Conversations with Big Rich

Off-road videographer, Crazy Doug Hayduk, on Episode 102

March 17, 2022 Guest Doug Hayduk Season 2 Episode 102
Conversations with Big Rich
Off-road videographer, Crazy Doug Hayduk, on Episode 102
Show Notes Transcript

Crazy Doug with some crazy stories. Shooting golf clubs, racing down ski hills on wheels, blood boosting, cocoa leaves, Baja, rockcrawling. If it includes adventure, this episode has it. Join Doug Hayduk and Big Rich for Episode 102.

5:28 – I won the hill climb three years in a row.

9:53 – I was charge with solving the welding cracking problems on titanium

14:41 – mountain bikers were a little more counterculture

20:36 – I always thought the ultimate opportunity was to use my engineering in sporting goods

28:32 – we were verbally promised bonuses, that didn’t work out

39:46 – gravity carts, like soapbox derby on mountains

48:39 – I’m a legend in Park City

52:25 – All I knew was Baja racing was badass, right?

1:18:34 – It’s really satisfying having friends that will shake your hand and do something for you 

We want to thank our sponsors Maxxis Tires and 4Low Magazine.

www.maxxis.com

www.4lowmagazine.com 

Be sure to listen on your favorite podcast app.

Support the show


[00:00:01.150] - Speaker 1

Welcome to The Big Rich Show. This podcast will focus on conversations with friends and acquaintances within the fourwheel drive industry. Many of the people that I will be interviewing, you may know the name, you may know some of the history, but let's get in depth with these people and find out what truly makes them a four wheel drive enthusiast. So now is the time to sit back, grab a cold one and enjoy our conversation.

 


[00:00:29.430] - Speaker 2

Whether you're crawling the red rocks of Moab or hauling your toys to the trail, Maxxis has the tires you can trust for performance and durability, four wheels or two, Maxxis tires are the choice of Champions because they know that whether for work or play, for fun or competition, Maxxis tires deliver. Choose Maxxis Tread victoriously.

 


[00:00:55.990] - Speaker 3

Why should you read 4low Magazine? Because 4low Magazine is about your lifestyle. The four wheel drive adventure lifestyle that we all enjoy. Rock crawling, trail riding, event coverage, vehicle builds, and do it yourself tech all in a beautifully presented package. You won't find 4low on the newsstand rack. So subscribe today and have it delivered to you.

 


[00:01:20.230] - Big Rich Klein

On today's episode of Conversations with Big Rich, we have Doug Hayduk. Doug is well, Doug is a videographer. That is what he does now that I know of, at least in the off road world. I met him. He was working with Pistol Pete and I was crewing with Pistol Pete. And then I found out that he actually had come to Donner and did one of our Cal Rocks or Early We Rock event and filmed that as well. So I'm happy to talk to Doug and he's got some great stories. He's done a lot in his history and we're going to find out all about that. So, Doug, thank you for spending the time with us.

 


[00:02:01.340] - Doug Hayduk

Oh, my pleasure. I'm glad to talk with you.

 


[00:02:03.380] - Big Rich Klein

Yeah, we've had some pretty good times down in Mexico with Fast Eddie and Pete, and we'll get into all of that. But where did you grow up? How did you get started?

 


[00:02:17.590] - Doug Hayduk

I was born into a military family in Southern California, right down the road from Riverside, California, where the hotbed of off road racing was. But I had no part of that. I was living in a military family and traveled around the state, as most military brats do. And then my dad finally retired in Colorado and I settled in. Our family settled in Grand Junction, Colorado.

 


[00:02:47.450] - Big Rich Klein

And you're still in that area now?

 


[00:02:49.430] - Doug Hayduk

I'm still in that area now. Moved away. Couldn't wait to move away. Went to College, got out there. It was a small town, and I wanted the big towns with concerts and nightclubs and colleges. And here I am back here in my 60s and living here, right on the Colorado River near the Utah border and just absolutely love it. Have no desire to move anywhere else.

 


[00:03:13.860] - Big Rich Klein

That's awesome. So let's talk about those early years. How much time did you spend in the Riverside area?

 


[00:03:22.210] - Doug Hayduk

Just as a child until like the age of five. And then we moved to more military bases in Arizona and Massachusetts and then finally in Colorado Springs. My father was head of Air Defense Command in Southern California, and his work was out on the Channel Islands. So I never saw my dad as a little kid because he would take a helicopter out to the Channel Islands and run the radar base watching incursions of Russian bears. They called them the Tu 44 planes, whatever they were the bomber planes that would come in and just test our readiness. This is in the 60s. I'm a Cold War kid.

 


[00:04:01.060] - Big Rich Klein

Yeah, same here. We're only a couple of years difference, I think.

 


[00:04:04.950] - Doug Hayduk

Right.

 


[00:04:05.450] - Big Rich Klein

I'll be 64 in like ten days. And you're what, 62?

 


[00:04:09.780] - Doug Hayduk

Happy birthday. I'm 62. Almost 63.

 


[00:04:12.940] - Big Rich Klein

Okay.

 


[00:04:16.570] - Doug Hayduk

I've already made a mistake. I'm 63 when we get old. Yes, I'm catching up with you.

 


[00:04:26.890] - Big Rich Klein

Yeah. You're only a year back then or not even.

 


[00:04:30.000] - Doug Hayduk

Correct. Yeah. So anyway, my father retired here in Grand Junction. I went to high school here, and I lived on the outskirts of town where there was this big BLM area open to the public desert Hills and canyons. And it really lent itself to motorcycle riding. And of course, as soon as I could afford one, age 15, I got myself 100 CC Hodaka dirt squirt motorcycle that my brother and I went in on halfsies on, and I never looked back from there. I just loved motorcycles and I loved going out explored in the desert.

