I left the gas station in Flagstaff at 12:22 a.m., exactly 89.9 miles from my own driveway, and turned south onto Lake Mary Road. I have been in the saddle all day. Why I am riding at night on a road notorious for elk, deer, and bear is none of your business. Is it life or death? It is important enough to take the risk. That is all you get.

Lake Mary Road is posted 50. I am going 40 and that feels fast. I just passed a stain of blood off the center line, wide as a truck hood, with the smell of a fresh kill still hanging in the air.

I have already passed five bull elk, including one that shot directly in front of me at 50 yards, and later a small herd of cow elk grazing just off the left shoulder. I am on a 2000 BMW R 1150 GS with dirt-oriented tires. No traction control. No ABS. Stopping power is a negotiation with physics. I am grateful I swapped the halogen H1s for LEDs last month, because my visibility is good, but this is a high road and it is lined end to end with winter weather reflective markers. After PRK eye surgery every one of them shines straight back into my eyes, limiting my visibility in the shadows. The reflectors are not what worry me. What worries me is the sporadic nature of mule deer, and right now both the deer and the elk are moving with their young.

It is cold. I just crested 7,600 feet and started the long, slow descent from the high point on Lake Mary Road toward the AZ-87. Going the posted 50 right now feels like a death sentence.

Ninety miles, near enough, and I do the simple math in my head. At 40 miles an hour, I am better than two hours from the house, a trip that normally takes about 90 minutes. Two hours of holding the old, sticky throttle cable steady while covering the front brake and trying not to white-knuckle the grips. And somewhere in that math, a question surfaces. Does going 40 actually matter if the road must be ridden? Is it wisdom, or is it an illusion?

Speed times time equals distance (S x T = D). The distance (D) is fixed. Every mile an hour (S) I give up, I buy back in exposure (T). Slower means more minutes on a road where the hazards do not care about my minutes. As I come over a rise, thick skid marks on the backside veer off into the other lane. As common on this road as car fire marks are on the AZ-87 headed to the steep roads and high temperatures of the Phoenix valley floor. "ABS is earning its keep on this road," I think.

My rule for riding around here is simple: there is nothing to see or do on a motorcycle an hour and a half before sunset in the warm months. The deer and elk taught me that one encounter at a time. Tonight I am breaking it in the deepest part of the night. If I make it home, I will swear I am never doing this again. I have sworn that before.

An oncoming car appears, the first I have seen the entire ride. They refuse to dim their high beams no matter how many times I flash them. I do not blame them. This road is so thick with animals tonight that dimming your lights, even for oncoming traffic, almost feels irresponsible. I put my eyes on the white line to preserve my vision until the pass. When the reflectors thin out, I can finally see more depth, and I feel good enough to bring it up to 43. Not a mile per hour more.

I am shivering now. Part of it is the cold at 7,000 feet in the early morning. My mirrors are fogged. But part of it is the chemical stress cocktail still flowing through my veins. A mule deer thirty yards off the right shot toward me as I neared, and for one long second we were on a collision course. I locked the brakes and the rear wheel broke loose, the familiar squeal of an adventure tire skidding on a bike with no computer or technology to fill in the gaps. I remembered my training. I held the rear brake down and rode it out. The mule deer adjusted course and broke back into the timberline at a 45 degree angle.

When we throw a leg over a motorcycle, we sign up for all of it. Day or night, rain or shine. You do everything you can to persuade the outcome. Technology, training, bike and tire selection, route selection & timing…whatever levers you believe you hold. But there is a harder question buried inside of that we often don't want to address. How much of that is control, wisdom, & prudence, and how much is the feeling of control?

I am going 38 in a 55 now as I transition from Lake Mary Road, turning right onto the AZ-87, headed toward Pine, AZ. Since turning off Lake Mary Road I have counted seven more elk, and I flash my high beams at the rare oncoming car as a warning; they brake immediately knowing full well what I am communicating. Several hours earlier, far north of here between Page and Tuba City, two cars met head-on in a devastating accident. The medical examiner's vehicle was on scene when I passed. Not a good day. We could pull the statistics and note that most riders get hurt in daylight. But there are very few fools on this road at 2 a.m., and the data does not tell a perfect story about the ones who are.

You could call what I am doing tonight idiotic, and in some ways you would be right. I will say only this. I have spent my entire professional life leading in high-risk environments. I know the difference between a risk taken blind and a risk taken with open eyes. This ride had to happen. There was no way around it.

So I am left with the question, and I turn it over with every dark mile. Is 38 in a 55 doing anything except stretching my time in the kill zone? Or is it the only honest answer to a bike with no ABS and a night with no margin? Am I mitigating the environment, or performing a ritual for my own nerves?

The universe does not wait long to weigh in.

