Kahoka, Missouri

For the layperson unaccustomed to woods racing, which is to say most humans born of this earth, the beginning stage of a hare scramble surely must be at odds with their perception of competitive motorsports. There is no grand pronouncement directing gentlemen to start their engines. There is not one, but many starting lines, and all abilities ride the same course at the same time. The most curious feature of a hare scramble would have to be the idea that within the first couple hundred yards of a 30 or 40 mile race, riders must fight for positions as if the entire outcome of the race depended on their place at the first turn. Given the multitude of possible successes and failures during an hours-long excursion in the woods, why compete so fiercely for the mystical holeshot? One answer lies in the possibility, small as it may be, that an awesome jump on one’s competitors is the fuel which propels a racer ahead of the chaos and leads to victory. Another relates more often to me and my habit of poor beginnings, which sometimes leave me to wonder what might have been if I hadn’t screwed up the start so badly. The 2002 version of the “Mulekicker” AMA National Hare Scramble was a case study in such retrospection.

Held in the familiar surroundings of Mike Burkhart’s backyard motocross track near Kahoka, the Mulekicker attracts riders from the mud-infested AMA District 17, the rock-happy state of Missouri, the recently thawed regions of Iowa, the far corners of the country inhabited by factory-sponsored professionals, and anywhere else populated with amateur racers willing to drive long distances to prove themselves on the national circuit. They arrive in all manner of transportation. On one end of the spectrum are motorhomes the size of small houses, pulling enclosed trailers large enough to transport full-size passenger cars and leaving one to wonder if their owners are independently wealthy or simply enjoy the company of enabling bankers. Others drive more economical box vans or self-contained RVs equipped for toy hauling. The most common transport vehicles are trucks and SUVs pulling trailers, but even these can push the boundaries of reasonableness. Thirty-foot 5th wheel campers weren’t exactly my idea of thrift, nor were the $75,000 three-quarter-ton trucks pulling them.

My end of the spectrum was a simple compact pickup truck. With four wheel drive, I could trudge through today’s muddy staging area without worry, and the 7-foot bed easily held my motorcycle and gear. Sure, an enclosed trailer would be nice, but my philosophy on racing includes limits, and if the time ever comes when I seriously consider special equipment for hauling dirt bikes, I’m taking my passion a little too seriously. The little red Sonoma was good enough, squeezed between the motorhomes and trailers circling the Burkhart farmstead.

Mr. Burkhart’s tolerance for motorcycles on Sunday and ATV’s the day before surely tested his limits, not so much for their activities around his house (literally), but for the torrential rain over the weekend. The parking area resembled a cattle feedlot in November, with farm tractors saving the day for those unfortunate souls without four wheel drive. As an AMA National hare scramble, practice laps weren’t allowed and hardly a rider would have complained anyway. The heavy precipitation had left the course such a quagmire that a brief cruise to the starting field was enough to add several pounds of grassy muck to wheels and fenders. Bikes would only gain weight from there.

While riders assembled along wide rows, the starting routine began with final announcements from course marshals. The trails would be ridable, so they said, by way of several reroutes around sections through which even factory-sponsored professionals might struggle. Back on the 5th row, shared among the Open B and 250 B classes, I took in the information knowing it wouldn’t really matter. This was a ride for survival. When Mr. Burkhart announced the race would be shortened from its usual 3 hours to “only” 2.5 hours, quiet cheers emitted from the riders and anyone else responsible for cleaning muddy race bikes.

As the green flag waved the Pro class into the treacherous course, the sound of silence gave way to a deafening roar of engines bursting to life, then an immediate spray of mud and grass chunks in high plumes behind the departing riders. The velocity and arc of trajectory coated riders as many as three rows back, which kept me in the clear for a time. But eventually I found myself squarely in the line of fire and ducked for cover as more rows left the line. By the time my row was next for departure, my KTM 300EXC appeared as if it had already made a pass through the course.

The flagbearer signaled our turn and the grassy field burst to life with the buzz and roar of a couple dozen engines…save for one. My engine remained still as the morning air. I kicked the starter lever again with the same result. Several kicks later, still nothing. My row was long gone, now disappeared around a line of trees and headed for the motocross track. I pushed the bike off the starting line and continued kicking as two more rows left the field. A crowd of bystanders witnessed my plight in respectful silence. Most riders would have chalked this up to a fouled spark plug and ran back to the staging area to grab a new one, but I simply didn’t believe in the fouling concept. How could an extra bit of oil on the electrode prevent an engine from firing to life? Physics be damned, I would dominate that starter lever even if it cost me a leg. Two minutes later, I almost became a fouled-plug believer, and then the engine decided to run. See? That was that…a myth perpetuated by spark plug manufacturers. Fake science.