 


[00:05:10.450] - Big Rich Klein

So when you were in the before the motorcycle, were you bike riding or.

 


[00:05:16.720] - Doug Hayduk

No, no, I didn't start that. So I started out about simultaneously in high school, and I got in a bicycle club here in Grand Junction. And I didn't start racing until I was in College.

 


[00:05:27.570] - Big Rich Klein

Okay.

 


[00:05:28.420] - Doug Hayduk

But once I got into bicycle racing, I just like to ride. I went to school right outside of Denver at Colorado School of Mines. And we had a big Hill climb there every year. And I would train for that. And I won it three years in a row. And everybody said you need to get racing well. And so I started racing when I was about 22, right. When I entered graduate school.

 


[00:05:50.150] - Big Rich Klein

Did you do any athletics in high school?

 


[00:05:52.970] - Doug Hayduk

I did. I ran cross country and played basketball.

 


[00:05:56.320] - Big Rich Klein

That makes sense.

 


[00:05:57.510] - Doug Hayduk

And really my passion in sports was to be a basketball player. I loved it all the time. And we'd go play at the College here, the junior College that was here and play against really good guys, College guys, and just loved it. But I just was not that good.

 


[00:06:17.290] - Big Rich Klein

Yeah, I understand.

 


[00:06:21.070] - Doug Hayduk

I just didn't have it.

 


[00:06:22.930] - Big Rich Klein

I loved football, but I sucked in high school. But I think it was all my mindset at the time. It wasn't that I could have been good if I had a different mindset.

 


[00:06:37.640] - Doug Hayduk

Yeah. It takes that dedication and intensity. Right. And to some, it seems to come natural and others not so or it comes a little later. Yeah.

 


[00:06:49.030] - Big Rich Klein

You have to be kind of aggro and super aggressive, at least in contact sports, like football and basketball the same way, because it is definitely a contact sport.

 


[00:06:58.660] - Doug Hayduk

Oh, yeah. And my parents pushed me into academics, and I went into engineering at Colorado School Mines, and that was a real good school. I actually was going to go into the military. Coming from an Air Force family, I was applied to the Air Force Academy, and they turned me down for my eyesight. I didn't have 2020 uncorrected. And even though I had 2020 corrected. And then about three months later, they changed their mind and said, yeah, we'll take you. Come on. My father was a Colonel in the Air Force, and having grown up in Colorado Springs, I said, yeah, come on over to Air Force Academy. But by then, I had already decided to stay at School of Mines and be a civilian. Okay. I was a little worried about the discipline and the rigidity of the Air Force lifestyle.

 


[00:07:54.760] - Big Rich Klein

I can understand that.

 


[00:07:58.030] - Doug Hayduk

I think I made the right decision.

 


[00:07:59.830] - Big Rich Klein

That's kind of the reason I led the life I've led.

 


[00:08:06.130] - Doug Hayduk

Yeah. That freedom is a nice thing, and the military doesn't offer that so much. They take care of you, but you do what they say when they say.

 


[00:08:14.830] - Big Rich Klein

Yeah, that or they eliminate your ride, and then you get that thing hanging over you and everything else.

 


[00:08:24.460] - Doug Hayduk

Oh, yeah.

 


[00:08:25.990] - Big Rich Klein

So what kind of engineering were you looking to do?

 


[00:08:31.750] - Doug Hayduk

Well, by the time I was in College, I really liked fabrication of parts. I like welding. I worked on my motorcycle, I worked on bicycles. And I wanted to learn about welding and metal construction. So I learned that there was a subject called metallurgy, and it was all about the manufacturing and production of metals, and that was a College degree that Colorado School of Mines offered. And they had a track record of employing everybody that got out of there and got a real high paying job and the offer of the opportunity to have maybe a half a dozen professional job opportunities once you graduated. So I stayed there for four years and got a bachelor's degree was ready to take a job at the Rockwell International Rocky Flats plant, which made the triggers and the interior workings of atomic bombs, which was a plant that's no longer around, which is halfway between Denver and Boulder. And all that work has been moved down to Texas now just outside of Amarillo. But I decided to stay on. I was offered a graduate degree or graduate program, and I stayed on working as a civilian for the Navy.

 


[00:09:52.990] 

Okay.

 


[00:09:53.540] - Doug Hayduk

And I was charged with helping to solve their welding cracking problems on thick section titanium for submarine holes.

 


[00:10:06.010] - Big Rich Klein

Wow.

 


[00:10:07.090] - Doug Hayduk

Yeah. The submarine program again, this is still Cold War, even though it's 1980 now.

 


[00:10:11.780] - Big Rich Klein

Right.

 


[00:10:13.690] - Doug Hayduk

Titanium hold submarines could stay under longer, dive deeper because the holes were stronger and they had problems with some of the alloys they were using. So I had a coaching from the Office of Naval Research, and they paid my full way through College graduate school to help solve their Weld cracking problems.

 


[00:10:39.730] - Big Rich Klein

Well, correct me if I'm wrong, but titanium is very strong, but it's also brittle.

 


[00:10:47.770] - Doug Hayduk

Yes, it can be brittle. It can be really brittle, especially if you have problems welding it. The fabrication of it is very difficult.

 


[00:10:54.920] - Big Rich Klein

Right. When I played darts at a pretty high level, I wouldn't say it was professional, but I was on a tour kind of.

 


[00:11:06.040] - Doug Hayduk

Yeah.

 


[00:11:07.810] - Big Rich Klein

I use titanium darts because I could get a smaller Dart and carry the same weight.

