VOLUME 59 ISSUE 1 JANUARY 4, 2022 P45
C
hampions are often forged through
adversity and Joe Wasson has certainly
faced his challenges en route to the
2021 AMA Hare & Hound National Champion-
ship title, a journey that's taken him from living
the cowboy lifestyle to working underground
in a gold mine and, most recently, to factory-
supported desert racing champ.
He accomplished his most recent goal with a
combination of speed and consistency—generally
the hallmarks of a championship season—with
four victories in the first eight rounds of the series,
and podium finishes in all but the ninth and final
round where he raced a 125 for fun to eighth over-
all, having wrapped up the title at round eight.
It's not something he imagined at 13 years of
age when he began working on a ranch in a re-
mote part of Oregon where, he remembers, "We
took care of a bunch of cows and rode horses and
did stuff like that. I think we had, probably, 500
head of cows so we had a regular working ranch.
"We farmed, too—drove tractors, combines
and things like that, moved cows to the moun-
tains and would bring them down off the mountain
and take them to sell.
"It was a totally different lifestyle than what
I do now."
Oh, he did ride dirt bikes well before that, but
it wasn't a passion yet and he drifted away from
the sport.
COMEBACK KID
WORDS AND PHOTOGRAPHY BY MARK KARIYA
