Standing at my workbench beneath the glow of my shop lights I washed the lingering taste of stale taco out of my mouth with another pull of moonshine from the mason jar, a solitary thought ricocheting around my head like the last, lonely ball on a pool table. As I fumbled for the drill that sole thought was that what I was about to do was wrong, way wrong, so wrong that it could either be the best thing I had ever done, or the worst.
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I pondered the unfriendly hand of cards life had dealt and the solitary thought poking through the fog of agony surprised me. It wasn’t about can I keep my job, will the surgery hurt, will insurance cover my illness, or will my dog still love me, it was this: Will I still be able to ride my motorcycle?
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I knew something was wrong. I remounted and ascended the grade slowly. With its rock face to the left and sheer drop to the right, running wide here meant endless airtime to consider what went wrong, get your affairs in order and picture your kids’ faces before gravity pulls you toward your inevitable handshake with the basalt rocks that lie below, waiting to mangle rider and bike. A couple of minutes into my climb I found Corey’s wreck. He had run wide.
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With great sadness I hold in my hand the last print issue of Cycle World. The brainchild of Joe Parkhust started publication in 1962 but ceased printing of magazines in 2020 as they transitioned to online media only. As the print version died, so did my dream of ever seeing my name in an issue of Cycle World…
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Welcome to my tearful farewell, my wistful goodbye to a house in the middle of a God-kissed corner of the Pacific Northwest bereft of time’s depravities, a place to run where the most important things in life are not things, but people. In this house, this oasis from life’s downward plunging corkscrew and its horrible sucking tempest there lived a gentle, retired Presbyterian minister and his wife.
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If you want a land to get into your soul, ask it to dance. Roam through its curves, flirt with its scenery, stop and stare at its unfolding landscape and it will talk to you, revealing itself like an intimate dance partner. Ask the landscape questions and it will whisper the answers in your ear, embedding it into your memory forever. As a northwest native, I never thought I could feel that way about Fall in the Appalachians.
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Sam Verderico is a painter in my hometown of Wenatchee, Washington, a God-kissed land in the upper left of the United States snuggled into a valley between the Cascade Mountain Range and rolling wheat fields. The mighty Columbia River runs through the middle. Sam grew up here, but as pristine as this northwest haven is, his beginnings were anything but idyllic.
“When I was a kid, we were super poor, sometimes homeless. My dad watched AMA road racing on TV. It was his passion. We just watched Mike Tyson and motorcycle racing. That’s where I got my passion. My dad would say ‘Gosh, those guys are awesome’, and as I grew up thought, ‘You know, these guys are awesome. I want to do this.’”
Here in the upper left of the United States, it’s the end of the world as we know it.
It started with an idyllic Labor Day as clear Pacific Northwest air stirred blue skies, a stiff warm breeze playing in the trees. Then the world caught fire.
When the MotoAmerica series came to my neck of the woods in the Upper Left, I knew a weekend at my “home track”, The Ridge Motorsports Park in Shelton, Washington would be a must for me. Beautiful weather, incredible views all around, the thrill of motorcycle racing, and the challenge of riding one of the most demanding racetracks in America, unfamiliar to all but a few in the MotoAmerica paddock. So that’s what I decided to capture, in photos and footage- the racers, their teams, their downtime, their prep rituals, their triumphs and tragedies. As we stated in our race report, The Ridge can eat bikes and riders, then spit them out broken and busted. And after being trackside and in the pits all weekend, and seeing that happen aplenty, it almost makes me want to slow down some at my next track day here. Almost…
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