 


[00:11:13.170] - Doug Hayduk

Right.

 


[00:11:14.890] - Big Rich Klein

And I remember that the first set of darts that I had custom made actually broke when they hit a hard tiled floor. And it was like, okay, we got to start that one over again.

 


[00:11:29.070] - Doug Hayduk

Yeah. Well, there's a whole series of titanium Malinois. It's actually a fairly new metal. It's called an aerospace metal. And it really wasn't available to us into manufacturing until the 50s.

 


[00:11:42.750] - Big Rich Klein

Right.

 


[00:11:43.120] - Doug Hayduk

In fact, the Russians were ahead of us there, and a lot of the work that I was doing were on pieces of Russian submarine that we had acquired. And I wasn't allowed to talk about it at the time. I was not allowed to talk about the composition, but I could tell from the pieces that were given to us they were cut out of Russian submarine holes. And it was turns out to be a sunken Russian submarine in the Baltic Sea near off the coast of Sweden, that we are trying to see what alloys they were using and how they were developing their submarines.

 


[00:12:14.970] - Big Rich Klein

So kind of a reverse engineer.

 


[00:12:16.970] - Doug Hayduk

Yes. And compare them against the alloys that we were using and the welding processes that we were using.

 


[00:12:23.950] - Big Rich Klein

And how long did you stay in the engineering world?

 


[00:12:29.530] - Doug Hayduk

On and off until now, really. I worked professionally in Southern California and worked on the cruise missile program and refurbishing the Atlas missiles after the failure of the Shuttle Challenger. They needed launch vehicles for satellites and other missions, and they had a big warehouse full of Atlas, which were the old original ICBMs designed by Werner von Braun. And so I worked at General Dynamics in San Diego, downtown San Diego for both the cruise missile and the Atlas program. And the thing about living in San Diego is I loved that beach and I loved the bicycle riding there. And I joined the San Diego Bicycle Club, and everybody encouraged me to keep racing because I was good. They said I was good for being a big guy, and I got results. So I ended up just leaving work quitting after a few years to race and moved back to Boulder, Colorado, and raced on a team for a couple of years.

 


[00:13:47.640] - Big Rich Klein

Wow.

 


[00:13:47.990] - Doug Hayduk

And traveled around, raced all over the Western US. Not a pro, and I wasn't at the most elite level, but I raced against the guys that were in the elite level, the guys that were going to the Tour de France and the guys that were sponsored by 711.

 


[00:14:03.670] - Big Rich Klein

Wow. That's pretty cool.

 


[00:14:06.320] - Doug Hayduk

I knew that you had raised I was lean and mean. And I got into mountain bike racing early, too, in 1983 when the first, which was the first or second year of commercially available mountain bikes.

 


[00:14:19.510] - Big Rich Klein

Wow. Let's talk about that.

 


[00:14:22.150] - Doug Hayduk

Well, that was fun because it's more like a motorcycle thing. It was a little not as strict and rigid as road racing was, and there weren't as many people into it. So being a good road racer and having that fitness, I automatically could pretty much kick ass on a mountain bike.

 


[00:14:37.480] - Big Rich Klein

Right. And being training at high altitude to begin with.

 


[00:14:41.100] - Doug Hayduk

Yeah. And spending a lot of time on a bike, you just had that fitness. That mountain bikers were a little more kind of a counterculture and a little more hippies and like to smoke their weed before they go ride. And that's not so conducive to racing. And road racers are very strict. We watch what we eat, we count our calories, we monitor our heart rate before and after exercising. And it's kind of more than I really wanted to do. Again, it was like being in the military to be a high level racer, and I didn't like that. I like to play around. I like to go to 711 and buy a 99 cent burrito and slather it with crappy salsa half an hour before race. And whatever happens, happens. I used to do that.

 


[00:15:29.840] - Big Rich Klein

So I have a question. Anybody that was that's been a biker at a level like you have, were you surprised about Armstrong getting busted for performance enhancing?

 


[00:15:47.260] - Doug Hayduk

No, because we knew about that. We knew about that even back in the 80s, what we were doing, there wasn't really a lot of suspicion back then. We would do epinephrine, we were trying to do bronchio dilators to open up our breathing because that's what seemed to matter and really would impact us was being able to have taken bigger breaths of air and open up your Airways. So we would take these like asthmatics, we'd take these bronchio dilators, and that is the kind of thing that will get you kicked out of professional racing. But back then, they were not tested for it. But then when Armstrong came around in the 90s, he started as a junior in 92, I think, and I raced against them down in Brisbane, New Mexico, was the first race I ever confronted him in, and they were already talking about him. And by then, when he got in as a professional, we all knew that the doping happened, but we didn't know to what extent. They were pretty secretive about it, but it didn't surprise me. Our Olympians got busted back in 1984. Our Olympic team in Southern California, which were also guys I raced against because I was living in Southern California in 1884, they got busted for what was called blood boosting, which would take out their own blood, oxygenate it, and then put it in the Frigger and then put it back in their body right before a race to give them a higher red blood cell count.

 


[00:17:13.630] - Doug Hayduk

A higher hematocyte level is what it was called. And they somehow were able to keep their metals because they were using their own body fluids. It was not doping. Technically it is now, but it wasn't then. It was called blood boosting.

 


[00:17:30.460] - Big Rich Klein

Blood boosting. Interesting.

 


[00:17:32.410] - Doug Hayduk

Yeah.

 


[00:17:32.960] - Big Rich Klein

Pretty wild. So you raced for a couple of years. You started off racing when you were at the School of Mines?