Just before the C classes were given their chance to enter the course, I jammed the shifter into 2nd gear, dumped the clutch and let the squirrely rear tire propel me toward the nastiest trails I’ve seen in a good long time. The first groups of riders had turned the course into one long series of ruts, some deep enough to slow the bikes into a snaking train inside the narrow woods. Even with maximum foliage a couple months away, the spring underbrush thickened anywhere the trail wasn’t, leaving only tricky and risky alternate routes. Thus, we paused in single file lines as rider after rider struggled through the same deep ruts. At one point I impatiently waited my turn as a rider revved his engine to 10,000 rpms and spun his rear tire at about 40 mph, throwing a splatter of mud into my face. I drooped my helmet to keep his mud spray from contaminating my goggles, then lifted my head and discovered the weight of an extra 3 pounds of sticky clay now glued to the top of my visor.

After a series of slide-outs, I gradually acclimated to the track conditions and plodded through the course. As with previous years, the narrow wooded sections connected in and out of full throttle blasts through open fields. These treeless areas had deteriorated into the kind of slop better suited for free range pigs. The only real solution to successfully crossing the fields was ignoring the nearly irresistible urge to slow down and point the front wheel into a well-traveled rut, for nothing good comes from it. The ruts know no depths in this rock-free region of Kahoka, and reducing speed kills the momentum needed to float over the muck. It’s an intimating sight, emerging from the woods into a normally relaxing open area, only to witness 25 different ruts zigzagging across jet-black mud. The worst of them could usually be found in the shortest path to the orange arrows in the distance. The fastest riders, who also tended to be some of the smartest, knew well enough to avoid the center of the field and had already fanned out 100 yards wide.

I upshifted to third gear and grabbed and handful of throttle, passing through the fields without falling or lodging my KTM in ruts. Inside the woods, I barely maintained enough speed to keep the bike moving forward in 2nd gear without stalling. As with the open fields, momentum was key in the narrow sections and my 10 mph average was borderline for survival. Even at this ridiculously slow pace, I caught several riders before our first real motocross test. The Burkhart moto track is unique in its ability to handle wet conditions, with generous truckloads of sawdust and municipal mulch applied to its surface. In the summer, it very much feels like a sand track. Today the saturated sawdust reminded me of loose silt commonly found in creek beds. A 500cc engine would have been ideal, as raw horsepower is the prescription for this kind of loam. My 300cc two-stroke was no slouch, but the hilly track consumed power like an underground marijuana greenhouse. In the whoop sections the front end refused to skip over the tops of the rollers and dove down into each trough. The effort to move forward was exhausting.

A cloverleaf course design had us centered on the motocross track, where we came out of the woods and took short trips through the sawdust, then slid our way back into the trees. Through the narrow trails, I rarely touched the brakes. Slowing down was a matter of pulling in the clutch and letting the mud do the rest. Even with such little use of brakes, the rotors acted like gritty grinders against the pads, eliminating most of the friction material on the first lap. It really wasn’t a problem.

The near eternity of lap #1 ended at the scoring trailer almost an hour after its beginning. With no idea of my class position, I finessed my KTM through a second trip around an eerily quiet course. The remaining bikes may have been few, but the alternate routes around deep ruts and mud holes were many. Some trails had been abandoned entirely, in favor of open fields running parallel to the woods. At first I tried to keep within spitting distance of the arrows and avoid outright cheating. Then I fell over in an off-camber section and nearly suffered cardiac arrest while attempting to pick it up with an extra 40 pounds of mud jammed into every nook and crevice. After that, I took any opportunity to follow the shortcuts created by others and may have added some new ones myself.

