Motorway takes my brother down

Below was written by my friend he summed it up pretty stinking good. My brother Alex is not on these boards alot but you can find him on geoladders as Lutkus1973.



So here is the story, from my perspective anyways. We were completing a fun, challenging and very cold 25 mile ride from Blackstar to Motorway.

We regrouped at the top of Motorway (3 mile steep, loose switchbacking single track that goes down the hillside into Silverado Canyon) and then started down the hill. Regrouping to make sure we had everyone with us every mile or so, we would switch off the leader. With about 1.5 miles left to go, Alex (Mark's brother) took the lead and headed down a straight, slightly rutted section that had plenty of loose sharp rocks that made up the trail. With Mark right behind him, Alex went over the bars and slid face first down the trail. The rest of the group pulled up seconds behind them to find Alex lying face down on the center of the trail with his bike on top of him. With a little closer inspection it was clear that he was bleeding, not profusely but certainly more than the average mountain bike fall (about a 12 inch wide puddle of blood near his face. At this point, I took off down the trail to get to a place where I could get cell phone service, Marlan hung back for a second to record the GPS coordinates from his Garmin and then followed me down, and Jeff and Mark stayed with Alex.

In hindsight I should not have been hauling as much ass as I was to get down the hill (we didn't need two injured guys up there) but Alex's injuries seemed to need medical attention quickly and brakes weren't an option.

I got down to Silverado and still had no service. Marlan was down shortly after me and we began yelling for help and knocking on Silverado resident's doors. People live out there for seclusion and quiet so it is no wonder that several people ignored our pleas for help. About an 1/8th mile down the road, we came to a small house with a light on, knocked and they answered. Very nice people, they gave us a phone and we dialed 911. Fire trucks responded after about 10 minutes (the longest 10 minutes ever) later. Because we told 911 that Alex was still up on Motorway (not accessible by motor vehicle) they were prepared to be hiking a mile and a half up the hill for him. For this reason, they called in 3 fire trucks, an ambulance, and from what we were told, the Sheriff's helicopter to locate them on the hill.

To my surprise and the first-responders, Alex was down the hill, laying near the trail head at the end of the paved road with Mark and Jeff when they arrived. Mark, Jeff, and Alex decided to walk down the trail so they could more easily get to safety and help.

When I walked up to where they were, this was the first time that I had seen Alex since the crash. He was sitting up with serious trauma to his face. It appeared to me that his upper lip and nose had been nearly ripped off. His teeth and gums were exposed and it looked pretty bad. Paramedics quickly began to lay him down, brace his neck and attend to him until the ambulance arrived.

Once he was taken away, Mark got a ride down to his car from the firemen, and Marlan, Jeff and rode the last 6 miles down the paved road to our cars where we met with Mark, took care of moving Alex's car to a different location, and headed home.

As I wrote in the previous post, Alex is at Western Med in Santa Ana and is having some kind of reconstructive surgery on his face but that is all I know.

I am sure all of our perspectives on the story are a little different because we all helped in different ways. Mark continues to be very grateful for the all of the help. And I personally am grateful that I ride with such resourceful, helpful guys that can keep calm under pressure. Hopefully I never need the help, but I hope I am with all of you in case something ever does turn bad for me on the trail.

I'll add updates anytime Mark sends a text update.

 

Ouch, hope all goes well with the surgery. Good thing he wasn't riding solo.

 

Hope your brother has a quick recovery. Adrenaline kicks in at times like that and we end up doing things that maybe we shouldn't. Glad everyone else made it down safely.

 

Ouch. Sorry to hear about this. It's not hard to imagine such a gnarly crash on the Motorway. I hope for the best.

 

Ouch. Healing vibes sent out for a quick recovery.

 

Dayum! Sounds like a good group to ride with just in case.

Hope all turns out the way he wants it to.

Just curious, regular or FF helmet?

 

Healing vibes to your brother. Keep us posted on his recovery.

 

Regular not full face

 

i had two nasty falls on motorway (first time ever). the rocks on there are no joke! they are jagged, sharp, and theres tons of them! i still a small blood stain on door panel from those two falls...

hope everything goes well with your brother.

 

it could happen to any of us..

wish your bro a speedy recovery, I'm pretty sure I met him...

 

Yea you met him at the over the hump race.

 

I suspect they took him to Western because of them specializing in head trauma. I've had 2 roadie friends taken there after some serious crashes and both did really well. One had to have a skin graft and a little plastic surgery and it came out very well. Glad it looks like he'll make out okay but he'll be hurting for a while. Thankfully no head trauma, that's the worse possible outcome.