 


[00:17:42.430] - Doug Hayduk

Yeah. I raised a total of 20 years on and off. Wow. Until about the year 2000 or 2001. But I really tapered down in the 90s. When I realized it's 35 years old, I thought, okay, now I'm a veteran. I go in this category called vets, and I can kick ass and I get in the vets. And it was all the same guys that were beating me when I was in my 20s, the same guys that are a little bit older and showing some age, but they're just as fast. I thought they were going to all quit and I was going to keep racing. No, they're still there racing and beating me. So almost like the way it was for me in basketball, I realized I'm really not that good, and I'm not getting paid to do this. I'm getting product, but I need to focus on other things.

 


[00:18:25.330] - Big Rich Klein

Right.

 


[00:18:25.730] - Doug Hayduk

And so I slowed down with that.

 


[00:18:29.830] - Big Rich Klein

But you didn't go back into engineering?

 


[00:18:31.910] - Doug Hayduk

I did. Oh, yeah. I still kept my engineering job. Okay. I still work at eight to five. I would get out of work. I worked for a large mining company in Salt Lake City for eight years. That was my longest job. And I would get out of work at 430, and I would rush home, get on my bike and ride till it was dark right up the canyons it's out of Salt Lake City and try to go one and a half hour exercise before it was dark. And then, of course, more in the summer. And I'd go race on the weekends. And I'd come to work beat on Monday morning when I was supposed to be chipper and fresh and make my bosses happy. But, yeah, I kept on an engineering, and I had some really great experiences. I learned to speak Spanish because I worked in South America. I worked in Lima, Peru, for a copper mining company for a while.

 


[00:19:21.620] - Big Rich Klein

Wow.

 


[00:19:23.230] - Doug Hayduk

It was a company. American company. But we own half of a large private copper mining company in Impression, metals company in Peru.

 


[00:19:33.580] - Big Rich Klein

Well, that's awesome. Them. Where else have you traveled?

 


[00:19:38.050] - Doug Hayduk

All over Central America. I went to Europe with some bike racers out of Sweden and traveled around Europe, didn't race, but just ran around with our bikes and road and followed the Tour de France. I've been to the Tour de France race following that as a spectator. Oh, four or five times, four or five different years. So I enjoyed Europe. And then I worked for a bike company for a little bit, and they sent me to Taiwan, had some interesting travels there.

 


[00:20:11.100] - Big Rich Klein

What bike company did you work for?

 


[00:20:13.220] - Doug Hayduk

It was a Swiss company called DT Swiss. They make bicycle wheels, hubs and spokes. All started in Switzerland, and they started their company here in Colorado, their US office.

 


[00:20:26.090] - Big Rich Klein

And again, it was the engineering, the super lightweight materials and that kind of stuff.

 


[00:20:31.040] - Doug Hayduk

Yes, that and the fact that I was a racer and knew the racing community.

 


[00:20:35.720] - Big Rich Klein

Right.

 


[00:20:36.520] - Doug Hayduk

I could help them with sales, with production issues. Engineering issues. I did the same thing for Lemand Bicycles in 1993 before Trek Bicycles picked him up. I was living in Boulder and I'd race. I worked in a day or half a day and sell custom bicycles for Greg Lamont with his name on them. And then Trek came in and picked him up and licensed him. And then that job went away. Yeah. I've had some interesting things. I always thought it would be the ultimate opportunity to use my engineering in sporting goods.

 


[00:21:15.630] - Big Rich Klein

Right. And you were able to do that for a while at least.

 


[00:21:19.440] - Doug Hayduk

I was able to do that. And then I was able to do it later in the 90s, where I took a job in Prescott, Arizona, working for Ruger Firearms. It was an investment casting division, making golf clubs for Callaway. The titanium again, this is because of my knowledge of titanium welding and titanium casting, titanium manufacturing. They were making all the Callaway Great Big Berthas, which were just the boom in the late 90s. Every golfer had to have one.

 


[00:21:49.230] 

Callaway?

 


[00:21:50.390] - Doug Hayduk

No.

 


[00:21:51.060] 

Okay.

 


[00:21:52.290] - Doug Hayduk

Bill Ruger, the patriarch and founder, met Eli Calloway, who was also multimillionaires. They met on a runway comparing Learjets somewhere in California. And it was in late 70s. And they're just talking about manufacturing precision parts, which Ruger does with firearms, making handguns, investment cash, real high precision, high tech metals. Ruger knew how to do that. So Callaway gave all the work to make the Great Big Bertha, the first titanium golf club. And they were cast in Prescott, Arizona, and sent down to Mexicoly, Mexico, in Baja for finishing to a Macchiadora plant for the final finishing of taking out imperfections and polishing and painting in the numbers and the letters and everything. And then they were sent to Callaway, which was in Carlsbad, California. So I was in charge of getting an electron beam. Welder working. So that we could fire all the welders, all the high paid welders that would call in sick every Friday and have it all done computerized. So they sent me to RollsRoyce in Cambridge, England, to learn how to work this electron beam welder. And we spend a million dollars on electron beam welder to make it all automated.

 


[00:23:20.410] 

Wow. Okay.

 


[00:23:22.000] - Doug Hayduk

In the meantime, it was a cool story, but in the meantime, here we're supposed to be making up to 2000 golf clubs a day. I started realizing, wait a minute, this is going to die eventually, because eventually everybody's going to have one of these clubs. Every man, woman and child can't own a $400 golf club, which was a Press of these things back in the late 90s. Golf was booming and stock market was good and tech was booming. And people are spending a lot of money on golf. I got to golf and meet some interesting people. Got to follow along with Jack Nicholas and Tom Fascio, which was the designer with Ford. Gerald Ford up in Veil.

 


[00:24:07.540] 

Nice.

