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VOLUME 58 ISSUE 41 OCTOBER 12, 2021 P127 urday's featured 50-mile race and then scored second, behind Chuck Minert, in Sunday's 100-mile final. Walt remembers Catalina as a great racing circuit. "It was unique in that we started in town [Ava- lon] and started on the road that went up to the airport," he said. "It didn't go far before it ran out of pavement and went to dirt. It went up on fire roads and then came back down to the golf course on what they call the hour trail. It then crossed the golf course and picked up pavement again coming back into town. They had a nice high-speed jump coming down on the pavement. "We had to find a nice combination tire that worked well on the fire roads as well as on the pavement in town," he noted. "It was an interesting course. It was kind of a Grand Prix course that they later picked up doing again over at Elsinore." Walt went on to explain that the race bikes would be loaded en masse on a barge on Thursday to go to the island. Riders were not able to practice the course, but Walt and some of his buddies figured out a way around that. "We would always try to get on the haybale crew so we could at least drive around the course setting hay bales so we could see what the course was like," Axthelm said. Looking back on his victory in Catalina's 50-Miler, Walt remem- bered a run-in with Triumph flat- track rider Don Hawley. "I knew how aggressive Don was from track racing," Walt said. "He had a reputation for running into people. We came out of a corner heading up to the golf course, and Don got inside of me, and coming out, he reached over with one arm and gave me a big thump on the chest. I thought, 'Whoa, what's with this guy?'" Off the track, Axthelm became a draftsman. He was involved early in computerized drafting, and he put his skills to work in the avia- tion industry. He worked on solid modeling and became a contract engineer for Boeing. He also had a Suzuki shop in Pomona that he ran with partners in the 1970s. By the early 1960s, Walt had moved from riding the big four- strokes to the lighter, nimbler two-stroke off-road machines. He began riding Jawas and CZs, and that led to an opportunity to com- pete in the ISDT. The U.S. Jawa importer helped set up the trip to Austria for Axthelm. "They supplied me with a motorcycle, put me up in a hotel, and took care of my expenses," Axthelm said. "At the time, it was thought that I was the first Ameri- can to compete in the ISDT, and that's the way they advertised it." His bike seized on the first day, putting him out of the competition. Axthelm went back to the ISDT as part of the American team at the Isle of Man in 1965. It was held in horrible conditions that year, and he said all the Ameri- cans were out of the competition by the third day. As his career progressed, Axthelm specialized in the bur- geoning long-distance off-road races of the late 1960s and 1970s such as the Baja 1000, the Parker 400, the Tecate GP, and other events of that type. Walt raced and tested some of Suzuki's early TM250 off-road prototype bikes. He later worked with R&D for Kawasaki, racing for the factory in desert races. By 1980, Axthelm was in his late 40s, and he decided to retire after getting hit by a big rock thrown up by a racing pickup truck in one of the long-distance desert races. "I decided that it wasn't fun anymore," he said. "I had a small sailboat at Dana Point and just packed it up and went sailing, and that was it." Axthelm said that after growing old and fat drafting on a com- puter all day, he decided to take up mountain biking. He found his competitive spirit was still very much alive, and he became one of the nation's top senior mountain-bike racers. In 2007, he won the overall cycling jersey in the National Senior Games. He's now retired and lives in Durango, Colorado, and trains almost daily for bicycling competitions. This Archives edition is reprinted from the November 21, 2007, issue of Cycle News. CN has hundreds of past Archives editions in our files, too many destined to be archives themselves. So, to prevent that from happening, in the future, we will be revisiting past Archives articles while still planning to keep fresh ones com- ing down the road -Editor. Subscribe to nearly 50 years of Cycle News Archive issues: www.CycleNews.com/Archives