Doing the Bullwinkle Shuffle

I had never set foot in the state of New Mexico until one summer my wife and I decided to give it a try over the course of a three-day weekend. We visited Angel Fire, a tiny, unincorporated village in the far northern part of the state, set in a valley that was, at its lowest point, 8,400 feet above sea level. It lay nestled between two ranges of the Sangre de Christo Mountains, a southern extension of the Rocky Mountains. On our third day there, we met with a real estate agent and began a process that would ultimately lead to the purchase of a house situated a fair distance up the mountain and on the outer edge of any development in the area.

So, having invested in a vacation home in an area of the country I knew next to nothing about, there were quite a few surprises awaiting us in New Mexico, most of them pleasant ones. Of all the surprises, the most wonderful one – to me, at least – was my discovery of the snowmobile trails. These were trails blazed through the forests, winding up and down the mountain and along the mountain ridges stretching for many miles, designed for winter use by snowmobile riders. The wilderness in this area began just across the street from our house and that was also where the snowmobile trails started. When there was no snow on the ground, these trails made for some of the finest off-road motorcycle riding I was ever to experience. 

To make matters even better, the wilderness around my house lay adjacent to the Kit Carson National Park, one of the lesser-used national forests, but one with extensive hiking trails. With only a few discreet turns, a rider could find his way from the snowmobile trails onto the hiking trails. These trails were seldom in use and made for some really good dirt bike riding, particularly in areas we called “the whoop-dee-doos”. Each of these stretches of trail consisted of a series of 4 or 5 berms, or earth mounds, that lay across the hiking path. They had been built up naturally over the years from rainfall and the runoff of melting snow. On a dirt bike, the rider would attempt to approach the first mound at just the right speed so that the bike would become airborne as it crossed over the top of the berm and then come to land, ideally on the rear wheel, just at the foot of the next one, creating a continuum of leaps and landings that were extremely exhilarating. Of course, if you approached the mound at the wrong speed or direction, the landings became unpleasant, at best, and disastrous at worst. Somewhere between the danger and the exhilaration lay all the fun of riding the whoop-dee-doos. So, venturing into the National Forest was considered to be well worth the risk of being caught by the forest rangers. There was only one such occasion during my years of riding there and it ended nicely enough with an apology and a request for directions out of the park. 

Early on, I vowed never to ride the trails alone, simply because the nature of the experience was fraught with the perils of accidents and equipment breakdowns, which could cause a personal emergency or a major inconvenience for retrieving a broken down motorcycle. As time went by and it became more and more difficult to find riding partners, I started making some short forays onto the trails by myself. Until, one day in the heat of summer — as used here, heat is a relative term since at 9,000 to 10,000 feet above sea level, it was never really hot on the trails — I had an experience that changed my motorcycle riding habits forever.

Venturing further up the mountain than was prudent, even by the most relaxed of safety standards, I was actually thinking of heading into the national park for one last turn on the whoop-de-doos. However, rounding a turn through the trees there suddenly appeared before me an enormous animal standing stock still astride the trail, blocking it completely. I realized immediately that normal braking would not stop the motorcycle in time to avoid crashing into the animal; and rocks and trees made evasive turns impossible. Instinctively, I abandoned the bike while turning it sideways and forcing it down on its side. Momentum carried the bike skidding and me sprawling toward the animal until the bike crashed heavily against the front legs of the beast, causing it to rear up on its hind legs quite unnaturally it seemed to me. I wound up just short of the animal’s feet, basically unhurt. The harm to the animal, which I now realized was a gigantic moose, seemed minimal, but when his front feet came down they landed on the front wheel of the bike, crashing through several spokes and bending the rim to near breaking. The blaring sound that came out of the moose at that point was deafening and quite frightful, no doubt causing aspen trees in the area to quake.

After freeing his feet from the tire spokes, the moose turned his attention to me. I was never a student of wildlife in the area, picking up only bits and pieces about bears and mountain lions out of a concern for safety, but I was certain I had learned that moose were not to be seen this far south in the Rockies. And yet, there he was, unmistakable in his enormity, grandeur and ugliness. Somehow, I managed to remember, from some long-ago discussion during a trip to Alaska, that moose were quite dangerous animals for humans, probably more aggressive than bears. I also recalled from that discussion that the best defense against an angry moose, which this one certainly was, involved locating a fairly substantial tree, getting behind it and moving around as necessary to keep the somewhat lumbering animal on the other side of the tree. This particular maneuver had become known as ‘the Bullwinkle Shuffle,” making it somewhat difficult to forget. The hope was that one could outlast the moose to the point where he would lose interest in taking out his anger on a human and then go about his other business. I found such a tree just in time and spent the next several minutes testing the moose defense theory to the fullest. I got a heavy dose of the beast’s malodorous scent, which caused my knees to buckle, and an extremely close view of the enormous palmate antlers which must have weighed by themselves well over a hundred pounds. The moose stood more than 6 feet tall at the shoulders and must have weighed in the neighborhood of 1,500 pounds. When he finally tired of the tree dance and ambled off, I was left with the formidable chore of getting myself and my bike out of the wilderness.