 


[00:24:08.560] - Doug Hayduk

Just sit behind them and watch them golf. I didn't golf. I just followed along. But anyhow, what happened has happened in all manufacturing is Callaway looks for a low cost producer. And it wasn't Ruger. It was in China. And so all the while they were smiling enough and having us make more and more golf clubs, they're going to China to learn how to get all the work done in China. And so all of a sudden they pulled the plug one day and said, Sorry, we don't need you anymore, because they had it all manufactured in China for probably a third or a fourth of the price and yet still kept the.

 


[00:24:46.230] - Big Rich Klein

All just went into their bottom line. Yeah.

 


[00:24:49.350] - Doug Hayduk

And the quality was there. It took a while to get it down because titanium is a difficult material. And actually making a golf club where you hit the golf ball at 100 miles an hour, it's actually kind of an engineering challenge to make it work. Right. Without breaking a golf club and weighing the right amount and not having casting defects and being able to charge somebody $300 for it, that will last at least a whole season.

 


[00:25:16.890] - Big Rich Klein

Yeah, you would hope so.

 


[00:25:20.070] - Doug Hayduk

I never realized that until I got down there. And it's like these golf clubs, these high tech golf clubs are really kind of there's a lot of thought that goes into them. So I did that for a while and then moved on. And they don't make golf clubs anymore, but they still have their handgun manufacturing plant down there. You asked me what the highlight of my work was at Ruger. Yeah, it was every other Friday morning. I could go in at 600 in the morning. And I was friends with a guy. He was a motorcycle racer. He still is a motorcycle racer. He was in charge of programming the CNC machines that I was doing with the welding. But he also worked on the submachine gun program. They made us a nine millimeter briefcase submachine gun, which never got sold to the United States because our police forces don't use fully auto.

 


[00:26:15.350] 

Right.

 


[00:26:16.060] - Doug Hayduk

It's just too much scattered, too much spray into innocence. But South Americans do. Europeans do. So they made a nine millimeter submachine gun. And I got to go to the indoor range there at Ruger. And I'd bring some defective golf clubs. We'd throw them down the range, and we'd shoot golf clubs with a submachine gun. That was fun. And the titanium of sparks. Silver sparks. It was crazy.

 


[00:26:50.350] - Big Rich Klein

That's awesome.

 


[00:26:51.480] - Doug Hayduk

That was my highlight at Rio Gear. I wasn't into guns, and I wasn't into golf that much, but I sure enjoyed that combination of shooting guns at golf clubs.

 


[00:27:01.450] - Big Rich Klein

So what other companies did you work for as an engineer or in the bicycle world or whatever that I mean.

 


[00:27:12.960] - Doug Hayduk

It'S just I did some consulting. I wrote a couple books. I did some consulting, and I wanted to be a consultant. I wanted to be independent and be a consultant. And that's really hard to do. You got to keep chasing it. One job ends and then you got nothing. And it's kind of nice to have beyond somebody's payroll. But I came back to Grand Junction. This is actually fairly recent. The most recent real engineering work I had was working in a gold mine down in Yuri, Colorado.

 


[00:27:42.270] 

Okay.

 


[00:27:42.690] - Doug Hayduk

It was 100 year old gold mine that had been resurrected by some graduates of Colorado School of Mines. So they hired a friend of mine who was an engineer and a bike builder. He built a lot of my racing bikes, and he was here, and he had his professional engineering degree and his certification in the state of Colorado to sign off on drawings and things. And his dad was in charge of all the whole uranium program in Western Colorado, which was, again, Cold War stuff, getting uranium for weapons back in the 50s. So Martin, my friend, hired me to go down three times a week, drive down three times a week, 100 miles and up into the mountains to work in a surveying and designing this new gold mine. Old mine refurbishing a gold mine.

 


[00:28:30.910] - Big Rich Klein

That's pretty cool.

 


[00:28:32.140] - Doug Hayduk

And we are promised we were promised verbally that we were going to have bonuses that could be anywhere between one and five times our salary. Everybody was going to get rich, and it didn't work out. And they end up abandoning the mine and closing it down. There were some deaths, there was some poor decisions made, and some people died in the mine, and it's back up going again. But a whole new company, a Canadian company.

 


[00:29:03.810] - Big Rich Klein

Okay.

 


[00:29:04.360] - Doug Hayduk

But that was very interesting because I'd never really been in mining. I went to Colorado School of Mines, and I knew mining engineers, but I really didn't want to be a minor hard work and dangerous.

 


[00:29:14.630] - Big Rich Klein

Right. And so what did you do down in Peru? You said it was Peru, right? Yes.

 


[00:29:23.070] - Doug Hayduk

I was in a copper production facility where they take all the copper and they're making a consumer product. The end product is wire, heavy gauge wire that's then drawn out for copper wire. And they had a new way of making wire directly from the copper solution, plating wire and drawing high conductivity copper wire. And it didn't work. It was somebody that had a patent. They're trying to sell us a patent. And I was sent down there to see if it worked and it didn't. But I'll tell you, I had some good times in Peru. I'd go on the weekends speaking Spanish and not feeling intimidated by the Latino culture. I would get on a bus and go up into the high mountains. I was still in good shape then and go up into the mountains or go to Machu Picchu. And I did some nice touristy things on the weekends.

 


[00:30:11.260] - Big Rich Klein

Well, that's pretty cool. I don't think I could make that hike.

 


[00:30:18.690] - Doug Hayduk

It was hard. I almost passed down. I probably came close to dying once. I went right from sea level to 15,000ft, which was really high. I just talked to Fred, you know, Andy Myers.

 


[00:30:28.780] - Big Rich Klein

Right.

