After Action Report: Dirtastic Women’s Dirt Bike Camp
What a women's dirt bike camp in Oregon taught me about pressure, performance, and showing up for yourself.
Operator: Kass | Date: May 2026 | Location: Jacksonville, Oregon Platform: Kawasaki KLX 140RL | Experience Level Going In: Minimal
Executive Summary
Fifty-one years old. Minimal riding experience. Solo operation from Yakima, WA to Jacksonville, OR. Two days of trail riding including an accidental Level 3 on day one. Full kit won from Fly Racing. Zero injuries despite multiple bike-downs. Came home with an open solar plexus and a clear confirmation of what the Inner Pathway has been building toward.
This is my Dirtastic report.
Mission Objective
This was not a competition. This was a deliberate performance test — outside my primary domain, in an unfamiliar environment, operating solo, with minimal prior training on platform.
Objective: Show up. Execute. Find out who I am when the terrain gets uncomfortable.
Secondary objective: Use this experience as the live-fire proof of concept for the Inner Pathway — the curriculum I’m building inside the Modern Day Sniper community around the relationship between mind, body, and material performance.
Gear & Logistics
Platform: Kawasaki KLX 140RL. Chosen specifically because I can put both feet flat on the ground — manageable, stable, confidence-inspiring for a developing rider. Know your platform. Ride what fits you, not what looks cool.
Transport: Solo trailering. Purchased my own trailer, ramp, and hitch. Loaded and unloaded without assistance. This matters — gear dependency is a liability. If you can’t handle your own equipment, you’re not fully autonomous.
Protective equipment: Full kit. Chest guard, knee pads, elbow pads, helmet. I laid my bike down multiple times on the mountain. I walked away without injury every time. Two other riders — my tent neighbors, younger, newer — skipped the full kit. They got banged up. The gear is not optional. Dress for the crash, not the ride.
Fuel management: Learned to monitor reserves, flip to reserve tank, and manage refueling in the field. Basic, but it had to be learned and executed in real conditions.
Camp setup: Solo. Full camp — Acacia tent (large, architectural, took practice to assemble), French press, ice chest, Jetboil. I ran the butane out on the Jetboil by forgetting to shut it off. Noted for next time. The only assist I needed all weekend was with ratchet straps — old ones, new ones, different mechanisms. That’s a skill gap I’m closing before the next op.
One-line logistics assessment: I operated independently across two states, over two days, with equipment I’d never fully field-tested. It held. I held.
Performance — Day One
Enrolled in beginner fundamentals class.
Fundamentals acquired:
Feathering the front brake
Finger placement — always maintain contact with the clutch
The clutch is your best friend. Don’t be afraid of wearing it out. Use it.
Standing on the bike — learned it, need more of it
Commitment on grooved terrain — Jacksonville trails cut deep sand grooves from water runoff. You commit to the groove or you meet the ground. There is no middle.
Then they took the beginners on a Level 3 trail.
“Oops,” they said.
I stalled out repeatedly on the declines. I laid the bike down multiple times. I got back up every time. I finished the trail.
Assessment: Raw execution under unplanned pressure. No preparation, no briefing, no warm-up. Just terrain and whatever I had. I had enough.
Performance — Day Two
Level 2 trail. Deliberate this time.
Notable improvement from Day One:
Maintained engine at low RPM through technical sections — no stalling
Smoother clutch management throughout
Better situational awareness on the trail
Hill clinic: Attended a dedicated uphill/downhill skills session. I can now navigate steep technical hills with confidence. One session. Real results. Braap.
Assessment: Measurable skill acquisition over 24 hours. The fundamentals from Day One were already integrating. This is how performance develops — repetition under real conditions, not controlled range drills.
What Broke Down
The instructor situation.
Three instructors. Snarky comments. Targeted at newer riders, including me.
I confirmed it wasn’t imagined. I confirmed it calmly. And I rode away.
No argument. No emotional spiral. No replaying it in my tent that night.
