For Christmas, Andrés, Amy, and I flew to Phoenix to spend the holiday with my extended family. One of the highlights of the trip was when we drove up to Sedona, rented ATVs, and went offroading amidst a Grand Canyon-like landscape.

I took the opportunity to strap on all of my bulky large-format camera equipment and take some 4x5" Velvia slides in the environment that was practically made for them. And I had a realization. I've had the large format camera for a few years, but I've barely ever used it, mostly because it's so big and heavy that I've been pretty much limited to the kinds of places I can reach with a car, which are seldom worth photographing. I'm not trying to make undue comparisons, but I remember reading Ansel Adams talking about having the same problem. He had a platform on the roof of his car from which he did a lot of his photography — for his longer jaunts into the wilderness, he packed most of his gear on a burro.

I realized that an ATV can be my version of a burro. I've always been interested in offroading, but when I realized that an ATV would both let me enjoy crawling over rough terrain plus let me strap down all my bulky large-format camera equipment and take pictures from places that I couldn't otherwise reach, it did me in — I had to have an ATV.

I wondered if it'd be worthwhile to own one, though. The rental prices were really expensive, but if Sedona doesn't have more than the three or four half-hour trails they told us about, then I'd imagine that you'd get bored of it before long. So I did some searching to see where you can go offroading in the area around Knoxville. I was amazed to discover that I happen to have stumbled into one of the meccas of ATVing. I moved here because I wanted to be close to the mountains, and apparently that decision served me well in this respect too.

I found that in Oliver Springs, the same town where my flying club's airfield is located, there's a large, privately-owned plot of land named the Coal Creek OHV Area, totaling an astounding 72,000 acres, which is entirely devoted to offroading, camping, hiking, etc. There are about 60 different trails, over 160 miles in all, spread out around the mountain. I later discovered that it's rated the second most popular riding area on the ATV Pathfinder site.

Then I discovered that there's three more OHV parks within about 45 minutes of me, all about the same size as Coal Creek. There's the Royal Blue Wildlife Management Area, with 600 miles of trails across 53,000 acres where you can encounter elk, deer, turkeys, beavers, etc.

Also nearby is the Brimstone Recreation Area, with 300 miles of trails in 45,000 acres (Brimstone is also on the Top 10 list at ATV Pathfinder), and the Sundquist Wildlife Management Area, with 74,000 acres. In other words, there would probably be enough new places to explore to keep things interesting pretty much indefinitely.

So with that determined, I set about the arduous process of learning all about ATVs, reading about the various options available and the effect they have, etc. I visited several different ATV dealers and test-rode a variety of bikes to get a feel for how the various options (2wd vs. 4wd, chain drive vs. shaft drive, solid rear axle vs. independent rear suspension, manual transmission vs. automatic CVT, etc) actually feel when riding over rough terrain, and little by little, I started defining what I wanted.

I had originally been hoping to find a used one in the $2000-3000 range, but as I did my research, I found that the only bikes available in that price range tend to be small 250cc machines. Now, I have no problem with a small engine — I test rode a few 250cc-based ATVs and even those accelerated faster than I'd probably ever want to in an offroad situation — but the bikes are physically smaller, since most are designed for teenagers, and I found that the smaller machines feel a lot less stable when traversing hills and handling uneven terrain.

So I set my sights at the midrange quads, in the 300-400cc range, but found that these apparently aren't very popular, because I have yet to see a single 300-400cc machine available used, and the new ones are already climbing well out of the price range I was hoping to pay — I didn't see any below $5000, and the few that were that cheap were very limited in their capabilities, and were designed more for doing work around a farm rather than handling actual offroad trails.

I was starting to resign myself to the idea of taking out a 3- or 4-year loan to spend $6000 on the Polaris Sportsman 400. It had all the features I wanted, though it did look kind of like a Transformers version of Lord Voldemort.

But then an interesting option turned up on CraigsList. It was a 2002 Kawasaki Prairie 650 4x4. I hadn't been considering anything as big as a 650cc, since I'm new to the sport and didn't want to have enough power to get myself in trouble, but he only wanted $3500 for it, so I figured it was worth considering. I did some research on the bike, reading online reviews, magazine articles, and forum discussions to get a feel for what kinds of problems people were having with them 5 years down the line, etc, and the opinions sounded quite positive overall, so I gave the guy a call and went out and test rode it.

I was surprised to find that the power didn't feel overwhelming at all. It was definitely fast if you got on the throttle, but the throttle wasn't overly sensitive, so it'd be easy to stay off the power if you don't want it. I had been worried that my hand could slip going over a bump or something and jab the throttle lever, sending the bike flying. But it actually feels very controllable, and I didn't have any problem keeping the bike from doing anything I didn't want it to do. And I actually discovered that the bike has a throttle-limiting screw to let you mechanically limit how much power it'll produce, if you want to be absolutely sure that nothing will go awry. I don't think I'll need it, but it's good to know that I can stop and screw that in if I start feeling like it's being hard to control.

It's definitely a physically bigger machine than the Polaris 300 and 400cc bikes I had been looking at, but it's actually not significantly heavier. The Japanese ATV manufacturers (Yamaha, Honda, Kawasaki, etc) have a self-imposed "gentleman's agreement" to limit the weight of their ATVs to no more than 275kg (606 lbs), whereas the American manufacturers like Polaris and Arctic Cat don't worry as much about weight. So the end result is that this Prairie 650 has the wider, more stable wheelbase without having to deal with the added weight. It was missing one of the features I really wanted (independent rear suspension), but at half the price of the new bikes, I'm more than happy to give up that one feature. And the fact is, since I'm new to ATVing, I probably won't be throwing myself into the types of terrain that you'd need IRS to handle.

Another advantage of this Prairie 650 is that, since it's a big engined, "full-sized" machine, there's a lot more of a market for it, so if and when I decide to sell it, I'll have a lot easier time getting rid of it. Not to mention the fact that I won't face the huge depreciation that a new machine would have incurred. If I decide I don't like this quad, I could probably turn around and sell it next week for about what I paid for it. With a new ATV, I would have faced a much bigger loss if I decided to sell it.

So I made my decision, and I picked it up yesterday. Of course, ATVs aren't street legal, so I had to come up with some way to tow it to the trails too. Having just spent $1500 resurrecting the lovable, visually unappealing Buick, I decided to make it earn its keep and turned it into a tow vehicle. I put a tow hitch on it this morning, and bought a small 5x8' utility trailer. I'll deprive you of the tedious details of my shopping for safety gear, but suffice it to say that I've made the necessary arrangements so that I'm not going to explode my brain on rocks.

So now all that's left is to go ride. I've been getting to know the members of the Windrock ATV Club, based at the Coal Creek OHV Area, and they invited me to come along on a club ride this Saturday in Coal Creek. I won't bother bringing the big camera gear this time — I'll focus on getting comfortable with the bike and the trails for now. Also I don't want to ask 20 people to wait while I set up my tripod and carefully check focus on the ground glass with a loupe.

I'm really hoping that eventually, once Andrés is established financially, he'll get a dirt bike like he's been talking about, and we can go riding together. In the meantime, I'll probably ride with the club most of the time, since it's safer to avoid riding alone.