 


[00:30:29.050] - Doug Hayduk

I just talked to him about doing a motorcycle trip down there. He goes, where are their mountain passes? Over 15,000ft high because he was bragging about motorcycle riding in Asia.

 


[00:30:39.470] 

Right.

 


[00:30:41.910] - Doug Hayduk

In the foothills, I think in India, somewhere in the foothills of the Himalaya. And I said, it's not in Colorado, I'll tell you that. It's in Peru, and there are passes that are 16,000ft. And you get into I got in a truck people of Indigenous Indians going to work, and I jumped in the back of the truck there and learned how to take the Coca leaf to help off with the high altitude sickness. You chew on it, but you also have to activate it with an alkaloid. You have to activate it with seashells. Fresh seashell. And you have to take they take these little pins, they're like a knitting needle. And I think they're just made of bone. And you have to poke the inside of your cheek so that it bleeds. So it goes right into the bloodstream.

 


[00:31:29.850] 

Wow.

 


[00:31:30.250] - Doug Hayduk

You take the leaves, you chew them. Then you take this little bowl of crushed sea shell, which is calcium carbonate.

 


[00:31:37.320] - Big Rich Klein

Right.

 


[00:31:37.760] - Doug Hayduk

And then you have to poke the inside of your cheek a whole bunch of times, and it goes right into your bloodstream and gets you that cocahe, not cocaine. But that's what you have to do to make it really work. Right. Just chewing the leaves is not enough.

 


[00:31:53.070] - Big Rich Klein

Okay.

 


[00:31:53.860] - Doug Hayduk

Is it fascinating?

 


[00:31:55.190] - Big Rich Klein

Yeah, it is fascinating.

 


[00:31:56.690] - Doug Hayduk

Yeah. And they all do that. All the workers do that. It's just kind of like smoking or drinking coffee. And that's about buzz you get from it.

 


[00:32:06.570] - Big Rich Klein

Well, that's a shame then.

 


[00:32:09.810] - Doug Hayduk

Yeah. Cocaine is really highly refined. It's a world away from cocaine.

 


[00:32:16.720] - Big Rich Klein

Right. I know that I've had some pretty good buzzes from some really strong coffees by drinking way too many of them at once.

 


[00:32:29.070] - Doug Hayduk

Yeah. You wonder what's in it. What is that in there?

 


[00:32:37.270] - Big Rich Klein

What are some of the other interesting things that you've done with the engineering? Do you have any other stories like that? Any other companies?

 


[00:32:50.510] - Doug Hayduk

Let me think. Here's something interesting. This is me being entrepreneur, okay. And this kind of got into why I got into off road.

 


[00:33:04.980] - Big Rich Klein

Perfect.

 


[00:33:05.390] - Doug Hayduk

I'll just say right now the reason I got into off road and off road racing is because I had an expensive camera back around. This is now 20. 00. 20 01. 20. 02. When You Rock got started United Rock Crawling and offroad challenge the Pedy brothers in Auram, Utah. Provoke. You knew them.

 


[00:33:30.210] - Big Rich Klein

And I don't know if that was we Rock was going on the same time we started Calrocks in 2001, which is when You Rock got started the same time with Craig Stump.

 


[00:33:42.960] - Doug Hayduk

Craig. Craig Stump. That's right. I met him.

 


[00:33:44.830] - Big Rich Klein

And then the Hades came on as a partner of his.

 


[00:33:47.640] - Doug Hayduk

That's right. Craig was a competitor. I knew him as a competitor. He had this red Jeep, and he was really into competing where the payties weren't competitors. They were more the business end and make sure the event went off and got the permits. Yes, they are the ones that paid my way. But now let me go backwards. The reason I had a camera, which not a lot of people did back then. Now people have nice video cameras and still cameras on their phone. But remember, there were no cell phones back then. Really? No smart with cameras, no smartphones. If you had a video camera, you were a serious enthusiast. You spent some money. You laid out $1,000 or more. Right now you can get a camera that works for $100 a GoPro and just push a button. Back then you kind of had to know a little bit.

 


[00:34:37.920] - Big Rich Klein

True.

 


[00:34:39.150] - Doug Hayduk

And it was all done on tapes. None of no SD cards was all tape cameras. There's a pain in the ass. A giant paint in the ass.

 


[00:34:46.180] - Big Rich Klein

Right. Especially editing.

 


[00:34:48.390] - Doug Hayduk

Oh, yeah. Horrible. Especially an off road because the dust you'd come back with your tape and you'd have dropouts. You'd have problems with the tape because it got dust particles on the tape and during the recording. And it would screw up the audio and screw up some of the video and you'd get really frustrated. And that went on to about 2005 or six, actually about 2007 when SD card started coming out with certain quality. But let me get back to the year 2000 when this invention I had, I was filming guys on mountain boards, which were large off road skateboards.

 


[00:35:25.090] 

Right.

 


[00:35:26.020] - Doug Hayduk

My idea was to make I wanted to make a video of guys on mountain boards and downhill mountain biking was just getting going. The free riding. And I went to Moab, and there was a free ride competition in 2002, which was the Rim Trail. And everybody knows the Moab Rim Trail, right? Because it's a Jeep trail 1 mile up at about a 45 degree angle, very steep, short and steep. And back then there was a chairlift that went up there.

 


[00:36:01.070] 

Yes.

