One of my favorite jumps was a downhill one into a huge ravine about 300 - 400 feet deep. A forest fire cleared all the brush and small trees out so it was basicly a giant V shaped ditch... dam steep.... most 4x4 truck n jeeps can't get out of it it's so steep.
Fairly smooth and the bottom is maybe 10 feet long before it goes almost straight up. It's about 200 yards wide where its ride able.
Theres a small cluster of trees at the edge with some exposed roots. One root right at the edge I used as a launch into the ravine. Gawd it was such a freakin RUSH
to launch off and drop easy 100 feet down or more landing on the steep downhill to G - Out at the bottom so hard you would crush down onto the tank as the frame ground into the dirt a second then it was wack it on and wheelie all the way up to the top! Both sides had a nice sized flat area up top to turn and shoot back into it wheelie up the opposite side and launch off my root!
I'd do that for hours on end, people would stop and watch, but no one else did it! It was really a ballsy thing, only reason I was doing it was I had the first Monoshock bike to hit the Island (I was sponsored by Domenicos Kailua Yamaha and got the first one that came from Japan, we got them several months ahead of the US). A 1976 YZ400E everyone else was still on the lay down twin shockers.
Occasionly I'd hit the root wrong and the back would kick up
Geeeeezus a few of them were scary!! The bike would be vertical front wheel down! Almost going over the bars on a 100 foot + drop into this ravine! Talk about changing the shorts!
One time I launched off too hard and landed right at the base of the downhill. That blew my right knee out, broke the foot peg right off the frame, bent the handlebars a little bit and put a dent in the aluminum gas tank where my helmet chin guard hit the tank! * Beer Influenced *
liquid courage put me on crutches for 4 months! Couldn't ride. But had to wait for the new frame to come from J land. The factory couldn't believe the peg ripped off! The new frame had a reinforced mount.....
Man the RUSH from launching off into that ravine was AWESOME! You'd look down and the ground was a easy 100 - 200 feet below! You were literally free falling down into this huge crevasse! The landings were super smooth like most downhill landings, you were falling nearly parallel to the hill face it was amazing considering how far you would fall....
Luckily I never ate it doing that, I must have did it 500+ or more times! That was lucky because if I did it would have been ugly.... real ugly.
I love to show off and that was the ultimate show...... back then jumps like that were never done. On the old twin shock bikes you would have ate shit instantly....
One of my favorite things I would do was get some dood that thought he was fast chasing me and I'd blow through a nasty whoop section, the long travel YZ would skim over the tops like nothing and the sucker behind would nearly always go down trying to stick with me
OK thats the KH story of the day.... Everyone called me Krazy for the way I rode back then..... it kinda stuck.... LOLz
Dam Munky!
I have jumped table tops, doubles, triples, whoops, trees...hell anything I could jump and never had that much of a problem. Give it a little sudden thottle blip at the top of the jump. If you are nose high push down on the bars, if you are ass high pull up on the bars and push down with your heels. Try to let the rear land a fraction of a second before the front and adjust the load on the shocks for the terrain.