GTDRI Stories: The Three Amigos of GTDRI 5

The header for the GTDRI for 2010 kind of was prophetic.

 "The GTDRI Stories" is a series telling the history, untold tales, and showing the sights from the run of Guitar Ted Death Ride Invitationals. This series will run on Sundays. Thanks for reading!

This was the GTDRI that was supposed to be a really popular one since I had all that feedback from the previous running of the event to use that spectacular course in Northeastern Iowa again. The thing was, as the date drew nearer, I was getting some negativity about the location for the start. 

It seems that it was just too far off the beaten path for many out of state riders and the primitive camping facilities weren't probably helpful either. It was forecast to be brutally hot as well, which I suppose played into may people's last minute decisions to not attend. 

In order to help drum up some interest and to answer some questions I was getting about the starting place, I went up a week before to recon things and do a better pictorial report to aid in those decisions to come or not. It was a lot of extra work to do that, but I was trying to be accommodating, and I thought it would help with attendance. In the end, whatever things were detriments to attendance, I was faced with hosting the smallest number of riders to ever attend an open GTDRI ride. 

The highly modified Salsa Cycles Dos Niner I rode at the GTDRI in 2010.

I was set up and ready to go for the next day at Echo Valley State Park near West Union, Iowa.

On the other hand, there were some interested riders were emailing me and saying that they "might" come up. I figured between those that showed interest and those that were telling me that they wouldn't make it up, I might see about five folks for this GTDRI. 

I headed up the night before the ride, set up my tent, and waited......and waited. I knew one rider was coming for certain, and this time that rider was again going to be showing off a concept bike. A bike based off the same idea for an adventure bike that he wowed us all with two years previous at this same ride. Only this time it was not an "official" model of the company he represented at that time. 

But besides Jason Boucher, and his grey metal machine he was going to bring, I knew of only one other person that was going to drop by to visit, and check out this new rig, and that was Rob, who ironically was the one several years prior to this who tipped me off to this same park we were meeting in. Eventually Jason and Rob showed up, but no other riders were arriving. Hmm.... Maybe we'd see someone in the morning then.....

Jason Boucher up the road in the beginning miles of the 2010 GTDRI.

Morning came after a somewhat anti-climatic evening. Well......at least I wasn't hungover in the morning! That problem got solved unintentionally. As I got ready to roll out, I was a bit sad that after all the hoopla that I had heard about this course, and after all the calls for me to put out the same route again, I was not going to see hardly a soul join me on this one. Fortunately for me, Jason's presence was really uplifting in that his effervescent personality and attitude really helped me to keep my head up concerning the ride. Then, as we were getting ready, Jeremy Fry pulled up, and he mentioned he had heard maybe that one or two others might show up. That gave me some hope, but then it was time to go, and well......there were no surprise riders this time! 

(L-R) Jeremy Fry and Jason Boucher. I love this image because of the Sun beams beating down on us, which was the byword for the day.

It was strange, and typically I would have been pretty down about the ride, but strangely I wasn't on this occasion. Jeremy brought us news that there was a heat index warning for later in the morning throughout the rest of the day. Temperatures would be well into the 90's with very high humidity, making the air feel like it was well above 100 degrees. 

And that news didn't bother me, which on most occasions, it would have, and I would have been internally freaking out about that. But again, I wasn't. I was excited to share an adventure with two like-minded individuals, and I reckon it was mostly because of those two guys that I felt somewhat at ease with our "impending doom". Jeremy and Jason really lifted my spirits, and I was actually pretty excited about the day.

The "Bike With No Name"

A Little Bit About That Bike:

As I alluded to above, Jason had brought a bike which was a concept he had for a titanium "Fargo-like" bike, but it was not a Fargo, not technically. Since it wasn't a "Fargo", what was it then? Well, it was dubbed the "Bike With No Name" because of that. BWNN for short, and that is what this particular bike is known as up to this very day. As I understood Jason to say, it was a design out of his own pocket to be a "proof of concept" type effort. Now, this was 2010, and as you all know, about a year or so later Salsa Cycles did indeed do a titanium Fargo. And yes, this bike was the precursor to that bike. A prototype, if you will, but not an "official" one.

