Then we turned off onto a fire road with packed dirt over which was slathered a layer of gravel about the size of walnuts. With every twist of the throttle on this salad of slip the rear tire lurched out sideways alarmingly. The moto men all thought this was another blast, and they ripped through it all with glee. It took me a while to realize that you use the sliding back tire to aim the less-sliding front, that the rocks machine-gunning from the back tire acted like retro rockets pointing the nose around the corners. It was terrifying, yes, but fun-terrifying.

I kept up.

One time, giving it just a little too much front brake on a downhill talcum-powder dirt turn of single track, the front wheel slid off the trail’s edge and I went flying over the handlebars like some kind of cartoon character. I landed in a perfect aikido roll and popped right back up faster than anyone could radio for a life flight chopper extraction and, with Spears’ help, pulled the bike back up and kept going.

It went on like that all day, over 110 miles in the rain and scenic splendor. I’d say that if you are a good to expert rider like my media colleagues that day you can really exploit the engineering that went into the CRF450L. It’s not a comfort cruiser, not something that anyone but iron-buttocked youth could actually ride to work and back every day. For beginners there is the less powerful CRF250L or, even better, The Grom, a micro dirt bike that is almost comically small but far easier to master. Or, for the true beginner, and I mean this in all seriousness, you can get a feel for dirt riding on the new Honda Monkey, the cutest little dirt spelunker you’ll ever see. As you graduate up through the size and power ranks of Honda dirt bikes, with the CRF450L being the crowning glory, you will want to keep the Monkey on which you started it all as a coffee table keepsake in the living room, it is that cute.