Death Valley 2011: Hell Froze Over

This is the next installment of our series on Death Valley, and it’s about the Hell’s Loop Rally organized by Alan Spears and the Motor Scooter International Land Speed Federation. We rode it in November of 2011, and while it was sunny that day, it was plenty cold. It was a scooter endurance run of 400 miles in a single day. You might be thinking that’s not too many miles. Try it on a 150cc scooter and tell me if you still feel the same way.

I was working with CSC Motorcycles at the time and the thought was we could ride the event with our 150cc Mustang replicas. The team included good buddies TK, Arlene, and yours truly. It was grand fun and CSC garnered good exposure from that event. I had a blast, and for me, it nailed three birds with one stone: A great motorcycle ride, another chance for a ride through Death Valley, and a chance to get more cool stuff to write about (and photograph) for the CSC blog.

With that as a backdrop, here’s the story.

A Cold Day In Hell

Arlene B (of Go Go Gear fame, and a California Scooter rider) and TK. TK and I both worked at CSC Motorcycles. That’s my red CSC 150 motorcycle.

Hell’s Loop, that is…the Motor Scooter International Land Speed Federation (MSILSF) and Alan Spears’ latest event. You’d think an event named after a place known for warmer temperatures would offer toasty riding, but it sure was cold!

The Death Valley Loop

This event was all about endurance riding, and Alan and the MSILSF team sure outdid themselves on this one. The route took a big round trip from Barstow, California, east on the 15, north on the 127 along the eastern edge of Death Valley (think Ronald Reagan, the old Death Valley Days television show, and 20-mule teams hauling borax), west on 190 through Death Valley, a long loop down through Death Valley’s center to a delightful little town called Trona (just kidding about that one, folks), back to the 395 south, and then Highway 58 back to Barstow.

The Hell’s Loop event was billed as an endurance rally, but in actuality it was a race. You and I both know you’re not supposed to race on public highways, but on scooters and small motorcycles, “racing” is not what it would be on bigger bikes. We ran this event with our throttles wide open a good 95% of the time. No kidding. The twist grips were pegged. That doesn’t mean we were speeding, though. Sometimes a wide open throttle meant 65 miles per hour when we were on the flats with no headwinds, and sometimes it meant 35 mph when we were climbing a long grade. Another aside at this point…the bikes performed flawlessly. This was another event in which we beat the, uh, Hell’s Loop out of our California Scooters, and they ran great.

The guy who won the event, Tom Wheeler, won it on a 49cc Kymco motor scooter. Yep, you read that right. 49 cubic centimeters! We’re sure not in the business of publicizing other brands, but hey, we’re more than happy to give credit where credit is due. Tom drove out from Arkansas for this event and he finished first on his 49cc Kymco, beating machines with nearly 10 times the engine displacement.

The Ride

The weekend started with TK and I rolling into Barstow Friday afternoon for a great lunch at Del Taco. Those of you who know Del Taco might be tempted to laugh (it’s a fast food Mexican chain not usually known for their fine food), but the Del Taco restaurants in Barstow are different. Ed Hackbarth is the entrepreneur who started Del Taco, and he did so in Barstow. Ed sold the Del Taco chain to a conglomerate after building it up into a huge business, but he kept the original three Barstow restaurants. Here in southern California, we know that if you want good Mexican food, Barstow’s Del Tacos are unlike any others. Everything is fresh, everything is bigger, and it’s not unusual to see Ed himself working in the kitchen preparing your lunch. Trust me on this one, folks….if you’re ever passing through Barstow, you need to stop for a meal at Del Taco.

Our Motel 6 room…where old Tom Bodette left the light on for us…$35 a night, and it might have been the most expensive hotel in Barstow! It was raining and we didn’t want to leave the bikes out in the cold, wet weather. A lot of the Hell’s Loop riders slept with their bikes Friday night.

