Highway Of Deception

While reading through Jeff Hughes' Benchracing story "The Third Layer," in this issue, I came across his reference to the Angeles Crest Highway about how the visions of making a mistake and flying off a sheer cliff into nothingness made him dial his pace back a notch. For the uninitiated not brought up on a constant diet of California mountain roads, the view can be very daunting when considered from a motorcyclist's "what would happen if things go wrong" perspective. For the casual tourist, the Crest Highway's many grand vistas offer what most would consider a breathtaking view from seemingly high up in the clouds, with the Antelope Valley splaying out for miles on one side and the San Gabriel Valley on the other. For the sportbike enthusiast new to the road, however, it appears more like a very stern warning on the consequences of a mistake.

In reality, the biggest danger of the Crest is far from skidding off the road and sailing off into the wild blue yonder. Which is not to say you would be fine if things did go terribly wrong and you found yourself freefalling down a mountain slope. And if it does serve as an obvious warning to some, so much the better. But the most dangerous aspect of the Crest is a hidden, deceptive feature that often goes unrealized by the unwary until it's too late.

Much of California is blessed with a mountainous terrain that provides the perfect canvas upon which civil engineers can unknowingly weave their magic. Southern California in particular has myriad serpentine roads that swerve and swoop through the region's numerous canyons, all within easy reach of the major metropolitan areas situated between the mountains and the sea.

Some of these roads are tight, twisty ribbons that a 600 would find itself at home on, roads that a literbike would have difficulty putting anywhere near all its prodigious power to ground. Others are long, loping routes through hill and dale that offer a higher-speed diet of tarmac. There are some roads that combine the two in a seriously fun smorgasbord of undulating pavement that can go on for many miles.

But while the Crest offers a multitude of turn mixtures for its 65-odd miles, it does so in a lazy yet striding pace that belies its true nature.

The turns on many other roads are tight enough that speeds are naturally kept somewhat in check, and other more wide and open roads that look fast (and are, if ridden aggressively) usually aren't, because of the obvious high-speed risks they generate-to the rider, and by gaining the attention of law enforcement.

The Crest, however, can lull you into a false sense of security, as its swooping turns are fast enough that the cut-and-thrust riding style won't work, but slow enough that you don't feel like you need to keep the throttle pinned wide open and be traveling a million miles an hour. Its smooth cadence of curves flow in a relaxed rhythm that can make a rider think he's just cruising along, with the grippy pavement and friendly turn camber adding to a misleading confidence that increases corner speeds.

And it's those increasing corner speeds that get many riders into trouble. The deceptive nature of the Crest's seemingly benign curvature masks its seriously high corner-speed potential, and those speeds can easily and unknowingly ramp up on a rider who isn't paying attention. As the corner speeds increase, the margin for error decreases rapidly, and the vast majority of single-vehicle crashes on the Crest have been the result of riders suddenly finding themselves way too hot into a turn and panicking, with obvious ramifications.

The bulk of these crashes that have resulted in serious injuries or fatalities weren't from riders sailing off the road and down the mountainside. Ironically, many of them were from just the opposite: riders sliding into the mountainside. Contrary to what you might think, it's actually more dangerous to slide into a sloping and rocky hillside at speed than to hit a tree or other single object. This is because where you can only hit a single object once, sliding into a hillside is just like hitting that immovable object-only several more times, due to your tumbling up the hillside. (This was the cause of fatalities at several U.S. racetracks in the past.) Then there were the usual collisions with automobiles or bikes traveling the opposite direction, or even the odd deer; but with the Crest's elevated speeds, the results were often not good.

For the riders who kept their concentration up and maintained an acceptable margin for error within the scope of their riding skills, the Crest was still what I consider one of the world's best roads to experience on a sportbike. I'm using past-tense verbiage here because unfortunately some severe winter storms several years back washed out a section of the highway, and the California highway-maintenance bureaucracy isn't in any hurry to repair it, so a large section has remained closed off since then.