Motorcycle ride – The ExhaustNotes Blog

The Atomic Autumn of Love Tour

By Joe Gresh

This is a story that happened long ago. Four of my dirt riding buddies decided to take a street bike trip out to Trinity Site in New Mexico where the first atomic bomb was tested. Trinity is open to the public only a couple days a year as it’s on a military base.

I can’t remember if this story was published in Motorcyclist magazine or anywhere for that matter. It popped up doing research for an upcoming Big Bend Park trip. Here at ExNotes we are environmentally woke so recycling stories is part of our shtick.

Hondo, Texas, 7:00 p.m., 103 degrees. I’m riding the long way to the site of the world’s first atomic bomb blast in New Mexico for a little fellowshipping with the Sons of Angioplasty. The SOA are a computer-generated, disgracefully aging MC gang best known for their exploits on two-stroke dirtbikes. Besides, Tourmaster sent along some nice motorcycle gear so if nothing else I have cooked up a reason to mention their products twenty or thirty times.

On the way to Carlsbad Caverns. These crappy shots are screen grabs from a video I made about the trip.

The Sons of Angioplasty ride an erratic collection of motorcycles. Gary’s riding a giant Honda Valkyrie, Vance has a KTM 990, Deet a WeeStrom 650, Greg’s on his brand-new Yamaha FJR1300, me and Dave ride Kawasakis (a KZ900 and a ZRX1100). The riders differ less than the bikes: we are nearly the same age and are all monotonously white.

We had an odd collection of bikes on the tour: a Weestrom, KTM990, ZRX1100, Kawasaki Z1-900 and a gigantic stripped down GoldWing.

Speaking of cooking, when you’re talking dangerous flammable devices I’ve found it’s safest to go home-built. Fabricated from two beer cans and burning denatured alcohol, the Penny Stove (google it) cast its spell on me with the irresistible promise of something for nothing. Three tries, 27 hours of computer research and a 6-week stay at the Betty Ford Clinic later I managed to assemble a working burner.

So there’s another reason to ride, I needed to go camping in order to use the beer-can stove. An expensive sleeping bag was ordered to complement a new 3-man dome tent. I’ll not mention the brand names of products purchased with my own money: we don’t want finance to influence my reviewing.

West on Highway 90 out of Hondo it only gets hotter. I’m wearing the mesh portion of a four-layer, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, Tourmaster jacket. The mesh flows air so well my ears pop when I remove the wind resistant outer shell. Tourmaster’s hell-for-warm Overpants are less breezy. I leave the long side zippers all the way open, pale, skinny legs lie exposed as the pants flop around like two drowning kittens in a gunnysack. You heard that right, I said drowning kittens in a gunnysack.

South from Marathon, Texas Highway 385 leads to Big Bend National Park. Full of rugged mountains, this out of the way park begs to be photographed. I swing a hard left onto Basin Junction Road then climb 4000 feet into the Chisos Mountains. The temperature drops a degree. I’ve been putting in long days on the green motorcycle that begins with a “K,” so this nearly deserted mountaintop will be my first attempt at camping.

Chisos campground uses the honor system: enclose 14 dollars in an envelope, poke the envelope through a slot in a brown steel pipe. Seems simple enough. I’m filling out the envelope, these friggin’ Tourmaster pants are really warm. Sweat runs down my legs into my boots. My Cessna-print boxers are sopping wet, clinging. Flies strafe my head then light, bellying up to my eyes like regulars at Club Moist Eye. I dig around my wallet, scream in agony and find two fifties and a five. In desperation I plunder the complex pocket system of the magnetic tank bag for hidden bills. Hmmmm, no money: that’ll cost Cortech a star.

I bungee the loose gear onto the motorcycle and we climb higher up the Chisos to the visitor center and the Chisos Mountain Lodge, complete with clean, air-conditioned rooms and a nice restaurant. I book a room, take that stupid camp stove.

From Chisos to Presidio, there’s fabulous Farm-to-Market Highway 170. This beautifully convoluted road parallels the Rio Grande river and the Mexican border. You’ll need to bring ground clearance on this desolate stretch; expect roller coaster first gear turns and lonely canyon views. I wish I could tell you about the tires I bought. They worked great. After Presidio, a straight shot north to Marfa then up into the Davis Mountains.