On Friday we had a bitter cold rain, but the forecast was for sunny warm weather on Saturday. Well, they got half of it right. I once heard one of those radio political talking heads say that the reason economists exist is to make weather forecasters look good. I think that guy might have had it backwards. It was sunny, but wow, was it cold when we woke up on Saturday morning. I wasn’t too worried…I had my California Scooter motorcycle jacket, a pair of warm motorcycle pants, and my Haix Goretex boots (they’re made in Austria and they’re great), but it was still cold. Really cold.

After a great 6:00 a.m. breakfast at IHOP Saturday morning, we rolled out onto Interstate 15 on our California Scooters and headed north. Wow, was it ever cold!

On California 127, headed into Death Valley. We rode under beautiful blue skies along Highway 127…it was a glorious day to be out on a motorcycle!

It sure was cold Saturday morning. As in maybe 40 degrees. Teeth chattering cold. I know all of our friends on the east coast would view this as something of a heat wave, but I gotta tell you, when you do 400 miles in one day through this kind of weather, it’s cold.

Before I get too much further, let me give you a warning about the photos. They’re not my best ever. We didn’t stop to smell the roses on this one, boys and girls, and most of these shots were from the saddle of my CSC motorcycle at high speed. That’s why a lot of the angles are off, and it’s why they might be a bit fuzzy. This ride was all about getting back to Barstow first. We stopped for fuel and restroom breaks, and that was it. We didn’t even eat. 400 miles on a motorcycle, in 40-degree weather, with no messing around. Riding…that’s what this run was all about. And in the cold weather, our CSC motorcycles were running strong. We thought we were gonna set the world on fire, until we heard about Tom Wheeler on that 49cc scooter. But I’ll come back to that. So after rolling along on Interstate 15 for about 60 miles, we took a left at Baker and headed toward Death Valley. The skies were clear, the riding was glorious, and we froze our tootsies off.

A 60-mph shot from the saddle…riding through the Mojave Desert!

We weren’t too sure about where we’d be able to buy gas, so we each carried a spare gallon or two. Turns out we didn’t need the extra gas, but we stopped nearly every place we saw a gas station just to make sure.

When we rolled into Shoshone, I was blown away by the gas prices. Believe it or not, these were not the highest gas prices we saw on this trip! I was sure glad I was riding a 100mpg California Scooter when I saw those prices. Ah, the glory of price gouging.

Every time I see something like what the photo above shows, I want to confront the owner and ask him if his mother knows what he does for a living, but I know it would be a futile gesture. And another 100 miles up the road, we paid prices that made what the photo above shows seem cheap.

Barney Fife

While we were topping off in Shoshone, I saw a National Park Service HumVee that I thought was pretty cool. I had never seen one of these in use by a law enforcement agency, so I snapped a quick photo of it while I was on my California Scooter. I guess the NPS ranger who was in it didn’t like that. As I kid, I always had a mental image of park rangers as pretty cool guys who took care of the bears and stuff like that. This guy was decidedly unfriendly…there’s no nice way to say it. Maybe it was a slow day for him and he wanted to harass some rough-looking bikers like me, Arlene, and TK. He wanted to know about Alan, who rolled through Shoshone earlier on his two-stroke Kymco burning “exotic fuels.” A park ranger. I chalked it up to another instance of our tax dollars at work. Go figure.

Continuing the Ride

After the fuel stop in Shoshone, we were on the road again. Here are a few more shots from the saddle.

On the floor of Death Valley, about 100 feet below sea level.

After we climbed out of Death Valley’s floor, it was a fast downill run west…you can see the flare from shooting into the sun

Heading west to Panamint on the western edge of Death Valley. The bikes were running just great in the cold weather. Here’s a quick shot of my speedometer as we rolled through Death Valley. Smoking right along on the Baja Blaster!

Arlene’s California Scooter ticked over the 9,000-mile mark on this ride, and we stopped for a quick photo.

9000 miles, including great California Scooter rides up and down the California Coast, the Sierra Nevadas, the entire length of Baja, and Death Valley! Arlene may well be our highest mileage California Scooter rider.

