Another great ride today. Great riding with ya as always Peter. Day started off interesting...Ill let Peter go into detail about the little "mis-hap" we had at the beginning of the run and how his "McGiver" skills were put to the test...As 2 of these pictures will depict.

Walker Valley is amazing and anybody who is ever in the great PNW should definently come out with us sometime. Here are just a few shots of the day.

Pete sometime I can get you a flash drive or something with ALL of the photos I have taken on our rides. I only ever post just a few, pain to upload all of them.

Peter doin some rock crawlin


Peter's McGiver skills come through! Broken throttle cable temp fix


Petrers new (hand) throttle control. Now that takes some hand eye coordination!








Spectacular terrain and sights up here


Learned of some new trails

thats some nice stuff there. watch out for big foot

ah at the rate of speed we were haulin down some of those trails, He better watch out for US!

We started out on crisp morning that had warmed up to the low 40's. I met up with Infamous at a local Wal-mart and Infamous' co-worker met us with his ATV at the staging area of Walker Valley. As soon as we started unloading we had the usual stares and questions from other ORVers about our rides.

We took a couple of high speed runs down logging roads and headed up a narrow switch back to one of the vistas. In the tightest turn uphill, my accelerator cable snapped - This is common on the 650's (mine has snapped before and I know of five others). I was able to back up the buggy on to somewhat level ground and then we started walking around buggy scratching our hears on how to fix this. by cutting back the insulation, I was able to get to the frayed cable. However we could not get a good attachment point on the cable, so I wrapped the cable up in the jaws of needle nose pliers until I had steady 3250 RPM. We taped the pliers and cable to the passenger grab bar and started back down the switch back to the staging area. The RPMs were high enough that I could keep moving and when I needed to cross roots or rocks, I would pull the choke to get additional power.

We made it back to the staging area in good time, but now needed to find a solution that would not put me out of riding the rest of the day. We stripped back more housing and I was able to create a loop in the cable that was cinched under the throttle stop. The cable was much shorter now, so it had to be routed from the carburetor under the clutch arm though the shifter tunnel to the pedal. This idea ALMOST worked - The housing would pinch against the cable and not always return the throttle. I found if I pulled on the housing between the seats, I had full throttle control with my hand so I tried it out in the staging area...

With a successful power slide, we decide to make another speed run down the logging roads and see how this would hold up. After a short stretch, I mastered the motion of grabbing the cable, releasing the cable, shifting and again grabbing the cable with my right hand while steering with only my left.

By this time it had warmed up to the 50's and we decided to hit the same trail that did me in first thing that morning. We climbed the switch back and I climbed the big rock you saw in the previous pictures.

Then we climbed some more. At points the trail has rocks sticking up more than a foot from the surface - One of these areas was a steep hill climb. After a couple of runs up this hill, one rock kept getting in the way so we pulled out the winch. After attaching the line, I started winching the buggy over the problematic rock when the base of the anchoring tree was ripped out of the ground. Now we had a downed tree and a rock to deal with! The rock proved to be a good anchor and I was able to winch the tree out of the way of the trail, but the rock was still there. By running one side of the buggy up a three foot bank the other tires cleared this meddlesome rock and I forged a way for Infamous to follow up. With a little effort and my track to follow, he made it up the climb (the ATV went up the hill with no effort since he could thread his way around the big rocks).

We continued climbing until there was only down as choice of direction. The buggies easily handled the off camber downhill slopes and this is where the ATV required serious weight shifting to avoid bucking its rider.

Successfully attacking our technical trail, we played around in a rock quarry before hitting another technical trail and the quarry once more at the end of the day. We started about 10:30am and finished at 4:30pm with the only break when we were working on throttle cable for an hour. Considering I had to use the hand throttle and our fix held up for the entire day, I'd call this a saved day that worked out great.