If you are in the market for a 360cc, twin cylinder, two-stroke Suzuki jeep, look no further than Fort Davis, Texas. The town has cornered the market on these little go-anywhere beasts. I can’t stop though, I’m meeting the SOA in Socorro, New Mexico.

White Sands National Park; now my shack overlooks these sands.

Group riding involves group dynamics and with six riders punching waypoints into 6 navigation machines routing becomes exponentially more dramatic. Leaving Socorro in the cool morning air, bikes carom from the motel parking like pin balls each following his private GPS plot. After a brief reconnoiter the Sons of Angioplasty school-up and ride towards White Sand Missile Range’s Stallion Gate.

Trinity Site is ground zero for The Church of the Bell Ringers of the Apocalypse. The Site is located on a military base and open to the public just two days a year. Trinity marks the precise spot where our modern world began in 1945 with a flash of light seen for hundreds of miles and a demonic roar heard all the way to Hell. Suspended 100 feet above the ground in a steel tower, The Gadget, a plutonium atomic bomb, released the equivalent of twenty thousand tons of TNT, excavating a radioactive depression and forcing the ancient Gods of War to relinquish their sovereignty.

The lineup into Stallion Gate this fine October day is long. Soldiers walk the auto-line explaining military base rules and taking extra time to warn motorcycle riders about free-range Oryx as the antelope-sized animals tend to charge motorcycles. “Stay in the convoy and you’ll be fine.”

Seventeen miles in we come to a circular fence. Corny looking yellow “Warning Radioactive” signs straight out of a 1950 sci-fi movie are spaced along the fence. Souvenir vendors sell A-Bomb t-shirts, A-bomb hamburgers, A-bomb key rings and scads of unrelated alien swarf.
The outer fence surrounds an inner fence where a stone plinth marks the exact spot of the explosion. Stubs of the steel tower legs lie exposed along with a construction covering a portion of undisturbed ground. An inactive Fat Boy bomb sits on a trailer; people sit on it and take photos. The main pit has been filled in over the ensuing 67 years. Intense heat from the explosion created a new kind of radioactive green-glass named Trinitite. Despite the fill, bits of Trinitite can still be found poking out of the ground.

I don’t know what to feel here. I geek out on the technology and the incredible effort plus the pure blind-huevos it took to light this sucker off. Some scientists involved in the project were betting the bomb would ignite the atmosphere and destroy all life on earth but gruesome photographs of flash-fried Japanese bodies and ghostly human shadows eternally cast onto concrete were the ultimate result of that Herculean effort. Hell, I reckon the Japanese would have dropped A-bombs on us if they had them.

Trinity Site is not easy to visit. I’m impressed with the size of the crowd that has made the pilgrimage. There’s a tour bus that takes you a few miles away to the farmhouse where the bomb was assembled. It’s a plain looking stead for such a fiery history.

From White Sands we make tracks for Carlsbad Caverns but Dave’s old Kawasaki fries its voltage regulator in Cloudcroft. Luckily it’s downhill to Alamogordo. Finding a generic regulator has messed up our schedule. The jury-rigged voltage regulator is hot, putting out 16 volts at full chat. Dave installs a voltmeter and by unplugging the regulator at regular intervals keeps the Kawasaki’s battery topped up nicely.

Now we arrive at the caverns late. The last tour has gone and a crisis of leadership unfolds. Gary and Dave want to go west. The nearest motels with vacancies are 40 miles north in the town of Carlsbad. The SOA are getting irritable, groups split off grumbling, there’s talk of mutiny. This whole atomic trip was my idea and it’s falling apart. I shuttle between rival camps and manage to get a quorum on watching the evening bat flight. The millions of flying rats put on such an impressive show we all agree to return tomorrow for the cave tour.

It took an act of congress to gather the SOA at Tina’s Mexican in Carlsbad for our final lunch together. The SOA are a bull-headed bunch and we were itching to strike out on our own. Too much togetherness breeds contempt. Vance and Deet ride east to Oklahoma and North Carolina. Dave, Gary and I head north.

