A Great Weekend at the HUMM
Ab, Canada
I had the pleasure of attending the 1st HUMM (Horizon's Unlimited Mountain Madness) event to be held in North America. The riding and navigation challenge has been a been going strong overseas since 2007 with events in Spain and Morocco, and HUMM Rockies lived up to its reputation as a not-to-be missed moto event.
Consulting the Map
The well-organized 2 day event was put together by Horizons Unlimited and Wanduro.com and attracted somewhere around 150 riders to the beautiful mountain terrain near Panorama, BC. The mix of road legal bikes (everything from 30 year old XR600s to the latest KTM 500s , from small
Waiting Our Turn
It was super fun. The map reading and navigation was pretty challenging but the riding was excellent and the scenery was stunning. Like orienteering or geocacheing, points are scored by finding numbered tags hidden across a huge vista, with logging and off road trails stretching on for hundreds of kilometers in all directions.
Old Bridge
Strategy plays an important role, as teams of up to 4 members strategize on route planning, and the best way to accumulate points. The points values of the hidden tags are rated due to trail difficulty, distance from the staging area, and a number of other factors, which ensures that it's not just the teams with the strongest riders or the most capable machines that win, it’s the team with the best strategy that prevails.
Small Stream Crossing
There were classes for single and multi-cylinder bikes and for map and GPS users. My team, made up of 2 WR250Rs and an X Challenge participated in the single cylinder map class, as did my wife’s team (which was the 1st all-female team in HUMM history – they had a CRF250L, a WR250R, a KLR and another X Challenge on their team). Although we ended the 1st day in 4th place, we finished the weekend in 12th place out of 24 teams in the single cylinder map class.
Nice Views
If you get a chance to attend a HUMM event in the future, I strongly recommend it! Check the Horizons Unlimited website for event near you.
Stream Apprach
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93 months ago
@EatSleepRIDE The way it works is that in the morning everyone gets a general aerial map showing the tag locations and a detailed map on which the approximate tag locations are transcribed, in theory allowing you to navigate to them. You spend an hour or two planning which tags you'll go after, the route you plan on taking and building your strategy (ex. going after for a lot of low value, easy to get to tags, or the more difficult, high value tags). Then using a then using the map amd a detailed road book provide by the organizers, you ride across the beautiful scenery for 2 days collection the tag numbers. The riding was exceptional and the navigation was challenging, it was a real team effort. I'll be signing up for next year.