Was today a good day or a bad day for me? Each of us can decide that on their , but for me today was a GREAT DAY!
Started off with a cool morning ride up to about 9,000’ of elevation with a new needle jet in my bike. I’ve been looking for the elusive “Goldilocks” needle for a long time. Seems whatever runs decent down here sucks at 8,000 plus ft.
As I was climbing up the last few 100’ feet to the peak I was luging the engine trying to get it to bog while messing with the air screw and it was pulling hard with less than 3 turns out! Finally! So we headed down the mountain for gorditas and coffee.
As we were dressing up to go home I reminded my buddy “Watch out for quads!” as I always do. Then not 5 miles up the road it happened. ..
My buddy was riding to the far right of the washboard road and I was about 15’ back and close to the center of the road. We doing about 50mph uphill coming out of a right-hand sweeper that turned into a 20 yard straight before becoming a left hand sweeper.
I saw the quad coming out of “his” downhill right hand sweeper hot and crossing slightly into our side of the road. My buddy pulled as tight as he could to his right and I hit the binders as hard as I could. For a split second I thought he could get back over onto his side of the road, but before I even released my brakes to enable a direction change his front wheels were aimed to my right, so I decided to fight my instinct and go left.
Bad plan. After he’d flashed his wheels to my right I guess he’d started to tip and decided to go hard left. I waited till the last second and then closed my eyes and did what I’ve always hoped I could do in a head on crash and that was stand up and jump at the moment of impact.
I figure we were both down to about 25 to 30mph when we collided. I guess I closed my eyes as we hit because everything was dark for a while. I really didn’t think I was going to live through this one. I remember thinking heaven was dark (then realizing I might not be in Heaven)
Then I heard someone yelling and opened my eyes and noticed my buddy was about 50 yards up the road and still trying to stop his bike. My next thought was that nothing hurt, followed by wondering if this was even really happening? Then I realized the yelling was behind me and I rolled over and saw the quad on its side and a guy slowly standing up on the other side of it. I got up and we ran towards each other both yelling “estas bien???” to each other. A moment after the euphoria of us both realizing the other was alive and moving I heard the yelling again.
It was his passenger whose leg was pinned under the quad and he was yelling that his arm was broken. We rolled the quad off him and stood him up as the guys in the side by side that were following him arrived. Then my buddy got there and we started to sort out the mess.
My bike was literally hanging from a barbed wire fence some 10’ off the road. It took three of them to pull it out. My upper tree had snapped and my front wheel had bucked under and flattened my pipe. My right side rad was crushed and my clutch master, stabilizer, odometer and bars were all damaged. The quad had a flat tire, bent steering arm, broken gear selector and the thumb throttle lever was snapped off as well as missing plastic.
The guy with the broken bone(s) was put in the side by side and the quad was driven off very slowly by pulling on the throttle cable by hand. I stayed behind alone while my buddy went out to the nearby town to look for someone with a pick-up. He found a guy that was willing to take me to my buddies house for a couple hundred bucks and then they dragged my bike onto my buddies truck (he'd followed us back on the highway on his bike) and then he took me home.
My wife was out with her cousins when I got home (did I mention it was a GREAT DAY?) so we were able to unload and drag the bike down to my shop undetected.
I’m sore, really sore, especially right leg and foot. I think my foot may be what broke the guys arm as all the buckles on my right boot blew open and one buckle that I just replaced last night was torn apart.
So, that’s my story for this weekend. When I’m feeling better I’ll have to tear the bike down and try and determine the condition of the forks, wheel and frame. The wheel looks round and I don’t see any obvious signs of fork damage, but I don’t see how I could have snapped the tree and done all that damage to the quad without something bending. Fact is I don't even care. I'm alive with nothing broken and still having trouble believing it, today was a GREAT DAY!!!
Pics are coming..
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Camexican! 
Originally Posted by fabiodriven
