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VOL. 54 ISSUE 44 NOVEMBER 7, 2017 P109 by none other than Dick O'Brien, who would go on to become the head of racing for Harley-Davidson. "That was one helluva a motorcycle," Piet remem- bers. "I could do 70 miles per hour on gravel roads with the thing." On the O'Brien-tuned 165, in 1959, Piet was able to win his first district enduro championship. Shortly after that win, Piet, now on a 250cc Villiers-powered DMW, won the Lightweight class at the 150-mile National Championship Enduro in Cayuta, NY, followed the very next month by winning the Expert Lightweight class at the Covered Wagon 200-mile National Championship in the Berkshires. Piet was suddenly one of the leading enduro riders the Northeast. Piet really came into his own when he stepped up to racing a Triumph, T100C, a motorcycle that better fit his tall stature. On the Triumph he went on to dominate the New England enduro Heavyweight class throughout most of the 1960s. As a result, Piet was awarded the an- nual New England Heavyweight Enduro Championship in 1965, 1967, 1968 and 1969. In 1966, he was awarded the overall New England Enduro Grand Championship over a huge field of expert riders with much lighter- weight motorcycles that were generally considered to have an advantage in the New England terrain. Piet said the camaraderie of enduro racing was a great joy to him throughout his career, making him al- most reluctant to talk about one of his only disappoint- ments and that was missing out on riding the first ISDT held in the USA, in the Berkshires in 1973. He was 48 at the time, but still the top Triumph enduro rider in the East. Triumph's U.S. squad was headed up by a west coast representative and he called to talk to Piet about the possibility of being on the team. "We talked for a while and then he asked me how old I was," Piet recalls. "I thought, 'Oh crap, this is what he wanted to know all along!' I told him how old I was and he asked me if I could still ride for six days and I told him I could. I told him I worked for IBM and he asked if I could get off work to ride all the qualifiers. I told him I would have to ask my employer first. He said we'd talk in two days. "He called back and said he was sorry, but they'd picked their team, so I didn't get in." Possibly hurt by Triumph's rejection, Piet decided to not enter the ISDT even as a private rider. "I just fig- ured if I couldn't ride for Triumph I didn't want to ride." It wasn't until he was in his 50s that Piet finally backed off his competition schedule and began to compete primarily for fun. About that time, he began turning his attention to long-distance adventure tour- ing. He also joined and later became president of the Crotona Motorcycle Club of White Plains, NY, one of the oldest AMA-chartered clubs in the country. In 1977, he became the first motorcyclist to travel Canada's then 480-mile Cassiar Highway from Kitwanga Junction, BC, through what is often called "bigfoot country," to its connection with the Alaska Highway near Watson Lake in the Yukon Territory. He accomplished this during his first long solo dual-sport ride to Alaska and back, which was a 13,000-mile adventurous odyssey from his home in New York. And what machine did Piet use on this long-distance adventure tour? A Suzuki GS750! Not your typical adventure-touring rig. Piet would go on to do many record-setting adventure tours, including in 1989 being the first motorcyclist to ride a Honda Gold Wing to the foot of Copper Canyon in the Sierra Madre Occidental Mountains of western Mexico. Piet also became a touring writer and magazine stories of his adven- tures were extremely popular with readers. He continued adventure touring well into his 80s and won accolades for his writings until his fateful crash when he was 87. On his 2013 accident Piet thinks he might have recovered enough to ride again, but "My family held their breaths whenever I talked about riding again, so I quit 'while I was ahead.' I rode for 67 years." Few riders can boast about the kind of adventures Piet experienced by motorcycle and fortunately for us, he documented many of those adventures by book and via his excellent Piet Boonstra blog subtitled, "You may doubt his sanity, but never his resolve." You can find the blog here. CN Subscribe to nearly 50 years of Cycle News Archive issues: www.CycleNews.com/Archives