A flatbed comes up behind me fast, the first car of the night approaching from behind, and it puts a pressure on me to pick up the pace with few options to pass. Just as I do, I round a corner and there is a bull elk standing in my lane, his whole silhouette thrown up by my headlight. Guardrail on my right. Steep drop beyond it. He has nowhere to go but stand like a buttress in my lane or head back the way he came. As I near him, his instincts kick in…he begins his u-turn directly into me before shooting 90 degrees back into the woods. I lock the rear again, aware that the car behind me is oblivious to what is around the bend. I pull over immediately after the guardrail on a small edge of the road to let the truck pass and my nerves to settle. 

Had I been riding the posted limit, there is no version of that corner where I come out clean. Not with my skills, not with that bike, not with those tires. No way. The speed I gave up is the only thing that bought me the seconds to see him, react, and keep the skid short.

For one corner, at least, the slow hand won the argument.

Or did it? Had I been going the posted limit, I would have passed that corner two minutes sooner. Maybe the bull is still in the trees. Maybe he is broadside in my lane with no time to name what killed me. My speed did not just decide how I met him. It decided that I met him. Every speed is a different road, populated by different animals, and you only get to ride one of them. The slow hand saved me from an encounter the slow hand arranged.

But I have the counterexample too. Years ago I got turned around off the road east of Lake Mary Road near the Arizona BDR. I had no intention of riding at night, but lost in the maze of offroad options, I hit the gate and the AZ-87 well into darkness. I found myself on the AZ-87 on a KTM 500 with a stock headlight and traffic stacking up behind me. That night I made the opposite decision. Part world-view, part blind ignorance to the risk of being new to Arizona, I rode the speed limit pace despite significantly less visibility than I have tonight. I came through untouched. Two nights, two philosophies, two riders home safe. The math refuses to settle.

The air warms as I descend. A forest service sign prohibits fires and charcoal, a reminder that we are at the peak of fire season even as the monsoons have just begun barreling through every afternoon, which is part of why the elk are moving so hard tonight. The front just moved out, and they are eager to move and feed after being hammered all day.

Coming down into Strawberry off the short but exciting twisties off the Mogollon Rim, the radar sign reads 28 in a 35. I have never triggered that sign from below before. Normally this stretch is a reward, a tight set of twisties I take with some appetite. Tonight it is just distance between me and the driveway. In Pine, the sign reads 23. A fair reflection of my nerves.

My legs are cramping from the chemical cocktail my body has been dumping for the past two hours with every encounter. I am half tempted to park the bike outside the brewery and call my wife, or just walk the rest. But that trades one risk for another. A narrow road on foot in the dark, or my wife out among the same elk that have been trying all night to make my case for me. No. This one I finish myself.

Leaving Pine the limit rises to 55 and I hold 35. That nearly doubles my remaining time on the road. There is the question again, riding pillion the whole way home. Is it worth going slow? Am I in control of anything? Did the universe arrange that bull on that corner at that second, and would it have arranged him differently at a different speed? I do not know.

The second car of the entire ride approaches from behind. I pull onto a generous shoulder to let the car pass rather than carry them on my tail through the long no-passing section into Payson. As luck would have it, it is a Gila County Sheriff's Deputy, who looks at a motorcycle parked on the shoulder at nearly three in the morning with its hazards on and decides he has more urgent matters to attend to. I pass the spot where my son went over the bars in a freak tank slapper a few years back. For six months you could see my skid marks where I locked it up behind him to hold off the traffic. The road has been repaved since. The asphalt forgets. I do not.

The last miles into Payson, I stay vigilant. There is an old saying that most wrecks happen close to home, when the guard drops because the driveway feels close enough to touch. Our neighborhood is a grazing ground. The town's northern roundabout holds a statue of an elk, an homage to their cultural importance.

I pull into the driveway an hour and fifteen minutes past what the GPS promised. My wife opens the garage door a few minutes after three. Just as I swing off the bike and pull my ear plugs, I hear it. Hooves on the concrete, somewhere down our street in the dark.

She is standing there. She's stood through seasons where return was no guarantee. I look at her intently and say, "Promise me. No matter how critical it is, you will never let me do that again."

She doesn't say anything in response. Her look is the answer.

I made it home alive. That is a very good day. 

Author's note: This story has a crazy ending. I take a sauna almost every day, and a few days after this ride I found myself sitting next to a guy who had a story to tell. Friday night, he was headed to Flagstaff on Lake Mary Road in his custom blue Jeep. "It had just turned dark," he said. "I came around a corner, locked up the brakes, and hit an elk. There was no way to stop. I totaled the Jeep." I asked him where it happened. It was the exact blood stain I had passed 10 miles into my ride south. Small world.