What’s that smell? Riding down the road at 70 MPH I check my bike, something is melting. The smell is stronger near Dave’s KZ. Is that smoke? I flag Dave over, his rear wheel bearings have seized and the axle is spinning in the swing arm adjusters causing paint and chrome to burn.
There are no parts for an old KZ in Roswell New Mexico so AAA picks up Dave’s bike leaving Gary and me to ride in the rain to Moriarity, New Mexico. 2:00 a.m., Dave rumbles up in a U-Haul box truck with the Kawasaki strapped inside.

We split the next morning, Dave in the big U-Haul to Idaho, Gary on the only slightly smaller Valkyrie to Washington state. I ride to Los Alamos then hang a right to Florida. Even though we get on each other’s nerves, I get the feeling The Sons of Angioplasty will ride again. When, I can’t say but after carrying that damn stove for 6000 miles I never did get to cook anything.

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Filoli, Xi, Biden, and Moto Diplomacy

By Joe Berk

You probably know about the meeting between Joe Biden and Xi Jinping last week. What you might not know about is Woodside, California, and the Filoli estate where they met. As always, we want our ExNotes readers to be knowledgeable and up to date, and that’s the focus of this article. I’ve actually been to and photographed the Filoli estate and mansion, and I’ve written a bit about Woodside before.

The Filoli mansion was built in 1917 for William Bourn II, who by any measure was a wealthy guy. He owned one of California’s richest gold mines and was president of the Spring Valley Water Company that served San Francisco and its surrounding areas. If you are wondering about the name, it’s formed by the first two letters of each word from of Bourn’s motto: Fight for a just cause; Love your fellow man; Live a good life.

The Filoli mansion and its gardens occupy 16 acres; the entire estate covers 654 acres and extends to the Crystal Springs Reservoir (which still provides water to San Francisco). If you drive south on the 280 freeway from San Francisco (it follows the San Cruz Mountain range), you can see the reservoir on the right.

Big mansions are expensive to maintain and hard to keep up. That’s why a lot of the big ones have been donated by the families that owned them to the state or other organizations and opened to the public for tours. It’s what the Hearst family did with Hearst Castle further south, and it is what happened to the Filoli mansion. The Filoli mansion and surrounding grounds are now owned by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. For a modest fee you can visit and walk through the same rooms and gardens as Xi and Biden. It’s cool. I did it in 2019 and here are a few Filoli photos from that visit.

A bit more about the town of Woodside: Woodside is one of the wealthiest places in America. A partial list of the big names who live or have lived in Woodside include Charles Schwab (yes, that Charles Schwab), Steve Jobs, Michelle Pfeiffer (the classiest actress ever), Joan Baez, Nolan Bushnell (the founder of Atari and the Chuck E. Cheese restaurant chain), Scott Cook (the founder of Intuit), Carl Djerassi (a novelist and the guy who developed the birth control pill), Larry Ellison (the CEO of Oracle Corporation), James Folger (as in need a cup of coffee?), Kazuo Hirai (the CEO of Sony), Mike Markkula (the second Apple CEO), Gordon E. Moore (Intel’s co-founder and originator of Moore’s Law), Prince Vasili Alexandrovich (the nephew of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia), Shirley Temple, John Thompson (Symantec’s CEO), and Nick Woodman (founder and CEO of GoPro). Woodside is within commuting distance of Silicon Valley, so it’s understandable, I guess, why so many high-rolling Silicon Valley types call it home.

This is an interesting and beautiful area. The Pacific Ocean is just on the other side of the San Cruz range, and a circumnavigation of these mountains makes for a hell of a motorcycle ride (see our earlier blog and the article I wrote for Motorcycle Classics magazine).

I don’t know if Xi and Biden accomplished much during their meeting. If I had organized their visit, I would have left all the entourage folks behind and given Uncles Joe and Xi a map and a couple of RX3 motorcycles. They would have had a better time and probably emerged with a better agreement. A good motorcycle ride will do that for you.

You know, we don’t do politics on ExNotes, but I have to get in a comment here. There ought to be a win-win solution to our current disagreements with China. I think if I could be king of the U.S. for about six months (not President, but King) and good buddy Sergeant Zuo from our ride across China could be King of China for the same time period, we could go for another ride and figure it all out. I’d bring Gresh along to keep it interesting and I’d get another book out of it, too. That’s my idea, anyway.

If you’d like to read more about Joe Gresh’s and my ride across China with Sergeant Zuo, you should pick up a copy of Riding China.

