2022 Pashnit Touring on a Hayabusa
- Thread starter pashnit
- Start date
A few miles away is this gem
Wentworth Springs Rd | California Motorcycle Roads | Pashnit
Sierra Nevada Motorcycle Rides - Ride the Georgtown Divide to Crystal Basin, California
www.pashnit.com
Wentworth Springs Rd is famous for previously being a jeep trail over the mountain, then around the year 2002, it was graded and paved right when my wife and I bought our first house nearby. Wentworth was brand new, so new, they hadn't painted the lines down yet & I was still using a film camera. And I had just bought my 2000 Hayabusa. It was bliss.
Imagine having this all to yourself.
When the new mountain road was completed around 2002:
Few months later when they painted down the lines.
Imagine having this all to yourself.
When the new mountain road was completed around 2002:
Few months later when they painted down the lines.
A hot redhead asked if I wanted to jump off a perfectly good bridge, attached to an elastic tether known as a bungee. She was a cute and had a Porsche. The decision wasn’t difficult. Now, being young, jumping off a perfectly good bridge with a cute redhead sounded like great fun for a Friday night. All the other kids were headed out to the bars & clubs, we were headed into the Sierra Nevada Mountains to jump off a bridge. Our plan sounded way more fun.
The bridge we planned to jump off was the Ellicot Bridge over the Rubicon River on Eleven Pines Rd. The bridge is 150 feet over the Rubicon River in the canyon below. A few feet of water in the river below us would protect us if something went wrong. This activity is quite illegal, of course, but that wasn’t going to deter us. To lessen the chance of being noticed partaking in our nefarious scheme, the jump would be at night in the dark. My friend with the long red curls picked me up in her ’76 Porsche 914, and we headed into the Sierra Nevada Mountains. We had some handwritten directions to the meet spot, which I compared against a paper map in my lap. The directions took us from Georgetown up Wentworth Springs Rd to Eleven Pines Rd. Arriving at dusk, we waited for the sun to set providing darkness to conceal our illicit activity while revealing the glow of the Milky Way in the crisp mountain sky above.
Forcing my body to reject all logic and reasonable thought, I jumped into the thin mountain air while an immediate thought flashed across my brain, I just jumped off a perfectly good bridge, the second thought that occurs to you is abject adrenalized fear as your body accelerates at 32 feet per second according to my then physics instructor, Professor Doyle. We were told we’d get about 1.5 seconds of free fall as it would take a total of 3 seconds to hit the ground. The second half of that 3 seconds was for the bungee to stretch to its maximum elasticity and then launch us back into the air. The math said we’d be traveling 66 mph when we hit the ground, so despite my new-found enthusiasm for jumping off bridges, the tiny remnant of my logical brain said accelerating 0-60 in less than 3 seconds was quite unnatural. But anyway, I lived. Got hauled back up to the bridge via a homemade gantry and pulley system, and voluntarily did it again a second time.
Yep, this is the bridge I jumped off nearly 30 years ago.
After the two jumps, the Hot Girl with the long red curls and Porsche 914 invited me to jump off the fourth-highest bridge in the United States, the nearby Foresthill Bridge. At 730 feet high, it offered an alluring full three seconds of free-fall. Also, quite illegal, I passed on that offer (saving my money for a new motorcycle) and stuck to the much safer activity of motorcycle riding, putting my jumping off bridge days behind me.
The forest was burned in the 2014 King Fire, which burned 97,000 acres. It was started by arson, and they caught the guy that started it, he's now serving 20 years in prison. They caught the guy b/c he filmed himself (yes, really) starting the fire.
We were admiring Ken's BST carbon fiber wheels. Sexy!
We were admiring Ken's BST carbon fiber wheels. Sexy!
Aftermath of the 2014 King Fire. On private forest land that logging companies own, they are still salvage logging the forest, but in the national forest land, they just leave the burnt trees.
We reach the fire line and it's like the forest fire never happened.
We reach the fire line and it's like the forest fire never happened.
Similar threads