You might also note that this bike has a suspension fork on it as well, which also ended up becoming a thing in the Fargo legacy when Salsa eventually had the "Fargo Sus" model offered. At the time of the GTDRI this story deals with, it was simply Jason's personal bike, but it did influence things in the Fargo lineage to a great degree. Additionally, this bike ended up with Matt Gersib, (MG) and is still in use to this day. 

Modified Dos Niner: This was the bike I rode at the second to last DK200 I ever tried. I was searching for a bike that had the capabilities of running big tires, had some "give" to it in terms of vibration damping, and I wanted drop bars with a wide range MTB drive train. The bike was something of a mutt and it wasn't quite "right" in terms of geometry and lateral stiffness, so despite the really great things about this experiment, I scrapped this bike right after this GTDRI. 

Eating dust East of Elkader as we climb into the big hills.

Jason climbing the Level B section of Imperial Road

So, back to this ride. By the time we'd gotten to Elkader it was absolutely cooking. We stopped for a bit to refuel there, but it was mid-morning and too early for lunch. I remember climbing into the real hills East of Elkader and that the wheels were starting to come off as far as my ride. I wasn't "done" just yet, but it was really slow going due to the difficulty of the climbing and the heat index. 

This was arguably the best part of the ride though. We were hitting two stellar Level B Roads and with the pavement sections sprinkled in, it was a bit less stressful and there were shady sections which kept the Sun off of us here and there as well. 

"The Money Shot". Jeremy Fry coming off Impala Road near Garber, Iowa.

Coming off of the spectacular dirt road named Impala Road, you end up on about a dead flat mile along the Turkey River. The dirt road snakes its way up to a bridge which a county road crosses, and we were to turn to cross that bridge, do about a mile of pavement, then turn right again back into some really brutal climbs. But before that happened, Jason and I had to stop to wait for Jeremy Fry to catch up.

We decided to stop shy of the bridge at a point where the road was lined with wild flowers. Jason ascertained this would make for a great shot of Jeremy, once he appeared, on the dirt road. I let Jason choose his spot, then I went to the opposite side and took a look at the landscape for a suitable place to take a similar image of Jeremy. He was late because, well, Jeremy is definitely NOT a mountain biker and the entrance to the dirt sector of this road went steeply downhill, it was laced with skull-sized boulders, and it was about as challenging a road as we'd see all day long from a technical standpoint. 

Jeremy actually went down twice on that sector, as I found out later, but when he appeared he smiled, as if on cue, and Jason took his shot, and I took mine. Later on, Jason bemoaned the fact that I had the better angle, and praised my image shown above, which made me feel good, because Jason is an expert photographer! 

The sign in Arlington, Iowa says it all.

We then toiled up and down the steepest grades on this route, and at one point, Jason and Jeremy were sitting in a dutch waiting for me to appear. I wanted to rest some and I was hoping that the guys weren't chomping at the bit to get going. Fortunately, they were as cooked as I was. As we commiserated together there, Jason had an idea. "Hey, I'm going to go into this corn field here. Follow me!" 

I thought he was insane. Maybe he was hallucinating from all the dust and heat. But no- he was insisting we follow him and trust him with this idea. We crawled about 20 yards into the shade of the tall corn and then Jason instructed us to sit down on the dirt. He then asked us what we felt. It was cooler! Like around 10-15 degrees cooler, which at that point was like air conditioning for us. Jason then explained that the canopy of the corn trapped cooler air in while the heat was reflected off the corn leaves above us. Brilliant!

We made a plan then to cut short the route, head in to Edgewood, which wasn't far away at that point, and then see about a short route back to the vehicles. We left Edgewood on pavement. I was fine until I wasn't on the road running into Strawberry Point, and so I decided to head into Arlington, Iowa, instead of short-cutting back to the Echo Valley State Park. Jeremy came back to fetch me later, and that was that. He and Jason still got about a 100 miles in, and I saw about 80-ish. Not what I wanted, but it was what I was able to do. 

And so it ended. After several years of finishing and making every mile of the GTDRI routes I all of a sudden was left feeling as though I had failed. I failed at getting people to show up. I failed at handling really hot weather. I failed to ride every mile. Although I had started with a good dose of optimism and hope, it all came unraveled in the end and I was dejected going home from this one. 

Next: Rolling Into 2011