faster they go, and the angrier they get. Which makes passing harder and more dangerous.

Better to follow at a respectful distance. As often as not, they’ll come to their senses, pull over, and let us pass. In that case, we just made the world a slightly better place. But if they don’t, we can pull over and smoke a cigarette until they’re far enough ahead.

Practice trail breaking.

It makes you familiar with your brakes in a curve, and gives you a soft touch that helps in an emergency. 

When you apply the brake in a corner, two things happen: 

  • Your bike stands up, which moves you out toward the outside of the curve
  • If you use up the available traction, you low side. If you have electronics, they intervene, but they may reduce the amount of braking you expected to have.

By practicing trail braking, your body learns how to anticipate both of these reactions and keep your braking under your control.

Late apex.

Late apex has three benefits that I am familiar with. There may be more.

  • As you enter the curve, you see more of the curve, which helps you avoid obstacles and get a better feel for camber and radius.
  • You exit the curve pointed away from the danger compared to a racing line. In a right-hand curve, your angular momentum is pushing you toward oncoming traffic, but your bike is pointed away from it. So if your exit speed is a bit too high, you have more room to maneuver. In a left-hand curve, your angular momentum pushes you toward the ditch, but your bike is pointed away from it, so you have more room to maneuver. 
  • It reduces your entry speed. First, because you are paying closer attention to the camber and radius of the curve. Second, because the initial turn-in is sharper than on a racing line, so intuitively you enter the curve more slowly.

Link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQ0Z5FfxxBE

Keep looking through the curve.

It’s human nature to fixate on a fixed point while going around a curve. Little by little, our range shortens and soon we’re surprised by a change in the curve radius or camber, or by an obstacle. Or maybe we just screw up our line. Force yourself to keep looking as far through the curve as the hillside lets you. Make it a habit.

Assume the worst until …

… you have evidence to the contrary. I assume there’s a broken down truck around every blind corner until I can see that there is not. Why? Because one time there was a damned broken down truck around a blind corner. Another time, it was a dead moose. Another time it was a line of cars that had just stopped. Several times it was ice. Countless times it was gravel. And once in a while it was another motorcycle coming toward me in my lane. 

Stagger the straights …

… single file the twisties. Simple. Easy. Safe.

Bad examples

Resources

You can find tons of resources nowadays, but these are three of my favorites

Ride Report: Chasing Ash Up Mt Morrow

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Written in Feb 2022

Riding along a mottled two-lane into the early morning sun between North Carolina’s bare February trees, the color of the land is reduced to the brown and ocher tones of old photographs.

It was 36 degrees when I left Winston, probably about the same when Ashish, Arvind, and Saurin left Cary. We met up at the Sunoco filling station in Seacrest. Seacrest is an odd name for a town in the middle of North Carolina, but it’s well known among the wives of motorcyclists for its independent pottery shops.

The night before, I had made the classic mistake of going out to dinner with friends instead of prepping my ride, so when I got to Sunoco, I had to inflate my front tire back to its normal air pressure. No matter how good your tires are, over the winter they lose air. Every winter. I suspect that as the temps drop below freezing, the rubber shrinks just enough to let a little bit of air leak out. In the other 9 months of the year my tires don’t lose any air. In Winter, they do.

Rumor has it, some guy named Behram is a master map maker. Apparently he’s plotted and ridden a whole lotta loops all over this part of the country. Ashish took us long one of those loops.

Motorcyclist Map

First stop, the Pisgah covered bridge. I had heard it was haunted, but I had never visited it. But I wasn’t too worried, since I’d read somewhere that only those who ride their motorcycles across it get haunted. I certainly wasn’t planning to.

Nevertheless, for reasons no one without a romantic soul can understand, covered bridges beckon us.

However, when the Pisgah bridge beckoned Saurin, it BECKONED him.

Saurin was not content with simply snapping a picture of the bridge. He felt that in the interest of Art, he should ride out through the bridge.

