Motorcyclist escapes serious injury in wreck and his GPS lived to tell about it

I am a motorcycle enthusiast and I use my Garmin® GPS III Plus on long-distance motorcycle trips. In July of 2000, I organized a motorcycle rally in Mountain Home, Arkansas, and was out for a ride one evening when I came around a corner and was surprised by a deer. I woke up in the hospital the next day with a minor concussion (thank God for helmets), and found out the bike was totaled.

My wife went to the hotel room where I had been staying and collected all my belongings. I checked out of the hospital and flew home after a couple of days. When I got home, I was dismayed to find out my GPS was missing. My wife said she thought she packed it in the bag when she went to the hotel, and I assumed I lost it either at the hospital or on the flight home. I went out and bought a new Garmin eMap® and figured the III Plus was forever lost. Later, I recovered my wrecked motorcycle and rebuilt it over the following months.

In April of 2001 (nine months later), I decided to ride my rebuilt motorcycle back to the crash site in an effort to get some final closure on the whole episode. After several passes up and down the mountain road where I wrecked, I finally located the corner where I went down. I stopped and began combing the ditch for broken motorcycle bits. As I was preparing to leave, I stepped on something under a large weed, and when I looked down, there sat my GPS III® Plus, facedown and smashed into the dirt. I picked it up, turned it on and it started to work, but the batteries died and the screen went blank. After flying off the bike at full speed and impacting the ground, followed by nine months of exposure that included one of the worst summers on record and the Arkansas ice storms in the winter, the GPS still worked fine. It was just a bit scratched up from the impact.

But the story gets better. I brought the GPS home, put in a fresh set of batteries and uploaded the active track log into the MapSource® Roads and Recreation software. Upon examining the track log from that fateful ride, I could reconstruct the entire journey right down to the exact second I left the hotel. The most interesting data in the log are the last two data points just prior to impact. The track log shows I traveled for 829 feet at 70.7 mph and then changed course for 43 feet at 49.9 mph.

This tells me what I wanted to know. Even though there was a deer in the road, the real cause of the accident was that I entered a 30 mph turn at over double that speed. Then, when I spotted the deer and tried to brake, I lost control because of my speed. Thanks to the GPS, I feel like I have final closure on the accident and I know the true cause. I now pay closer attention to my corner entrance speeds when I ride so as not to repeat the mistake.
Fred H.

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