Putting distance between misaligned priorities, Southern Arizona
Olaf Wolff
AllAboutBikes.com Sr. Staff Writer
Editor’s Note: This is the second installment in a three-part series of Wolff’s travels.
Downtown Pine Valley is about a half mile long – Sheriff Novak’s office stands in the middle. Speaking from experience, the Sheriff figured the weather was only going to worsen for the next few days. It was 2:30 and the Arizona border was still three hours away. I was about five miles from the summit, in the Sheriff’s opinion, unless I planned to hole up in the one hotel in town for the next few days, the best thing was to keep moving – the choice was clear.
The weather remained pretty much the same up to the 4500 ft. Crestwood Summit – sans the hail. As far as I could see the desert was dry and clear, the decision to keep moving had paid off. I was back on I-8, back on course.
Beginning the decent into El Centro there are a series of large yellow highway markers: “Warning – Extreme wind area for next 16 miles.” From what I was encountering, this was a consoling attempt at understatement.
It was sunny now, but the wind was exploding in random blasts as violent as any I’d experienced in over 40 years of riding. The speed limit on this stretch of I-8 is 75 mph, I slowed to 45 and still wasn’t comfortable.
Riding in a constant wind is one thing – you surrender naturally to the correct lean angle and ride with your bubble a few degrees off vertical. But extreme, unpredictable gusts attempting to rip the handlebars from my hands presented an entirely different predicament. At one point a dark, ominous cloud of solid debris, including a huge sheet of aluminum siding, flew directly across my path, a few smaller chunks striking the front fairing.
The dynamic pressure deviations from one side of the mountains to the other created unstable atmospheric conditions that seemed to intensify with every mile. I slowed to 25 mph and rode the shoulder, until finally, further down the grade the wind again became manageable.
Once I reached the flat of the desert the wind subsided even more. Exit 2/Hwy 95 in Yuma came into sight around 6:15 that evening. The Motel 6 looked mighty good after 400 brutal miles of battling the elements. After a dinner of barbecue chicken at Tyler’s Taste of Texas, I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bed, staring blankly at the TV screen. For just a split second I questioned the sanity of my journey at this particular time of the year, but just for a second. It’s been my experience that on road trips things always looked different, most times better, on the second day.
