In 2012 we lost one of the great characters of New Zealand mountain biking.
James Dodds was a rider, a trail builder, a bike designer, and a successful entrepreneur.
This is a story that demonstrates the kind of energy levels Dodzy ran on. I was riding to the top of the forest, my goal was Billy T. Billy is a trail (built in part by Dodzy) that snakes across the top of the forest and drops a rider into a network of other downhill routes, the perfect outing if the after work ride allows the half hour it takes to get up there.
The first part of the ascent is a soul-eating plod up a forestry road called Direct. A more poetic name could have been found for it, and I am sure any one of a thousand mountain bikers would have suggestions, but most would not be fit to put on a signpost, so Direct it has remained. It gets a punter up about 200m over a couple of kilometres.
From there the route involves Frontal Lobotomy. The trail, not the operation. Also built by Dodzy, it was conceived as a two-way run. On completion the safety police deemed it too risky, and it had become a rare thing in our neck of the woods: a climbing single track. When he was building it, Dodzy described it as a middle-ring climb, back when that meant something. As it turned out even I have clambered up it without resorting to the granny when I had one, but I couldn’t manage it every time. It has the perfect gradient to its halfway point, a 180 degree switchback, but after that it is obvious that the calculations had to be adjusted. To get the trail to the desired exit point there are a series of steep pinches, and they come after nearly 400m of elevation gain from town.
On this afternoon I met up with Dodzy just as we arrived at the entrance to Frontal. I foolishly took the lead.
Dodzy was pretty excited about his latest off-bike exploit: He had bagged his first deer. He started telling me about it almost immediately. He had driven to the end of a road and beelined into the bush and up a steep escarpment. I knew the place he was describing, and ‘bush’ and ‘steep’ don’t really do it justice. New Zealand bush is more like jungle around here, and the bush above Okataina is a vine laden maze of almost impenetrable foliage, on about a fifty degree incline when it isn’t vertical.
From the tops Dodzy stalked around until he spotted a deer, which he lined up and shot cleanly.
The challenge was that the deer he had spotted was a long way below him, in a small clearing at the base of a very steep section of the terrain.
At this point in the story we were still short of the hairpin, and my pressure gauge was hovering just below the redline. I had grunted enthusiastically at a few exciting bits of the hunt, but had not otherwise uttered anything sensible.
Dodzy climbed down to his deer, and did whatever hunters do to make them ready to extract from the bush. He reckoned the first time he tried to stand up with it on his back it was so heavy he fell over backwards. The only way out he knew for sure was even possible was back up through the jungle the way he had come down, to pick up the ridge he had climbed in on. He didn’t get very far before he realised there was no way he was going to make it up the climb with the deer on board, let alone survive the hike out to the car.
He retreated to the clearing and cut the deer in half. That made it reasonably portable. He climbed the cliff with the first half.
Another thing you need to know about Dodzy is that he was frugal. Waste not want not. He could no more leave half a deer in the bush than set fire to a pile of folding cash. So down he went again, and back up with the second load.
By now we had gained the first steep pitch, which I barely cleaned, while Dodzy buzzed my back tyre and laughed out loud about how hard the second trip up was. He described it as almost impossible, and was going into gory detail about the state he was in after wrestling two pieces of a freshly slaughtered beast to the top of this mad jungle.
My turkey timer was well and truly rattling, I was just about baked.
Two trips were required to get the meat from the staging point to the car, and that meant a serious hike both ways, twice. There were more details forthcoming, but by that point I was in survival mode, cross-eyed with the effort, and not really following the narrative, entertaining though I am sure it was.
We popped out of Lobotomy into the bright afternoon, I did my impression of the incredible melting man while Dodzy’s grin conveyed his satisfaction at the fact that the deer was now safely in his freezer. After a few minutes, when I could string a sentence together, I asked Dodzy when this epic had taken place.
“Yesterday!” was his answer
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