And if you’d like to read about Gresh and me riding across America with the Chinese, you need a copy of 5000 Miles at 8000 RPM.

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Coming up…more good stuff!

We’ve got a bunch of cool stuff coming your way in the next few weeks.

I’m working on a detailed tutorial on how to time a revolver…it’s my beloved Model 60. It seems the more things go south on that old war horse, the more I love it. This time, the revolver went out of time (that means it’s firing with the chambers misaligned with the barrel), and the way to correct that is by fitting a new hand. That’s the piece you see in the big photo above, showing the well-worn 60-year-old original hand on the left and a new one on the right (the hand is the part that advances the cylinder for each shot). Good times. Did I mention I love that gun?

I’ll be on a bunch of secret missions in the next few months. I’m visiting Janus Motorcycles in the next few weeks and I’m going to ride their new Halcyon 450. You may remember I rode with the Janus guys in Baja three years ago (wow, those three years went by quickly). The Janus trip was a hoot and I was blown away by the quality of these small motorcycles.

I’ll be in Gettysburg soon…four score and seven years ago, and you know the rest. Gettysburg was the turning point, and the bloodiest battle of the Civil War. I’m looking forward to the photo ops, and you’ll see the Nikon’s output right here.

And another: Hershey, Pennsylvania…an entire town blanketed in the aroma of good chocolate, streetlights that look like Hershey kisses, calories galore, and tasty treats. That will be a sweet ride!

Folks love listicles. There are a dozen or so reasons why a Timex is as good as a Rolex. That one will generate a few comments, and we’ll be bringing them to you here.

How about the Indianapolis Motor Speedway? You’ll see it right here on ExNotes. Good stuff. Yep, we’ll be there, too.

Bill’s Bike Barn…yet another vintage moto museum. Never heard of it? Well, you will!

More gun stuff? Absolutely. Fine walnut and blue steel. I’ve got a cool story about the most beautiful stock I’ve ever seen on an absolutely incredible .257 Weatherby Magnum Ruger No. 1.

Look for a follow up on the Shoei helmet Gresh wears these days…it’s in the mix, too.

A road trip to New Mexico, and that means a visit with Joe 1 (or is he Joe 2?) and another video or two. Gresh has a bunch of motorcycles. Maybe I’ll borrow one and he and I will go for a ride. Who knows?

And more rides on my effervescent and exciting Enfield, one of the best bargains in biking (we’ll have a listicle coming up bargain bikes, too). Now that the left-leaning evil time suck (i.e., Facebook) is in the rear view mirror, I have lots more time. I’m doing what the Good Lord intended, and that’s riding my motorcycle and writing about it.

Stay tuned.

The $100 Hamburger…

The $100 hamburger: It’s aviation slang for any hamburger that requires flying in to a local airport for a burger. I first heard the term from good buddy Margit Chiriaco Rusche when researching the story on the General Patton Memorial Museum. You see, there’s still an airport at Chiriaco Summit, left over from General George Patton’s Desert Training Center. Margit told me about pilots flying in for the mythical $100 hamburger at the Chiriaco Summit Café, and I knew I had to have one as soon as she mentioned it. The Café doesn’t actually charge a hundred bucks (it was only $15.66 with a giant iced tea, fries, and a side of chili); the $100 figure pertains to what it would cost a pilot to fly your own plane to Chiriaco Summit, enjoy the General Patton Burger, and fly out.

Even though bloggers like Gresh and me are rolling in dough, we don’t have our own airplanes. But we have the next best thing. Gresh has his Kawasaki Z1 900, and I have my Royal Enfield Interceptor.

Good buddy Marty (a dude with whom I’ve been riding for more than 20 years) told me he needed to get out for a ride and I suggested the Patton Museum. It’s a 250-mile round trip for us, and the trip (along with the General Patton Burger, which is what you see in the big photo above) would be just what the doctor ordered. I’d have my own hundred dollar burger, and at a pretty good price, too. Two tanks of gas (one to get there and one to get home) set me back $16, and it was $18 (including tip) for the General Patton Burger. I had my hundred dollar burger at a steep discount. And it was great.

