The Trophy's in the Basement: A Conversation with Jeff Nash

Who is Jeff Nash? Jeff Nash is Klim's Mid-Atlantic sales rep, an AMA Vintage Days national trials champion (that's the trophy in the basement), and a guy who has spent his lifetime in the powersports business. If you've seen his Wheelie Wednesday videos, you already know he rides like a man who never got the memo that you're supposed to slow down. He came to us through his work with Amanda prepping for the Legacy Lap, but he stayed because he turned out to be a gold mine of stories.

Jeff got introduced to me by Amanda Knapp, my co-contributor on our Isle of Man Legacy Lap coverage and a friend of American Moto Co. The pitch was simple: I wanted to talk to the guy who helped get Amanda ready for her adventure.

Jeff started as a kid on a minibike his older brothers put him up to, saw On Any Sunday and immediately became hooked like the rest of us. He went on to race motocross, hare scrambles, and four-plus decades of trials. He's spent his entire working life in the industry: parts counter as a teenager, ten years as a parts manager outside DC, outside sales since '98, and he's the oldest rep at Klim now. He says it like a punchline: he walked into his first sales meetings as one of the youngest guys in the room, and somewhere along the way became the old guy in it.

Klim has official women's ambassadors, but Jeff wanted to do this one on his own end. He met Amanda at Bob's BMW during a Klim open house, asked what she rode, and what she was about before he ever talked product. Then went home and did his homework. Amanda has West Virginia roots, like him, she was on the cover of American Motorcyclist and has a PhD in education. He immediately got behind her journey, putting Amanda in the Klim Artemis jacket, the X1 Alpha helmet and Altitude pants. Amanda took a rented BMW GS 1250 across the UK and the Isle of Man in the rain and the cold: Cavern Club, Stonehenge, and a meeting with Elspeth Beard along the way, staying dry and comfortable the whole time.

But you are not here to read a story about Jeff’s day job, you are here because Jeff has stories from the road, and I would not want to disappoint.

Back in 1979, Jeff and his buddy Pete borrowed a lawyer's Cessna 182, they'd done the plane's annual inspection and flew it out to Oshkosh, then all over the northwest. Two kids, twenty and twenty-one at the time. That trip is how Jeff came to know Montana. He lived in Great Falls for a year. Pete eventually put down roots in Lewistown. And then, somehow, twenty-five years went by before Jeff made it back out to see him.

When he finally did, Pete, who now has "all the toys," including a couple of airplanes, wheeled out a 1952 Indian Chief he'd restored from the frame up.

If you've never thrown a leg over an old Indian, here's the puzzle. The clutch is on your foot. The throttle is on your left hand. The ignition timing is a lever you set by hand. And the whole thing is a 1,300cc air-cooled three-speed that wants to be rocked through the gears, not rushed. Jeff hadn't touched a foot-clutch bike since a Cushman scooter around 1970. Pete, who doesn't trust just anybody on his machines, had Jeff ride around a field first to make sure he had it.

The first couple of stoplights were sketchy, you can't put your left foot down, because your left foot is the clutch, so you've got to lean the bike to your right. But once it clicked, Jeff said it was one of the best afternoons he's had on two wheels. Torquey, surprisingly comfortable, completely alive. A seventy-year-old machine that rides like nothing else on earth.

Then there's Baja, which Jeff has ridden something like a dozen times since 1999, always with the same crew he's known since he was a kid. In the early years he was the trail boss, navigating an entire peninsula off a paper map.

Baja has no mercy. Jeff has knelt in monsoon rain and field-dressed a friend's severed fingertip, splinted the bone back on and got him eight miles to the nearest town with a doctor. But ask him about Baja and he doesn't go to the danger. He goes to the beach.

There's a point in the ride where you climb up out of the canyons, dry, blown-out, technical stuff, and crest a rise, and the entire Pacific just opens up in front of you. He feels it before he sees it: the thermal wave rolling off the ocean, that first cool lungful of sea air. Then you drop down onto the sand and open it up. Miles of empty beach at full throttle. Wheelies. Donuts in the sand. His oldest friends strung out beside him, four-stroke exhaust and salt and surf mist all arriving at once.

He's had moments out there so beautiful he's teared up inside his helmet.

"I'm gonna tear up now a little bit," he told me on the call.

That's what keeps pulling him back. His buddy Chuck swears every single year that he's finally done with Baja, then calls two weeks later to start planning the next one. It was never the top speed or the bragging rights. It's the end of the day, a hotel and a meal and a drink, everybody retelling the same ride a little taller than the last.

I have seen videos myself, but never made the trip, so I ask him what Baja actually smells like, he didn't pause: desert after rain, cactus and sagebrush, the cattle ranches, all of it coming at you at speed.

Takeaways:

For new riders: Start small and forgiving. Fifty years in, Jeff still preaches the little dirt bike as the best teacher there is it's how he learned, and it's how he'd tell you to learn.

For experienced riders: The people Jeff has ridden with the longest are the ones he met young. Keep showing up for those people. The trips compound, and so do the friendships.

For all of us: Never stop having fun.

We're going to need a part two, his wife called it before we even started recording, Jeff has enough stories to fill a few days and barely scratch the surface.

I already know I'm going to get him back to share more....