Good thing he did, because after some … um … creative riding, he got his GSA into position to snap an epic picture:

(picture taken by Saurin)

The color palette was so promising that even Ash could not resist blending in.

The roads between the Pisgah covered bridge and Mt Morrow are gentle sweepers through rural North Carolina. Because everyone with a grasp of common sense was sitting by a warm fire at home, we had the roads to ourselves. A delightful route along farms, fields, forests, and small towns.

Somewhere along the route we wound up taking Ashish’s Honda Gold Wing and Arvind’s BMW R1200RT down some dirt roads. I mean, when you have a full-dress tourer, who really needs a dedicated dirt bike, right? Lord Saurin and I were on BMW GS Adventures, rather incensed that the Gold Wing and the RT were kicking dust onto the beautiful paint of our stylish motorcycles.

After a great deal of sulking, we got over it, mostly because our filthy, dusty, dirt route landed us at a delightful rest stop by the Low Water Bridge near Ritchfield.

Even among the cool temps and bare trees of February, it was a serene spot to pause and reflect. Saurin spent most of his reflection time wondering where he had left his motorcycle key.

I spent most of mine wondering whether to tell him.

After a snack of girl scout cookies (is there anything better, really?), we rode off to Jay Patel’s Coffee Central in the town of Richfield. Talk about feeling immediately at home. And delicious Chai. I was having such a good time I’m not even sure I paid.

As we struck up a conversation, the four of us realized we were in unanimous and enthusiastic agreement that fear of women was a clear sign of intelligence in a man. Conversely, a man who does not fear women can be dismissed us woefully unprepared for the realities of life. Not to mention dangerous company, given the proclivities of the godesses Kali and Durga, may they both forgive the sins of their humble servants Ashish, Arvind, Saurin, and Rick.

From Richfield we flew at the perfect pace that Ashish set for us toward the small country town of Badin. Assuming that in today’s permissive environment a motorcyclist is allowed to use that word without losing his reputation as a man of substance, the town of Badin is charming.

Nestled against a lake conveniently named Badin Lake …

… and astride the Yadkin river, Badin is the resort town for the area that includes Mt Morrow State Park.

Somewhere along the route we lost Saurin, but we attributed that to either the haunted bridge or a mood swing by Kali, so there wasn’t much we could do about it. But we did miss him.

Mt Morrow State Park is charming– oops –Mt Morrow State Park is well marked, manicured, and paved. If we hadn’t had a car in front of us the whole way we would have made it there in half the time. Riding behind Ashish, I had the distinct impression that he was exerting a supernatural effort to restrain himself from riding straight over the top of the car holding us back so he could enjoy the twisties.

No matter, because once we got to the parking area by the lookout, we were greeted by two C7 Corvettes.

The red Z06 was a stunner.

We wiped off our drool, took several pictures, met some riders from Charlotte, one of whom rode a Triumph Street Triple that looked really good. After several failed attempts by yours truly to coax the rider of the street Triple and Arvind into a grudge match down Mt Morrow and back, we settled into pleasant biker chats.

We also engaged the Corvette owners in scintillating conversation, as a result of which they offered to help us convince our wives that we each needed a Corvette for when the weather got a little too cold or a little too hot to ride a motorcycle.

Sometime after 2:30 pm we decided we’d better stop socializing and hit the road or we wouldn’t be home in time for sopapillas. Since I’d save over an hour by heading straight home from Mt Morrow, I took my own route home, and Ashish and Arvind completed the loop back to their abodes.

I don’t use turn by turn navigation, preferring to memorize the next half dozen turns from my phone’s map and then try to figure out where the hell I am after I invariably wind up lost. As a result, I wasted that hour I saved by taking the direct route. Nevertheless, I got to meet some gentle souls who were kind enough to point out which way North was.

The route was serene, the pace was perfect, the company like old friends. Can’t wait for the next one.