I’ll confess…it had been a while since I rode the Enfield. In fact, it’s been a while since I’d been on any ride. I didn’t sleep too much the night before (pre-ride jitters, I guess) and I was up early. I pushed the Enfield out to the curb and my riding amigos showed up a short time later. There would be four of us on this ride (me, Marty, and good buddies Joe and Doug). Marty’s a BMW guy; Joe and Doug both ride Triumph Tigers.

As motorcycle rides go, we had great weather and a boring road. It was 125 miles on the 210 and 10 freeways to get to the Patton Museum and the same distance back. Oh, I know, there were other roads and we could have diverted through Joshua Tree National Park, but like I said, I hadn’t ridden in a while and boring roads were what I wanted.

The Patton Museum was a hoot, as it always is. I had my super fast 28mm Nikon lens (which is ideal for a lot of things), and I shot more than a few photos that day. You can have a lot of fun with a camera, a fast lens, a motorcycle, and good friends. A fast 28mm lens is good for indoor available light (no flash) photography, and I grabbed several photos inside the Patton Museum.

It was a bit strange looking at the photos of the World War II general officers, including the one immediately above. I realized that all of us (Marty, Joe, Doug, and I) are older than any of the generals were during World War II. War is a young man’s game, I guess. Or maybe we’re just really old.

You can see our earlier pieces on the Patton Museum here and here. It’s one of my favorite spots. If you want to know more about Chiriaco Summit, the Chiriaco family, and the General Patton Memorial Museum’s origins, I highly recommend picking up a copy of Mary Gordon’s Chiriaco Summit. It is an excellent read.

We rode the same roads home as the ride in, except it was anything but boring on the return leg. We rode into very stiff winds through the Palm Springs corridor on the westward trek home, and the wind made for a spirited ride on my lighter, windshieldless Enfield Interceptor. My more detailed impressions of the Enfield 650 will be a topic for a future blog, so stay tuned!

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Tastes like chicken…

Just over 45 years ago when I was getting out of the Army, I interviewed for a job with US Gypsum in Sweetwater, Texas. I was mustering out from Fort Bliss (near El Paso), and I wanted to stay in the Lone Star State. US Gypsum seemed like a nice outfit and the people who interviewed me were great, but I wasn’t too sure about living in Sweetwater (a town I had never heard of before my interview). I had a good interview, the US Gypsum folks took me to lunch and peppered me with more questions, and they offered me a job. I asked about what it was like living in Sweetwater, and what people did around there when they weren’t working.

It was the right question to ask. Up to this point it had been kind of a standard tell-me-your-strengths/tell-me-your-weaknesses interview. But when I asked that question, everyone started talking about the Rattlesnake Roundup, becoming more and more excited as they spoke. The Roundup, they explained, is kind of like a bass-fishing contest. “The boy who won the Roundup last year brought in nearly 3500 pounds of rattlers…” one of my hosts told me.

I was stunned. In four years of crashing around the Texas desert in armored personnel carriers and jeeps, I had seen exactly three rattlesnakes, and they weren’t very big ones. 3500 lbs? That’s a lot of snakes, I thought.

“How can you find 3500 pounds of snakes in a day?” I asked.

“We strip mine the gypsum,” one of the USG guys told me. “Our boys just bulldoze up the earth. Every once in a while, these old boys will turn up a snake den,” he said in a conspiratorial whisper. “They look around to make sure no one else has seen them, they mark the location, they cover it up, and then when the Roundup rolls around, they know exactly where to go…”

You could have knocked me over with a feather. I had no idea such things existed. Snake dens? For real?

Suddenly, all the rattlesnake kitsch I had seen (but not really noticed) at the airport, the hotel, the US Gypsum plant, and even at the restaurant’s cash register (belts, belt buckles, bolo ties, hats…all based on rattlesnake skins, rattlesnake heads, and rattlesnake fangs) started to make sense.

Snake dens? Seriously?

I experienced three revelations simultaneously: Sweetwater was not a town for a nice Jewish boy from New Jersey (that would be me), these people were seriously into rattlesnakes, and at some point in my life I had to get back to Sweetwater to see the Rattlesnake Roundup.

That interview with US Gypsum was in 1977. I told the above story three decades later when we had a couple of friends, Marty and Liesel, over for dinner. Marty listened intently. Marty is paid to be a good listener (and he is), but I could see my story was getting more than his usual intense focus. Marty was mesmerized.