 


[00:36:02.230] - Doug Hayduk

And the chairlift, they would take mountain bikers on it, and they mountain bikers go down it. And it was intense. And I had a camera, a good camera, and I shot it. And these guys go, what are you doing with your footage? I said, I'm thinking of making a DVD. They said, let me take you to an inner these were guys from Salt Lake City that worked for you, Rock. I didn't know it at the time, but they said, let me buy the footage from you. I said, oh, $50. I said, yeah, sure, they give me $50. Then they called me up the next week and said, hey, you shoot good stuff. You're good with a camera. It's not rocket science. But I paid attention. I was a photographer. And they said, we want you to come and shoot you, Rock for us. You can make I don't know how much. It was $300 a day or something like that. And you'll put you in a hotel, and you travel around from St. George to Salt Lake, Moab to Vernol to Farmington. And I shot you, Rock, for three years.

 


[00:36:56.090] 

Okay.

 


[00:36:58.250] - Doug Hayduk

And shooting Euroc was fun. But one day I met Walker Evans and everybody said, who? Walker Evans is like, yeah, he's a frustrated desert racer that's made to go slow. He doesn't like to go slow. He liked to hit that right pedal, and he liked to haul ass. And in rock, Carling, as you know, that doesn't always work. No, it's more about finesse than it is about strength and knowing when to lay off the gas pedal. And Walker looked at me one day and he goes, you look forward, son. You need to go down to a desert race and shoot that. And I said, well, I thought about that, but I've never been down there. I don't know anybody in desert racing, and I really didn't. I had been to one desert race in my life, and that was 1976 when I was out motorcycle riding. They had the Colorado West 300, which was an off road race. And there was actually a score race, but I wasn't at that one. There was a score race in Colorado. I was up in Craig, Colorado. A lot of off road racers would talk to me about that.

 


[00:38:08.760] - Doug Hayduk

And I said, no, I'm sorry. I wasn't into offroading back then in the 70s, but Walker Evans talked me and go into balls. And I said, yeah, that's on my bucket list. But I don't really know how to go about that. So I had a nice camera I was shooting. I never did make my downhill mountain board video, but mountain boards were these long off road skateboards, about three, 4ft long with big kind of knobby tires. Off road, just like an off road skateboard is what it was. But these guys were crashing and their feet were put into it like snowboard bindings, and they would fall and they'd get these horrible spiral fractures of their TIB fibs and hurt themselves horribly. I went to a festival in Moab and one in Aspen, and I watched a guy become a paraplegic, and I watched other guys break their legs and hurt themselves. And I go, this will never do. They're trying to get them approved for use at ski resorts.

 


[00:39:02.330] 

Yeah.

 


[00:39:04.070] - Doug Hayduk

This is too dangerous. I'm filming car crashes. This is not good. I'm watching guys hurt themselves. It's not fun.

 


[00:39:11.160] 

Right?

 


[00:39:14.910] - Doug Hayduk

There's still mountain boarding still exists, but it's really kind of a fringe cult sport because the skiers don't want those things because they're too dangerous. They won't let you ride up the ski lifts with them and run down the ski runs because it's too extreme.

 


[00:39:27.660] - Big Rich Klein

Right.

 


[00:39:30.390] - Doug Hayduk

Everybody wants extreme. But ski resorts wanted something for summer operations, and they had mountain biking. They wanted, quote, extreme, but they didn't want real extreme. They don't want anybody getting hurt. They don't want lawsuits is what they don't want.

 


[00:39:44.290] - Big Rich Klein

That extra liability.

 


[00:39:46.000] - Doug Hayduk

Yeah. So now this gets into my invention. I decided I'm going to take one of those mountain boards, make it a little bigger, longer, wider, put some real axles on it, put some suspension on it. Brakes. Mountain bike brakes. I knew bike industry put some brakes on it and make it stare and a seat. And I went down to off road warehouse in San Diego, and I bought some fiberglass buggy seats, and I put those put a seat and brakes and some steering. And I made a 50 pound off road gravity powered go cart. They were called gravity carts. They looked like the little kids that ride the scooters, not the scooters, because the four wheels, the cars down. Pinewood Derby. No soapbox Derby.

 


[00:40:39.950] 

Okay.

 


[00:40:40.880] - Doug Hayduk

All the towns still have soapbox Derbys. I'm joining all these soapbox Derby clubs and around the Western Midwest is really big on them. They have them down their biggest Hill in town, like Sledding. So I made these things called gravity carts, and I refined them over about two years. And I would make the wheels come off and put on skis so he could run in the wintertime. And I went around trying to sell them to ski resorts, including Norm Sailor at Donner Mountain, Donner ski Ranch, because he could make things happen. They owned them. He didn't have to go to a board of directors, or the risk manager was him.

 


[00:41:18.330] 

Correct.

 


[00:41:19.570] - Doug Hayduk

Where I go to Veil and they say, you're talking to the CEO. I think it's cool. And our summer. Officer guy loves it. But you need to talk to the risk manager, the lawyer. Yes. He's the guy that deals with the lawyers and probably is a lawyer, and he's the one that does the numbers and say, okay, we're going to make X amount of sales, and we're going to probably have two lawsuits against us and we may lose $2 million. Are we going to still make a profit? And the answer to that was pretty much no. So they said they would only do it for me. I had Vale Resorts in my back pocket, but I had to provide the liability insurance. I spent a lot of time refining these things. And my video camera was used and purchased really for my upgraded video camera was to make my own video to demonstrate them. And so I had good video equipment in 2003, 2004 and was still shooting You Rock, and then went into a couple of your events and a couple of Mike Schaefer's Rock race events. Xra.

 


[00:42:27.910] - Big Rich Klein

Oh, Mike Weaver.

 


[00:42:29.680] - Doug Hayduk

Mike Weaver. What did I say?

 


[00:42:31.160] - Big Rich Klein

Schaefer Mike.

