Swamp Stompin’ With Honey Badger: Part 5

It wasn’t me that took the trail, it was Honey Badger. The silly little motorcycle simply loves doing stupid shit! I’m an innocent in all this I swear!

So there I was, trundling down a road that had become a sketchy road that devolved into a trail that was fast becoming a path. Then I saw what I call “a clue”.

There’s a whole ecosystem of legal designations about what you can legally drive where. (This is utterly unrelated to the vehicle’s ability.) There are “national forest roads” and “minimum maintenance roads” and OHV roads and ATV/OHM trails and multi-mode whatever they call those. It’s the natural result of bureaucracy trying to draw lines around the continuous spectrum of “try not to fuck up the soil” and “this thing can traverse this terrain”. I’m sure many meetings were held.

I gave up trying to remember all the errata but there’s one sign that gets my attention like a gunshot. A very few times I’ve seen a sign that says “limited to 1000 pounds GVW”.

I don’t know where they come from. I don’t know what makes them different. For all I know it’s a BLM thing? All I know is that every time I’ve seen that type of sign I’ve wound up on a very old dike or related earthwork that’s super fun and would eat a jeep and chew on a fat UTV. They always go through absolute impassible hell and they’re always fun.

Perfect!

In case you’re wondering, Honey Badger is legal just about anywhere wheels are allowed. It has plates for pavement and any OHM/OHV sticker that could apply in this area. I’m sure I was ok. Also Honey Badger weighs 300 pounds at most. I’m pretty light by modern UTV standards.

Then again there wasn’t a living soul to bitch at me anyway. I suppose I could have brought a bulldozer. Regardless, when I see “limited to 1,000 pounds GVW” that just warms my heart.

I already mentioned that my GoPro battery was toasted. No photos. But it was super fun.

It feels like I rode a levy or dike that probably was put in around the time narrow gauge railroads were a thing. It was pretty but also very odd terrain. You might think North America is mostly forest or prairie. If you’re into such things you might know the difference between tallgrass and shortgrass prairie. But there’s a lot more diverse shit than most people know.

By my observation I rode out of a forest biome and into Nkasa Rupara National Park in Namibia. It was a wetland, estuary, marshy, reedy, muskeg, bog, um… thing. I’m looking around like “this looks more like the place to find a hippo than an elk” and the motorcycle is talking back to me “relax, we got this!”

Now you know why I carry lots of equipment.

By the odometer it was only a few miles. By experience it was a safari.

The grasses got taller, the path got narrower, the water closed in on both sides. No worries though; I had a nice solid patch of gravel about 6″ wide. That’s all I needed.

I paid close attention. If I were to go off the path on either side I’d be catapulted into a quagmire. It wouldn’t be dangerous but it would be yucky.

I was happy that there aren’t a lot of poisonous snakes here (and any self respecting timber rattler would bail out of this fetid trailer park of nature asap) but the ticks had been waiting their whole life (literally!) just for me.

I was covered head to toe in motorcycle gear/armor. Armored mesh pants (my stillsuit!) zipped tightly over motorcycle boots. Jacket tightly zipped up, long sleeves velcroed over motorcycle gloves. Full face helmet. I might as well be wearing a space suit… but still the bastards were everywhere. They were crawling around my crotch! They couldn’t get through the mesh armor but I couldn’t take my hand off the handlebars to brush them away. Try to concentrate when there’s a tick trying to get to your nuts. It’s hard!

I wanted to stop and enjoy the view. Despite my description (and the lack of hippos) it was truly breathtaking. But every tick for miles was crawling around my face shield and forearms. Fuck that!

I kept on and eventually I gained just a little bit of elevation. It got a lot less um… savannah-ish and became something like North America again. The path widened and soon was two tracks again. It looked less like a place that might harbor a hippo and one that might hold a lion. Infinitely bettter!

I stopped at the first suitable place (right in the middle of the track… not like anyone was coming) and did a tick eradication sweep. Yikes! Nothing more gross than a tick.

I drank a ton of water and gave Honey Badger a salute. She’s slow but nothing stops her. I’ll have a heart attack before the bike loses traction.

Behind me, buried in the grass, was a sign for people approaching from this side; “limited to 2000 pounds GVW”. One thousand from one direction and two thousand from the other? How can that possibly make sense? Also, if you drive a ton of anything in there… you’re going to wind up regretting it.

Stretching my legs, I hiked a quarter mile further (picking up 18,236,437,723 ticks as I did so). There was a fork in the trail; an intelligent direction and a sketchy one. You know exactly which one I chose.

(To be continued.)