MY OWN BAJA

LUCHO’S JOURNAL
MY FIRST TECATE &
How I Saved 3 Families

We’re talking about early seventies here. I believed I had raced in the first annual Tecate 500 Enduro, Los Ancianos’ two-day romp from Tecate, Baja California to San Felipe and back. It was a glorious two days of riding and it just hooked me to all that is Baja.
Ed Pearlman’s NORRA had the Baja 500 on its scheduled, and I thought, heck I rode 500 miles in the Enduro, I can do the Baja 500—no problem. Wrong!
I was not prepared and to show you how dumb I was, my plan was to ride my ‘71 Husky from Ensenada to San Felipe and back as a “pre-run,” carrying old bottles of Prestone, filled with fuel, and refueling along the way. The dumb part (besides being a moving Molotoff Cocktail), was that I had no “chase” people with me. I did not arrange to ride the distance with at least one other person, none to see if I had made it through or crashed and burned. That’s was not only dumb but also stupid.
But what did I know in 1972, I was 30 years-old, and I thought I owned the world. I was relatively fast, daring, confident, 70 lbs. lighter and really, really dumb!
As I said, I left Ensenada with a brim-full 3.5-gallon Husky tank and two bottles of extra fuel—total of about 5.5 gallon. That would get me over the “summit” to La Ventana on the other side of the Baja peninsula.

Figure 1 - The racecourse from the top of the Summit to La Ventana, approximately 75 miles.

 Mistake number one: Before I got to Nuevo Junction (at the foot of the “summit”), I had already used both bottles of fuel and my white tank showed that I had about a half a tank left. Looking at the map, I still had a ways to go before La Ventana or a place called Chinero.