Just past the halfway point of the race, still on my second lap, I dropped down into a gully and found a mess of deep ruts leading up a small rise. Not an inch of ground was undisturbed by knobby tires and flying mud, with every rut a potential bike-stopper. The scene reminded me of mud drag competitions hosted by the Milford Fun Days back home in Illinois. All that was missing, in between the screaming engines taking their turns through the slop, was the sound of Tennessee cloggers performing on the main stage. In this section I was a clogger of a different sort, stopping up a rut on the left edge of the gully. My KTM came to a halt, its rear tire spinning helplessly. As I dismounted to push my way out of the gully, a group from the Pro class came in like a wrecking ball, slamming their bikes into the ruts. I had never seen this level of sheer momentum as a method of conquering mud. For the most part, it worked. One of the Pro riders fell over but was quickly assisted by spectators. The remaining riders charged through the gully as if riding in dry loam. Flabbergasted, I was.

The second lap ended as unmercifully as the first, followed by quick pit stop near the staging area. I’d left my gas jug a safe distance from the trail, where I could fill up without straying far from the marked course and keep away from flying mud. As it turned out, so many riders had left the race that I refueled with only the distant noise of the few motorcycles still attempting to finish. I spotted the transparent gas jug of Matt Sellers, who had left his fuel near mine and was apparently still out on the course. His container appeared untouched. Somewhere I had passed him unaware, for who could distinguish among motorcycles and their riders, wearing pants and boots and helmets all adorned in the same shade of mud-black?

My simple two minute refuel was enough to recharge my energy, and I jumped back on the bike to see what the third lap had to offer. The course bid us little besides more mud and more ruts. I’ve never been one to obsess over a hare scramble’s impact on the earth, but we tore that place apart and I really didn’t want to destroy it more. By this time “the course” was somewhat a figure of speech. Riders had strayed so far from the arrows, I had no way of knowing how many yards or miles these diversions cut from the marked trail. Any sections within sight of open fields had been bypassed entirely. Riders even detoured around the single checkpoint in the woods, rather than suffer through the ruts to be scored. The small creek meandering through the property had been reinforced with logs wherever we crossed, which was about the only thing made easier. Everywhere else, I fended for myself.

Halfway through the lap I found Matt parked along the trail with an overheated engine. Rather than push on and risk an expensive repair, he decided to wait for the sweep crew to help him back to the staging area. I pushed on toward the finish, then experienced my own overheating engine. Steam poured from the radiators as I pulled into an open field, where another rider on an air-cooled Honda XR suffered his own engine problems. Squirts of water from my Camelbak hose instantly evaporated upon contact with the radiators, but cooled things off enough to restart and ride gingerly to the finish line.

The scoring crew announced my second place finish, 36 seconds behind the class leader. Heading into Monday morning, the what-ifs ran through my head uncontrollably until I realized the bad start and that one nasty rut and the several-minute break to cool the overheated engine had little effect on my finish. Everyone on that awful course experienced similar challenges and failures.

Which brings us back to Matt Sellers.

After our encounter on the third lap, he did what all race organizers plead for riders to do when they can no longer continue: Stay with the bike and wait for the sweep crew. It’s surely tempting to leave a stranded bike on the trail and walk to the staging area, but this leaves the sweep crew wholly responsible for extracting the motorcycle and locating its rider. Matt did the right thing. He waited…and waited some more. Back at the staging area I witnessed the sweep crew return about an hour after I’d finished the race. Matt wasn’t with them. Another hour passed without any sign of Matt, and the time had come for Mr. Burkhart to turn on his microphone and start the trophy presentation in the machine shed. Just then, in walked Matt, caked in mud and wearing the expression of a Democrat stuck in a Republican National Convention. To say he was unhappy would be a mild understatement. “I was out…there,” he muttered, pointing toward a wooded area, “…for THREE HOURS!” After dropping his helmet near my truck and slumping on the tailgate, he explained the eerie calm of the woods when all bikes left the course, including the sweep riders who apparently lost their way and completely missed the trail on which Matt lie stranded. He finally gave up and walked a mile to the staging area, exchanged words with the sweepers and eventually retrieved his KTM.

At the trophy presentation, delayed because of protests, legendary promoter Bill Gusse grabbed the mic and reminded the complainers that nobody, not a single rider, rode the course legally. And nobody…not a single rider…debated his point. The overall win was awarded to Chuck Woodford, followed closely by Scott Plessinger and Jason Raines. Matt collected a 7th place trophy in Open B, a testament to the attrition rate. We finished the day driving home in relative darkness, yet again wondering what in the world we’d just done and why we thought it was a good idea in the first place.