The cover of this issue must have offered some hint of where we’ve been lately. Aahh…Colorado! I’ve been riding in the Rockies since the early 1980s and I always have a great time up there. (The photo on the right might make some people think otherwise, but believe it or not, I even had a great time this year.)

Doc Bodnar checks out my x-rays and thinks he spots a broken piece in the tibia bone (the large lower leg bone). He was right!

     One event I look forward to all year is the Rocky Mountain 300, the dealer ride put on by Thor, Moose, Alpinestars and Parts Unlimited. It’s been going on now for over a decade and continues to get better and better every year.
     Yes, I did have a little incident on the trail on Day One of this year’s ride that did dampen my 2004 Colorado experience a bit. What happened, you ask? After a great morning of riding, I was heading back to Steamboat Springs with a small group of riders. We were on a great little single-track trail when I hit one rock wrong. I needed to go right, but the rock turned my front wheel left. I was only going about 25 miles an hour, so normally it shouldn’t have caused much of a problem.
     But since I was on a side-hill, there wasn’t anything there to land on and I started tumbling down the hillside. Momentum sent my body down the hill, but I stopped abruptly when my right boot stuck in the rocks and my body kept going. The result was a severe hyper-extension of the knee that flexed it forward so far that a piece of the lower leg bone broke off near the knee.
     At the moment it happened, everything hurt like H—-, but after a few minutes it wasn’t as bad and I was able to ride back to the base. I went to the hospital for x-rays. It was hard to tell in the first x-rays if it was just a hairline fracture or worse. At the hospital they thought it was just a crack. Doctors Steve Augustine and John Bodnar were on the ride, as they have been for years now, and they provided lots of attention and expertise. They were checking on me constantly and when Doc Bodnar looked at the x-rays, he thought he saw a whole piece broken off. Either way, my ride was over for 2004, so I hung out at the hotel until the ride ended and we all had a great time at the banquet. I even won the bid on a jersey that Travis Pastrana used at the X Games, so all was not lost.
     Once back home, I made contact with Dr. David Ashkenaze, an orthopedic surgeon from Laguna Beach who I have used in the past. It turned out that Doc Bodnar was right about the broken bone, so Dr. Ashkenaze performed surgery to put a couple of screws in the tibia to hold the broken piece in place.
     I’m now in physical therapy to get the leg working right again and looking forward to getting back on a trail bike soon. Of course, I’m looking forward to next year’s Colorado ride.
     But enough about me and my problems. No, trail riding in Colorado is not all that we have covered in this issue. Also inside you’ll see the report on the Summer X Games. There were some truly memorable rides there this year. In his first-ever X Games competition, Jeremy McGrath impressed the world as he won the Step Up competition. Matt Buyten, Nate Adams, Ben Bostrom and Travis Pastrana also put their own personal mark on the event that won’t be forgotten for a long time.
     Also inside we’ve got a pictorial by Kinney Jones of the Pro Circuit Kawasaki KX250F that Ivan Tedesco won the 2004 AMA 125cc Supercross West series on. Mitch Payton and his crew at Pro Circuit put a ton of hours into this machine and it shows when you see it up close like this.
     Of course we’ve got a full platter of information on the latest products on the market and more.
     Hope to see you in Colorado next year!