A Sojourn at Scenic

   The day before the second last A.M.A District 12 race of the year, the weather forecast wasn't looking too good. It had surely changed. For  much of the whole week before, the long range forecast was encouraging. Now, the night before, the forecast for Sunday - Drizzle !! Well we all know about the accurate weather forecasts in Ohio. So I decided I'm going anyway. I have been very lucky so far this season. Every Sunday & Saturday that I went to the races, only once did it really rain, Western Reserve in June.

   One good sign upon arrival was the driveway. There wasn't anybody using the road as the pit, there was nobody sitting at the bottom gathering courage for the journey upward and best of all - no 6 inches of mud to go through !!!  I was starting to get psyched.
   As I crested the hill on my way up, I am again amazed at how beautiful a track Scenic Highlands really is !!! We are lucky to have this track in the D12. The second thing I noticed was there were not a lot of vehicles in the parking area. I figured the forecast kept a lot of people away. What I didn't know at the time was that almost every vehicle was bringing 1 if not 2 bikes. I guess most of the spectators were kept away by the weather. Only the most diehard of fans and racers showed up. There ended up being 126 entrants, not bad for this late in the season with the forecast we had !!!

   The last bit of rain or drizzle I saw was about 10 miles from the track on my way there. So all in all it turned out to be an almost perfect day for racing. Certainly at least as good as the last sojourn at Scenic Highlands Motosports Park. There was very little mud with not a hint of dust. Not even any mud for this photographer to trudge through. Tim, who runs Scenic, was all over the place today on his tractor or on his quad, on which he must have put 20 miles. I would really like to applaud him for putting on a first class operation and thank him for letting me roam all over to get the pics of these great riders !!!!! We are surely lucky to have all these first class people & tracks here in the area.

I would also like to commend a young man of maybe 13 or 14 years old (hard for us old folks to tell) who was working his first time as a flagger. There was a very nasty crash just past where he was working in a flag stand, where a couple of 125C riders tangled & went down when they went over a small hill. He grabbed the yellow flag & started waving it with one hand and seeing a rider unmoving in the middle of the track, hidden just over the hill from the oblivious oncoming riders, he grabbed the .....

medical flag & started waving it like crazy. As he was waving the flags he stepped out on to the track a bit to really get the riders attention. He told me afterwards that he thought the racers were going to hit him. I told him he did a really good job, how he was the only person that could keep that downed rider from possibly getting landed on or run over and injured worse. He was a little nervous, but he handled the situation very well. He should be proud of himself & the way he handled the event !!!

There were a couple of racers who made the trek all the way down from Ontario Canada to check out Scenic. Here's a couple of pics.

   This year was a really good one with all fantastic weather we had for the racing season. It was dusty sometimes, but for the most part, certainly better than the kind of mud we saw at Western Reserve in June. Hopefully we will get one last nice Sunday weatherwise for the final outdoor MX race of the season at Spring Valley. If so I plan on being there.

If you would like to view all the pictures from this fabulous fall event, go HERE or Visit the Photo Gallery.

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