After dinner my wife and I took Marty and his wife home. By the time we returned to our home, I had an email from Marty. He had found the Rattlesnake Roundup on the Internet, it was still going strong, and he thought it would make for a good motorcycle ride.

Hey, why not?

Sweetwater is about 200 miles west of Fort Worth, which means it’s about 1200 miles east of Los Angeles. That’s two days by motorcycle…two long, boring days of droning along I-10 for 1000 miles, and then I-20 for the last 200 miles. Like I said, why not?

Sweetwater originally started the Roundup because the town had a serious rattlesnake infestation. As one of the locals explained it, the snakes would slither right into town. The Sweetwaterians (is that a word?) were experiencing five or six snakebite cases a month. The idea was to thin the herd. Hence the Rattlesnake Roundup. When Marty and I went there in 2006, they had already been doing this for nearly 50 years. As the photo below shows, though, there are a lot of rattlesnakes still out there.

Fascinating, no? Western Diamondbacks at the Sweetwater Annual Rattlesnake Roundup.

The Sweetwater Annual Rattlesnake Roundup was a big show. Those pens you see above? There were dozens of them inside Sweetwater’s Nolan Coliseum. There were all kinds of exhibits and zillions of snakes. Zillions, I tell you. Snake handling. Rattlesnake milking. You could touch a snake if you wanted to (while the handler held it, of course…I took a pass on that one). Grand fun.

Wanna touch? The handlers were impressive. They took the live snakes around to the spectators. You could touch them. You could. Not me.

There were a couple of pens where the snakes were being milked for their venom. The handlers put the snakes’ fangs over a funnel, and then squeezed the venom glands. About an ounce of amber-colored fluid (almost like thin honey) came out of each snake. It was impressive. The photo ops were amazing.

One of the spectators asked a snake handler the inevitable question: “How many times have you been bit?”

“Never,” they said. I imagine they were telling the truth. I think in that profession, one mistake is all it takes to get into a new line of work.

Another spectator asked how long it took the snakes to replace their venom.

“About two weeks,” the handlers answered, “but these boys ain’t got two weeks…”

We would soon see what they meant.

The look on this young lady’s face says it all. This was one hell of a show.

Good times. Good photo 0ps. Everyone there was building up a good bank of stories.

David Sager, master story teller, doing his thing. The largest Western Diamondback ever brought in to the Roundup was 81 inches long! That’s just under 7 feet! Bad dreams to follow…

David Sager put on quite a demonstration. He’s a good old boy, with a Texas twang, a flair for the dramatic, and a sense of humor.

Sager told a story about road runners and rattlesnakes. The former eats the latter. The roadrunner flaps its wings and entices the snake to strike at it futilely and repeatedly. The road runner is faster than the rattlesnake’s strike, and that’s saying something. We saw the handlers induce the snakes to strike several times. The snakes are faster than the eye can follow (more on that in a bit).

A road runner will tease the snake to strike repeatedly, and ultimately, the snake will tire and simply coil up. When it does this, the road runner then hops on top and pecks at the snake’s head until the snake puts its head under its coils. The snake becomes docile, and the roadrunner pecks at the snake’s head to kill it (and ultimately, to eat it). The snake keeps its head low in its coils, trying to hide from the roadrunner. Beep beep, Dude. Time’s up.

Mr. Sager played roadrunner for us. He put a rattler on a table and started lightly pecking at its head with a snake-handling rod. The rattler immediately coiled up, entered a trance-like state, and hid its head under its coiled body. If you think that’s something, read on…

Sager then swept the snake off the table with his right hand, and caught it in his left. Yep, he picked up a rather large, very much alive rattlesnake in his bare hand! That’s the snake’s head peeking out on the right side of this photo.

Is the roadrunner gone? The phrase “not for all the tea in China” comes to mind.

Mr. Sager explained that rattlesnakes sense heat, and he proved his point by irritating the snake with a long orange balloon. The snake dodged and weaved, trying to get away from the balloon.

Dodging, weaving, and trying to stay away from the balloon. Quit bugging me!

