On the previous weekends trip we found ourselves in a little situation where we had to decide wether to back track on get out by going cross country in an area where your not supposed to.
I made the decision I considered most likely to succeed and I wonder what others might have done ?
This was only a minor thing, but did have some potential to go
wrong , so I will try and outline it as factually as possible
without trying to put a case either way.
We were out to do some serious testing and training on trail bikes
in Victorias western dessert on a hot 38 degree afternoon.
4 bikes on this occasion, 1 inexperienced & 3 good riders.
We had water, UHF radios, my bike and another also had GPS.
There are many old unmapped bits of track in the area.
We rode east along a heavy sand main track and turned sharply left 150 degrees into an old track at an intersection such that we were riding a diverging path back from along the one we came in on.
At the intersection though the less experienced rider, no doubt getting overconfident, took off before anyone else, another bike stalled on starting and we were soon 500m meters behind the bike that took off first.
We trailed along trying to keep up and the track started to get rougher and became overgrown.
The sand was soft and we crossed a couple of difficult sand ridges and the track had almost dissappeared before we all caught up approximately 15 minutes and 5km later when he decided finally to stop.
A few
well chosen comments later, no harm done, we turned around to back track when we discovered one of the bikes had suffered on the rough track whilst jumping a log and no longer had a clutch.
We had just come down a hard dune ridge and before us was a flat plain stretching towards the track we intended to get to.
Now this is soft sand scrubby country which had been burnt out a year ago and there was lots of undergrowth and shrubs about 3 meters tall and lots small burnt trees on the ground making progress slow and you could not see more than about 30 meters.
We assessed that we could not ride the bike back along the path we had come in on as while we could put the bike into 1st gear and ride it the path was just to steep and soft.
We believed we had two realistic options.
1st Leave one bike and backtrack 5km - This would be hard , take a long time and at the end of it we felt we could not recover the bike this way because the track was to hard for our cars, especially with a trailer.
2nd Cut across country only 1.5km , relying on our GPS'es.
This was feasible but had some issues, the bike could go this way because it was flat but the rider could not stop and would have to ride faster than the slowest riders and make instant desicions about which path to go thru the scrub, he was sure to get a few scrapes.
This almost certainly meant we would inadvertently split up.
I decided to we should take the cross country option, and split the 4 bikes into 2 groups of two, each with a gps and radio and water.
We would attempt to go the same path but we all knew it was only a matter of how far before we would lose the slower group.
We headed off, I followed the faster bike with no clutch. As expected I couldn't keep up with him and we together outpaced the slow group.
Each followed the instructions this time and by use of GPS trace we made, radios and finally used our bike horns to signal each other for the last 150m to the main track, as the scrub was so thick.
Despite loosing visual contact we all made it ok, coming out onto the main track within 50m of each other a bit relieved and scratched up.