Motorway seems to extract a mean price for every crash. It's one of the few places I can say I don't like to ride.

 

Man, that sounds painful and a good answer to "riding alone" thread. Healing vibes to him for a quick recovery.

 

sorry to hear....hope he isn't in too much pain, heals quickly and is riding soon.

motorway....i have seen what it can do to tires and my arms and hands. definitely wouldn't want to see what it would do to someone's face!!!

 

That's awful, I hope your brother recovers quickly.
I think I'll be riding with my ff a little more often.

 

Update:

Looks like they are going to do the second surgery tomorrow or Friday they are trying to team up the oral surgeon and the plasitics.

 

Oh man. Alex will be in my thoughts...wishing him a speedy recovery.

 

ohh wow, was this today? raining? you guys are warriors..

 

To add to what Mark wrote, here are excepts of my account:

I was the last guy down motorway on every regroup. The climb really sucked it out of me. We regrouped three times down the hill. The last regroup was on a really loose, sandy off camber hairpin turn. I had taken the hill really slow. Not only was it loose, but I recognized at the top that my legs were pretty much shot by that point and I was having a hard time supporting myself behind my seat. So, I lowered my seat, sat on it as far back as possible (this again just reconfirms that the $200 for a seat dropper is worth the investment from purly a safety perspective), and went slow. Plus, it was so cold, I couldn't feel my fingers, which made it all the more treacherous.

After the last regroup, I would guess I was 30-45 seconds behind Alex. I approached the accident scene thinking it was another regroup, only to see Alex laying face facedown. My first sense of alarm came as I saw the amount of blood on the ground and Alex not moving. The alarm was confirmed when I observed Mark beating down the inevitable panic that arises from a bad accident when Alex rolled over and Mark finally saw the extent of the injuries. I give props to Mark at that moment -- he must have been worried sick about his bro and the injuries and still he kept his head.

As soon as I pulled up, Skyler said, "I going down for help, can somebody come with me." I was the late comer and Mark and Jeff had taken control of the situation, so rather than be another cook in the kitchen I immediately said I would go with Skyler.

50 feet further down I stopped. At this point I didn't know the extent of the injuries. I thought it would be wise to get the coordinates in case a helicopter needed to be called in, so I fiddled with my GPS for the better part of a minute trying to remember how to capture a waypoint.

As I rode down the remainder of the hill (carefully I might add because now I was a little freaked out), it occurred to me for the first time that I had my first aid kit. In it, I keep tampons to stop big bleeding (they will absorb a lot of blood, as well as gauze). As I mentioned below, it didn't occur to me at the time that I also had a space blanket for cold in my kit.

I got to the bottom and met up with Skyler who was trying to get a signal with his phone. As soon as I got there, he realized it was fruitless and we started to go into town to get help. When nobody answered the first few knocks, we rode through town with Skyler yelling "We need help!!! Is somebody there?" Eventually, we made it to the house Skyler mentioned and dialed 911.

Skyler told me 911 instructed one of us to go back to the gate and the other to wait at the house. I rode back up the road, and saw a forest service gate and stopped there.

Eventually, I heard the guys coming down the mountain. I grabbed my bike to go meet them. But I decided if S&R showed up and I wasn't there at the gate it would probably just cause more confusion, so I stayed put.

When they got down, that was the first I saw Alex's injuries. I didn't want to gawk, so I never got a clean look. But I could tell it was bad--much worse than I thought. I started to feel a little guilty (irrationally as I was doing the best I could under the circumstances) that I hadn't offered my first aid kit at the scene of the accident. So I blurted out to Alex, "I have some tampons for the bleeding." The look he gave me was priceless -- it was a sort of bloody mix of "you have to be kidding me" and "what is your problem." Again, chalk that up to being dead tired, I guess.

Finally, the first fire truck arrived. The guys in the truck seemed very grateful that they didn't have to hike and apparently called off the helicopter. Later, one of the EMT's mentioned that it was better Alex had come down because it would have been hard to work on him up on the trail, which is steep and narrow.

The EMTs were hooked up Alex to oxygen, a heart monitor, and somebody finally had the good sense to put a tarp over him (I had somehow spaced that I had a space blanket in my kit, which would have probably saved Alex 10 minutes of cold). He started to shiver pretty bad -- either from shock or cold or both. The EMT's did their job until the ambulance arrived (blaring its sirens through the sleepy town at 11:30 PM.

Healing vibes to Alex.

 

My birthday is today so I got a group together last night. We left the tree lot at about 6:30 and headed off into the cold and dark.