Thrush Tails: July 2022

Close Call!

My friend Bruce and I just completed a long MC Road trip across the northern area of Pa.-route 6! It's a beautiful road-we started at Troy, then Wellsboro and on to the Lumber Museum - down to the Elk Visitor Center in Benezette. All of these should be on your bucket list if not visited.

We were rounding a tight mountain curve outside Troy when a 20 ft. damaged section of steel guard rail flipped off a tractor trailer.

Thank goodness we dodged it! By the time we turned around, a car hit it and moved it parallel to the road. We moved it off the road.

Bruce did a full report on the ride complete with photos-should you care to open:

Bruce's Report!

When I get a call from my buddy Bill Thrush asking if I am up for a little motorcycle trip, I always know I am in for a great time. Bill and I used to teach together back at Abington High School back in the 70’s. We both have the “adventure bug” and as a result we have had hundreds of adventures together. You see, Bill is one of the few people I know that when they say they are going to do something you can count on it being gospel and you don’t have to worry about being disappointed with a last minute cancellation call, like happens all to often I have found in most groups. Back in the 70’s we were big into winter back packing and we often would hike sections of the Appalachain trail as well as trails like the Chuck Keiper trail that is listed as the most difficult trail in PA. We even went to Maine and hiked Mt. Kittahdin which is the northern terminus of the AT. Many times there were others that would say they were going along and at the last minute when the weather forecast was for single digits or a foot of snow, or heavy rain, they would cancel at the last minute with feeble excuses of a kitchen that needed painting or some other lame excuse. Bill and I made a promise that we would never do that to each other as long as we were not in our coffins, or strapped to a gurney with IV’s in our arms. As a result, we have hiked and camped in sub-zero weather and on one trip hiked 16 miles through three feet of new snow, taking turns breaking trail for each other 100 yards at a time. We rode 15,000 miles to Alaska together camping in tents the entire way, and some nights had to eat our meals inside mosquito net over our heads because we were attacked by the “Alaska state bird” which is the mosquito. To say we have been life long “adventure buddies” is an understatement. Bill is 81 years old now and he can still ride off road as well as on road with the best of them. He now rides a Kawasaki Versus 650 which he says is the best bike he has ever owned and he has had a lot of them including the R100GS he rode to Alaska and the R1150RT which he got rid of when he had to remomove 27 screws to change the air filter. Being so top heavy also figured into the equation to be fair. The Kawasaki is only a couple years old. He bought it new and it now has over 60,000 miles on it, and it is only one of several bikes he rides almost every day, so yes, he is not a poser, but a real rider. He probably has more miles on quads than that, between riding the Colorado high country around Ouray and Tincup as well as the “strippins” as he likes to call the coal strip mines out around his home town of Houtzdale, PA. He has worn out more quads than most people ever hope to own.

Well last week I got a text asking if I was up for a ride to Troy, PA. Just when I think I have been everywhere, mention of a town like Troy will come up that I have never heard of. “Sure I said” I am always up for a motorcycle ride. “What is the plan” I asked. His reply… “Hey we are retired we can do anything we want”. Bill is a history buff and is involved in several historical societies, he spearheaded the restoration of “The Mighty Atoms” show truck for the Boyertown Auto Museum. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wt8jCtK7yW8

The Mighty Atom was a strong man that used to go around to carnivals and show off his inhuman strength bending horse shoes with his bare hands among other feats of strength. Well apparently Bills deceased aunt was from Troy, PA and in going through her things Bill discovered old pictures of the town that he thought might be of interest to their historical society. Our first stop on this trip would be to deliver the second installment of pictures to the curator along with touring their amazing building. Now you might ask, “what in the world history would be attributed to a small town like Troy? That was my question as well. As history has it, this town was the collecting point for volunteers for the First Pennsylvania Copany during the Civil War. Young men would come here from all over PA to sign up to fight and they would then be loaded on trains a the railroad that came through this little village and sent off to war. Who would have thunk? You see when you travel with Bill, you just have to acknowledge that whatever you plan for the day will only be the tip of the iceberg of what you will see and do that day. He has the uncany ability to squeeze three days into each day, so I never know what to expect, but I aways end up doing three times what I expect in a day. So, me being me, I went to my REVER app and drew up a route from his house to Troy using all back roads, then we decided that we might as well hit Wellsboro as we have stayed there before and it is a cool area on Rte 6. From Troy we took a nice scenic loop up to Lake Hammond and ended up in Wellsboro for the evening. The game plan. was to stay there in the Penn Wells Hotel, (we ended up in the lodge) and then head somewhere the next day. Somewhere ended up being exploring some of route 6 as well as some other roads such as Rte 87 on our way over to the PA Lumberman’s Museum. We had both been there several times before, but they have added a huge new building to it which is a work of art in itself. Post and beam construction on an amazing scale. On the way across Rte 87 we had an encounter that I will call one of the three closest calls to “buying the farm” that I have experienced in over 400,000 miles of motorcycling. I was leading and we were going around a pretty tight left hand sweeper at about 55 mph. A tractor trailer going the opposite direction, thus negotiating his right hand sweeper” with a low-boy trailer filled with 20 foot lengths of galvanized steel guard rails decided to deliver one into my lane at about 55 mph going the opposite direction. It came bouncing and sliding across my lane diagonally as I dove for the narrow right berm on this two lane highway. We just missed each other by inches. Bill was right behind me and he missed it as well. A 20 foot piece of flying steel with a closing velocity over 100 mph has a way of getting you attention.

To say were shaken was an understatement. No level of motorcycle safety training or any skills training prepares one for an episode like this. It is pure reacting and survival instinct acquired in hundreds of thousands of miles of riding in my opinion. We turned around once we got our wits about us and went back to see if he had stopped. He did not. I am guessing that he did not want to get into the blood and guts that must surely be spread across the pavement to say nothing about the liability for not having his load properly secured. We parked the bikes and lifted the rail up onto the guard rail beside the road, so it was not in the travel lane. I don’t like to even think of what would have happened had we been a few feet further down the road. This ranks in my top three all time puckker moments in any vehicle.

We continued on, enjoyed the Lumberman’s Museum then headed down to Bennezette for a stop at the Elk Preserve before heading to Houtzdale. No elk were out in the viewing sites, as it was the heat of the day and hot to say the least. We arrived in Houtzdale, stopped at a friend of Bill’s hunting camp for a little swim in the sulfur creek to cool off and then into the booming metropolis of Houtzdale for our obligatory side salad and delicious pizza at Joey’s. It never tasted to good. Of course no evening in Houtzdale would be complete without a trip to the American Legion or the Moose to check on what all the “old timers” are doing that never have left town. Every small town has them, people that for whatever reason never left the nest and spent their whole lives within a few miles of their home town. Ask one of these folks how far it is to Altoona and you are likely to get a response like “Altoona, well I have never been there, but I don’t think it is that far”. It never ceases to amaze me how small some peoples worlds really are. Bill has a nice garage building in town that we use as our crash site after another day of riding quads or exploring on dualsports. This time it was our respite after several hundred miles of pavement as we were just passing through on our way to the next adventure. We got up early this morning and hit the road at 6:30 a.m. to enjoy the cool mountain air as we transited past Happy Valley and Penn State on our way down to Harrisburg and back home.

Another great trip is in the books. We survived one attempt to kill us and lived to tell the tail. Let’s hope that is our last attempt to test fate. If you are interested, I have attached the link to my sugmug photo gallery, which also has images of our routes in case you ever want to explore this beautifully wooded section