It was June of 2008 when Ryan Ashby of Kimberley, B.C., ventured out into the wilderness with a friend on a scouting adventure. The men, both in their 30s, had the goal of looking for signs of elk and plotting the terrain for their return in the fall to go hunting.
Ashby was riding a Yamaha Kodiak 400 while his friend was riding a Honda Foreman 400. The men set up camp in Whiteswan Provincial Park, and over their three-day journey, they covered almost 250 kilometres on their machines.
On their first full day of scouting, the two men ventured over incredibly rough terrain and into an old burn. Before the burn, a person could only access the mountain they were to climb by hiking it. But to contain the fire from burning over to the next mountain, fire roads were pushed all the way up the mountain—and because of this, Ashby and his friend were able to access their secret hunting spot.
But it was not a simple task: the path was strewn with blown-over trees and deep ditches, and the extreme grade added to the challenge.
Tackling the slope
From camp, the men ascended the mountain with great caution. Ashby said he dreaded the road they had to take. They had to go up a big hill on a side slope, then down onto a deactivated road. Ashby said on the cross-slope, they had to lean right off their machines on the up-slope to keep going. To make matters worse, in the middle of the steepest part, there was a massive rock on the upside of the slope that they had to drive over.
"You want to go fast, because the faster you go, the quicker it's over," said Ashby. "You also have to keep your momentum. Then when you hit the rock, it throws you up about two inches so you're just teetering on two wheels. You have to lean up, hit the throttle and get back down."
To get up the side of the mountain, Ashby and his friend had to take a 40-minute quad trail that went straight up the mountain almost the entire way.
"You keep asking yourself, when is this going to end?" said Ashby.
A few rough patches
The men went up steep slopes and down through gullies all the way to the top. The spring runoff had caused one of the trenches on the trail to be deeper than the other, so not only were the quads almost vertical, they were bouncing from side to side on a major angle as well.
"Some gullies you would come into, you would go from looking at the centre of the earth to looking at the moon," said Ashby. "You got to go dead slow because it feels like the front of the quad is going to go right into the other bank. Then all of a sudden the tires catch and up you go."
Once the men finally reached the top of the mountain, they found it teeming with elk and deer. They parked their quads amongst the pine trees growing up out of the old burn, but after hiking back down, their quads were nowhere to be found. It took the men half an hour of trekking to locate the quads because of the dense brush.
Descending with caution
When the men got back on their machines, they had to go down the mountain the same way they came up, which was extremely treacherous.
"Coming down, the nasty side-slope, cross-cut gully was even worse," Ashby said. "You have to lean straight back so you're almost flat but still hanging on. Sometimes only two wheels were touching the ground. If you touched the brake too much, you would flip right over."
Later that year, the men packed an elk down this same trail.
Just one false move
Some people might call it a day after a ride like this, but Ashby and his friend journeyed on. They travelled all day, ascending into cutblocks and every logging road they could find that they could handle. The two friends climbed up into one drainage and had just gotten past a massive rockslide where they could barely keep the upper wheels of the quads on the ground, when Ashby's friend took off and got way ahead of him.
"I came up around a corner after about 10 minutes of riding by myself to find my friend pinned underneath the quad with his arm about to snap off," said Ashby. "He was laughing but almost crying and in severe pain."
Ashby's friend had come upon a corner with a snag across the road. There was only one way to get under it and that was to go slowly through a very steep ditch on one side of it. He had to lean with his weight all the way to the uphill side, trying to manoeuvre over boulders. He had to navigate the ditch very slowly for fear of flipping over—and that's exactly what he did. He made one false move, and as the quad was flipping over, the handlebar caught his sleeve and twisted his arm to within an inch of the bone snapping.
Ashby came to his friend's rescue, carefully lifting the quad off.
"He was pinned and helpless," said Ashby. "If I wasn't around, he probably would've cut his own arm off to get free. I pulled the quad off of him, but had to do so very carefully in order to untwist his arm."
Coming out of it with a smile
The men, after all they had been through, continued on. Ashby's friend, even with a sprained wrist, got back on his quad and they rode for several more hours. A 120-kilometre ride, a hunting lead for an elk in the fall, a sprained wrist and two massive smiles on the men's faces were the results of all their efforts on that day in June 2008.
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