Boys Will Be Boys

For some reason, even at age 45, I cannot resist a mud puddle. You'd think that at some point men would outgrow the urge to play in mud, but at least in my case this day has not yet come. This past weekend five of us (Craig, Ken, Reed, Robin and myself) headed for Capitol Forest near Olympia WA to go quading. Capitol Forest is kind of a Mecca for off-roading enthusiasts in this area. There are miles and miles of logging roads and trails to ride on and even though I have ridden there many times I still have only covered about half of the area. We left early on Saturday and met at the Straddeline ORV park that is next to Capitol Forest. The ORV park itself has several miles of trails which we explored, but Saturday we spent most of the day exploring Capitol Forest. We ended up riding for something like 50+ miles - which is almost the equivalent of riding from Tacoma to Everett. That's a long ways to ride on a quad...and our muscles were feeling every mile of it by the end of the day. The good news of the day was that nobody died or was severely injured. Accidents on quads, especially on rough trails like we were riding on, can happen very quickly. Craig put his quad on its side once (at a very low speed) and I nearly got bucked off of mine after hitting a stump with my rear tire - which caused me to have about a 1/2 second of one of those "Okay, this is when I die" thoughts go through my head. But alas it was not to be and I regained control before crashing off the hillside (yes mom, I had a helmet on). One good thing about getting older is that we now know our limits of ability and we rarely push those limits, and we also know that if we fall it's really gonna hurt. So even though we like the rush of a good steep hill climb, none of us are willing to risk a 20 foot jump anymore (older/wiser).

But that brings me to the mud. It was just sooo tempting. Once we got back from our long ride and got some food we decided to explore the ORV park's trail system a bit more and we kept coming by this big swampy looking mud puddle again and again. Eventually one of us (Reed) decided to go in it and he promptly got stuck. Once we pulled Reed out, the challenge, of course, was on. Slowly but surely each of us started going back in and pushing just how far we could go into the "deep part", but nobody was actually willing to try and cross the swamp. I recently bought some new tires for my quad that make it look like a miniature version of a monster truck so I was the obvious choice to try and make the first crossing. I made it about half way and then got bogged down in the mud. I almost got stuck but after several minutes of moving at a snail's pace with mud flying everywhere from my spinning tires I eventually made it through...and my quad and I were covered in about 50 lbs of thick, clay-like mud. It was a blast. Then we all got into the act and we had mud flying everywhere and pretty soon we had an audience of other quad riders and dirt bikers who stopped to watch us play in the mud. They were probably shocked to see that when we stopped to take a break and took off our helmets that the five guys bombing through the muck were not a bunch of teenagers but instead a gang of middle-aged guys. Boys will be boys...hopefully that never changes.

PS - Upon arriving home I opened the front door and proudly announced that I had survived the weekend and tromped right up the stairs and into the kitchen where my son Jake informed me that I just left 30 feet of muddy foot prints throughout the house (which brought a glare from my lovely wife that could melt a polar ice cap). As I said, boys will be boys...

Addendum (3 hours later):

This is what the quads look like clean - ain't they purdy? ...whew, it was a lot easier getting mud on them than getting it off! (but that won't stop me from getting them muddy again)