Our next stop was Panamint. There’s a gas station and a convenience store out there (but not much else). This place set a new record: $5.79 per gallon! It’s the most I’ve ever paid for gasoline in my life!

$5.79 a gallon….but what a cool photo op!

Wildrose Canyon Road and Trona

While we were stopped, I pulled out an extra T-shirt and added it to the several layers of clothing I already had on under my California Scooter motorcycle jacket. To my surprise, that one extra layer did the trick. I stayed relatively warm for the next 130 miles back to Barstow. After our Panamint gas gouging, we turned the bikes east for a quick three miles back down the road to Wildrose Canyon. That was our route out of Death Valley, and here’s a shot looking east across the valley floor.

Death Valley’s floor, as seen from the saddle, looking east from Panamint

We negotiated Wildrose Canyon Road, fought the wind downhill, and then we rolled into Trona. Trona is a mining town (they mine potash or some other such chemical), and there isn’t too much else out there. And I gotta tell ya, when they built “no place” they must have centered it around Trona (because that town sure is in the middle of no place). It’s an interesting place, though…a collection of white chemicals, brown hills in the distance, blue skies, and industrial processing equipment.

A late-in-the-day, shot-from-the-saddle photo of Trona. Some day, I’d like to ride out to Trona just to take photos.

Returning to Barstow

After Trona, we cranked the bikes wide open for the run home. It was a burst out to the 395, a speed run down to Highway 58, and then a left turn for the last 32 miles back to Barstow. We pulled in to the Motel 6 parking lot just after dark. And it was even colder. Did I mention earlier that it was cold?

Alan Spears, his friend Kathleen, and Dennis did a great job organizing this event.

When we returned to the Motel 6 rally headquarters, the good folks from MSILSF had good food and drinks waiting, and that was a good thing. We hadn’t eaten all day, and I was hungry. And cold. It sure was nice to return to a warm welcome. And it sure was interesting to learn about the winning bike and rider…that would be Tom Wheeler from Arkansas.

Tom Wheeler, a Kymco dealer from Arkansas, accepting one of his trophies for the Hell’s Loop Endurance Rally.

The Winner: A 49cc Kymco!

As I mentioned earlier, Tom won the event on a 49cc Kymco. Good Lord! A 49cc Kymco! My first thought was that the bike had to have had a couple of superchargers and maybe it was running on nitro, but no, that wasn’t it at all. Tom is obviously an experienced endurance rider, and he had the problem sorted. When I asked Tom about the top speed on his 49cc sizzler, he told me that it might see 45 mph on a flat road under ideal conditions. We sure didn’t have ideal conditions, and what that meant to me is that Tom ran a lot of the day’s 400 miles at something between 30 and 40 mph. The trick is to not have to stop. Tom had an auxiliary gas tank on his Kymco, and he only had to make one stop for gas.

Alan and crew sure did an outstanding job pulling this event together, which didn’t surprise me at all. MSILSF is the same outfit that organized the November 2009 Land Speed Record trials and last year’s Salton Sea Endurance Rally, and both of those events were wonderful.

I am more than a little intrigued by all of this, and by MSILSF. You might be, too, folks. Think about it. Motor competition. Real competition. Speed trials. Endurance rallies. All with scooters. You can get into it, real motor competition, for peanuts. And a California Scooter is a great way to do so.

Here’s a shot of Tom Wheeler’s winning 49cc scooter. 400 miles in one day on a 49cc motor scooter! Can you imagine!

So that was it, folks. 400 miles in one day, we won the 150cc class, and we had a great time.

We just returned from a trek through Death Valley a few days ago, which prompted our series of blogs about prior Death Valley trips. You can read the first two Death Valley blog installments here.

Death Valley: The Prelude
Death Valley 2008: My First Visit

And, oddly enough, the Los Angeles Times ran a story in 2017 about a trip that almost exactly described the ride you see in this blog. You can read that one here.

Read a few of our other great motorcycle rides here!

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