Sager then pulled the balloon away from the snake, rubbed his hand on the balloon’s end to warm it up just a scosh, and started to move the balloon back toward the snake. The rattlesnake struck instantly. It happened in the blink of an eye. Less than the blink of an eye. Their strike is very fast, faster than you can see. The balloon exploded with an amplified bang. Grown men screamed. I was one of them. That, my friends, was a rattlesnake strike!

Look at those fangs! They are about an inch long. Check out the rear-slanting teeth, too! It would be hard to break free of that grip, and that’s the idea. A desert rat, a small rabbit, whatever. It ain’t breaking free.

The Roundup even has a beauty pageant, and yep, there was a Miss Snake Charmer 2006. This was a major event in west Texas. I thought it was great.

It was a 1200-mile motorcycle ride to get to Sweetwater, and it was worth it. A tiara, a banner, and camo slacks. Where else are you going to find this?

Back in 2006, I was using a Nikon D70, one of Nikon’s first digital cameras. I was getting great shots and I was having a blast. Motorcycles. Rattlesnakes. Pretty girls. Texas. Life just doesn’t get any better.

Note the pit just behind the snake’s nostrils. That’s how it senses heat. It also senses vibration with millions of nerve endings in its belly. And sight. And smell, of a sort. When a rattler flicks its tongue out, it’s gathering molecules in the air that it then flicks against the roof of its mouth. The Jacob’s organ (hey, I can’t make this up) “smells” the molecules. It’s called sensor fusion (sight, vibration, smell, and heat), and it’s how the rattler decides if it’s going to strike. Sensor fusion is a concept we used in the smart munitions business, but that’s a story for another day.

I held my camera directly over this bucket of snakes, snapping away like the happy photographer I was, until one of the handlers told me the snakes could reach me from there.

The Roundup ran like a production line. The snakes came in, they were weighed, they were milked for their venom, they were slaughtered, they were butchered, and then the skins and the meat went their separate ways.
All of this was done right in front of us. It was definitely not a place for the squeamish, but we were in Texas. Ain’t no snowflakes in Texas.

The end of the line for the stars of the show…ye old chopping block. You thought you were having a rough day?

The world needs belts, boots, bolo ties, and hat bands. And food.

Even the heads are used…there’s a lot of belt buckles and bolo ties in that bucket.

The Roundup had a long line of people waiting to buy fried rattlesnake for lunch. I looked at Marty. He looked at me. In for a penny, in for a pound.

Marty tried one bite and spit it out. That was enough of a testimonial for me. I didn’t try it. Marty’s reaction and the rancid odor were enough.

The Roundup was fun, but a half day was plenty. The weather in Sweetwater was balmy…a sunny and humid 80 degrees. Marty and I decided to head back home. We had a 1200-mile freeway drone in front of us.

We hit I-20 and just kept going. We wanted to make New Mexico to get a jump on the ride for the next day. We cruised through El Paso at around 8:00 p.m., and stopped in Las Cruces for a quick dinner. Lordsburg, New Mexico, was our target that night. It was dusty, dark, very cold, and the wind was awful, with gusts in excess of 60 miles per hour. We were leaning our bikes at 30 degrees just to maintain a straight line.

We finally made Lordsburg, only to find that the Days Inn where we thought we would stay had no vacancies. You know the drill…you see the sign outside that says “No Vacancy,” but you have to go inside and ask anyway. “Everything is sold out,” the lady behind the counter said. “There isn’t an empty room in town, what with all this wind.” All the truckers were getting off the road due to the high winds.

We had passed an older motel on the east end of Lordsburg on the way in. Willcox, Arizona, was the next town up the road, but it was 80 miles west and I knew I couldn’t ride another 80 miles in this wind. We doubled back and tried the older hotel. We got lucky. We nailed the last room they had.

It snowed that night. We had a good breakfast the next morning and waited a couple of hours until the snow turned to sleet, and then we were off. We pushed through a combination of snow, sleet, and cold rain for the next 60 miles. We made Arizona (where the sun came out), and then rode another several hundred miles through sunny (but cold) weather.

The Roundup was a bit of a shocker. Lots of venomous snakes and the butchering was kind of brutal, but it was fun. And, no matter what anyone says, the myth that rattlesnake tastes like chicken just ain’t so. Sometimes I wonder…what if I had taken that job in Sweetwater? Would I be out there, rounding up rattlesnakes, instead of writing the blog?

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