A ride to remember: Older and wiser bikers re-create trip of lifetime

"As the sun comes up in the eastern sky

No fonder sight could please my eye,

Than to travel along the desert floor

In the presence of lads, a dozen or more."

— Joe Jorgensen, Sigurd, 1974

The scene at the Sigurd church house a week ago Wednesday morning looked every bit the trip staging that it was: Plans to ride vintage Honda motorcycles on a 500-mile, half-off-road loop through the desert heart of Utah had come down to last-minute minutia. But the group was a lot more revved up than the two dozen little Hondas they were kick-starting to life. Turns out the first leg of the trip —18 months of planning — had already made the route ahead to Goblin Valley on the north, nearly to Bullfrog at the south, and back again a success even before the actual ride even began: They were celebrating because people had actually shown up, ready and as excited as a bunch of teenagers that they were back together to head off again, about to head into the middle of nowhere again.

Most everyone there had been in the same environs 10 or 20 times since the first members of Explorer Post 2371 started the nearly annual venture there the weekend before Easter Sunday in 1964. But today, they were going again for the first time as 40- 50- and 60-somethings to the place where as boys they found their manhood and lifelong association that drew them back now, two generations older, 20 pounds heavier and more excited than they'd been in years.

Returning to re-create the first trip, undertaken in 1964, that turned out to be more than the boys could handle and mostly more than they hoped.

The 2009 trip could have been an easy, less than two-day jaunt if they were on the 500cc and 600cc two-wheeled catapults many had left home. But putting miles behind them as fast as possible isn't the point. Honda Trail 90s and 110s with engines barely bigger than a lawnmower's were the required bike of choice: a journey back to your teenage years ought to be on the vehicle that literally got you through them.

The trip is already memorable just because it's actually happening. The gap between the last time many of these guys saw each other isn't several years but whole lifetimes: marriage, kids, grandkids and all the intervening splendid, tragic, beautiful and stark realities of grown-up life.

For the next four days, the rocks and hard places and the rutty, sand-blasted, bentonite plastered areas between them will be real and right here right now.

Who would have thought that a journey launched by their Explorer leader, the late Joe Jorgensen, would still be under way? And that those kids he tended would come back as men, willingly getting out of their comforts and routines to and trail off through a wilderness of biblical proportions?