This is worth noting in an after-action context: your ability to manage social friction in a performance environment is a skill. If I had let that situation take up real estate in my head, it would have cost me performance on the trail. It didn’t. I compartmentalized, re-focused, and executed.
Know when to disengage. Not every battle is worth fighting. The trail is the mission.
Bad instruction has a way of making you grateful for good instruction. If you've been through Caylen's fundamentals class, you know what I mean. That man is a gift to beginners. Not everyone is.
Mental Performance Assessment
This is where it gets relevant for the rifleman community.
The terrain on Day One was, objectively, sketchy. Life and limb territory. The kind of environment where broken bones are a real possibility and getting off the mountain under your own power is not guaranteed.
My internal state: calm. Present. Grounded.
No anxiety. No scanning for external validation. No performance anxiety about what the women around me thought of my riding. I was entirely self-contained — operating from my own internal reference point, not from the crowd.
When I cleared a difficult section, the satisfaction was mine. Not because someone acknowledged it. Just because I knew.
This is new for me. External validation was a significant distortion pattern for years. The fact that it wasn’t present in a high-stakes physical environment tells me something important about where the inner work has landed.
And this is exactly the point I want to make to anyone in this community who performs under pressure — whether behind a rifle, on a stage, in a boardroom, or on a mountain:
The material item only performs as well as the operator behind it.
You can have the best rifle, the best bike, the best gear. If your mind is running on external validation, fear of judgment, or unresolved noise from your past — that’s what’s going to show up downrange. In the groove. Under pressure.
Mind. Body. Material world. All three have to be working together. When they are, you feel it. I felt it on that mountain. It was golden.
What I’d Do Differently
Get the fundamentals dialed before the large group event. Two hundred riders, mixed skill levels, variable instruction quality — not the ideal environment to be learning basic clutch control. I’d recommend getting range time on your platform before attending a clinic of this size. Show up to the clinic to refine, improve, but not to learn from scratch.
That said — if you have minimal experience and the opportunity comes up, go anyway. Just know that beginner level is usually a lie and you need to be okay with that. Discomfort is the curriculum. The Level 3 I accidentally rode on Day One taught me more than any controlled beginner drill would have.
Key Takeaways
On gear: Dress for the crash. Full kit, every time. The riders who skipped it paid for it.
On autonomy: If you can’t handle your own equipment independently, you’re not fully mission-ready. Close the gap.
On performance under pressure: Calm is a skill. It’s trained, not given. If you’re still running on external validation or unresolved internal noise, that’s the first thing to work on — not your trigger pull.
On skill acquisition: One focused day of deliberate practice produces measurable results. Day Two was noticeably cleaner than Day One. Trust the process.
On the Inner Pathway: This weekend was live proof of concept. The mind work came first. The physical performance followed. That’s the sequence. That’s always been the sequence.
Connection to the Inner Pathway
The Inner Pathway — the curriculum I’m building inside Modern Day Sniper — is built on a simple premise: your inner world is the first range you have to master.
Most performance training focuses on the external. The platform. The technique. The data. All of that matters. But underneath it, the operator is running an internal program. Patterns laid down by experience, by wounds, by the things that were never resolved.
Dirtastic was a field test of what happens when that internal program has been upgraded.
I didn’t ride well because I’m a skilled rider. I rode well because I wasn’t fighting myself while I was doing it. I was just there. Fully present. Fully capable. Fully mine.
That’s the goal of the Inner Pathway. Not to make you a different person. To clear the noise so the person you already are can actually show up and perform.
The mountain will show you who you are. Make sure you like what you find.
Kass | The Dirt Codes | Modern Day Sniper — Inner Pathway
Way cool. I believe in what you learned. Rode a similar rig overseas for four years in the bush. Agree on all that you observed. Calm confidence and reasonable curiosity got me through some tough goes, especially when I was over my head. Belief in self matters a lot. You go gurl.
Powerful clarity, with lots of heart...as always, love seeing you in action with pics!