 


[00:42:33.160] - Doug Hayduk

Yeah, it's different guy. Mike Weaver had all this content and started producing DVDs. And by then I'm getting ahead of myself because by then I had already gone down to a couple of Baja 1000 races. But getting back to my gravity carts. In 2002, the Winter Olympics were in Salt Lake City, and I had sold a program to Park City because Park City was a privately owned company and they were self insured. There's two rich guys, the Cumming Brothers, who loved go carts, loved racing, car racing, loved anything truly extreme. And they loved my gravity carts, and they bought a whole fleet of them from me.

 


[00:43:14.160] - Big Rich Klein

Twelve of them nice.

 


[00:43:16.020] - Doug Hayduk

And they wanted me to run it. So I ran them in the summer and ran them in the winter. And I pitched it to the Today Show. And I was live on the Today Show during the 2002 Olympics and had Katie Kirk, Al Roker and Matt Lauer all ride these things down a ski slope on live TV exactly 20 years ago last month, nice during the Olympics in Park City. And everybody said, you're going to be a millionaire. You're a millionaire. Anybody has a product that they pitch on Today show becomes a millionaire. I thought, that's nice.

 


[00:43:51.820] - Big Rich Klein

Where's your million?

 


[00:43:55.910] - Speaker 1

You should have told somebody, you know what?

 


[00:43:57.960] - Big Rich Klein

I'll sell it to you for $900,000.

 


[00:44:03.330] - Doug Hayduk

Yes. I didn't really get rich off of that because it was too extreme. You could really hurt yourself on them.

 


[00:44:08.110] - Big Rich Klein

Right.

 


[00:44:09.150] - Doug Hayduk

And now if you go to ski resorts all over the place, they're in Colorado, and there's places there's one right up in London Springs. Here they have these things that are like they're called mountain coasters, and they're on tracks, and you can have a heart attack or fall asleep or freak out and you'll just end up at the bottom safely. They're like an Alpine slide but they're on cars.

 


[00:44:30.340] - Big Rich Klein

That's right.

 


[00:44:30.910] - Doug Hayduk

The cars that look just like mine, except for that they're physically attached to railing like a little railroad track. And they get you to the bottom without and it feels like you're like a roller coaster. It feels like you're doing something really extreme, but you're really safe.

 


[00:44:46.650] - Big Rich Klein

You talk about having ideas and trying to get a product out. When I was a kid, I spent all my winters at Squaw Valley, which is now Palisades Tahoe or something like that.

 


[00:45:02.850] - Doug Hayduk

Oh, that's right. They can't use the word Squaw. They just changed it.

 


[00:45:05.760] - Big Rich Klein

Yeah.

 


[00:45:06.990] - Doug Hayduk

I've skied with Paraplegic Squaw Valley.

 


[00:45:09.730] - Big Rich Klein

It's a great resort. It really is.

 


[00:45:11.770] - Doug Hayduk

Very much, though. Very much so.

 


[00:45:13.090] - Big Rich Klein

But I pretty much grew up there because all my winters were spent there skiing. And we got you know, we got as kids do. We started experimenting with things. And I tried I took one of my single water skis because I was either water skiing or snow skiing, it seems like. And I took that up on the Hill and put bindings on it. And I never perfected anything, but we were doing it way before anybody had the idea.

 


[00:45:51.950] - Doug Hayduk

Yeah. The snowboard. Oh, yeah, right.

 


[00:45:54.070] - Big Rich Klein

And we took a surfboard and tried to do it all sorts of things. Then the other thing we did is we took our BMX style bikes and we took the wheels off and cut down skis so that I had a longer ski in the back and a shorter ski in the front. And we attached those two trucks and then skateboard trucks and then put them on the bicycles and ride those all the time. But the steers would let us go up the slopes on them.

 


[00:46:26.600] - Doug Hayduk

No, because they see that they could get sued over that kind of thing.

 


[00:46:31.540] - Big Rich Klein

And this was all late 60s, early 70s.

 


[00:46:34.330] - Doug Hayduk

Yeah. During the skateboard craze, I met some of those inventors. I would take my sledge to the ski show in Vegas and then down to the action sports show, action sports retailer show in San Diego or Orange County or somewhere. And I'd meet all these guys that were old skaters and they had these crazy ideas, little disc brakes for skateboards and this and that and the same kind of inventions that you do tweaking things and using their enthusiasm. That's what it takes is ambition and a little bit of vision and just the drive to try to invent something and create something not specially revolutionary, but evolutionary the next step.

 


[00:47:19.160] - Big Rich Klein

Right. We did it just for fun.

 


[00:47:21.590] - Doug Hayduk

It was just personal fun.

 


[00:47:22.960] - Big Rich Klein

It wasn't never thought about. Oh, this will review really cool. We can sell these.

 


[00:47:27.030] - Doug Hayduk

We just did shit because you're just looking for another rush to have something Besides a BMX bike.

 


[00:47:33.410] - Big Rich Klein

Yeah, exactly.

 


[00:47:34.360] - Doug Hayduk

Yeah. It's cool. It's a neat movie that has been done in parts of kids growing up making cool things. And they start with the basics of a skateboard and a sled. And that's what I started with. Those are the foundations. I've thought of making a movie, actually, seriously thinking about making a movie. That's called Gravity Gets Me Down. It's all about things that use gravity to get downhills on non motorized. You think of all the little inventions and things that people have done, starting with a sled as a kid. The Flexible Flyer sled and the toboggan and the saucer, skateboards and saucers, very, very crude instruments. And then they get up into high technology stuff, including really, like, the Olympic events, the Bob sledding, the luge. Those are just sliding devices that just use gravity. And it's an interesting subject matter for me anyhow, and probably for you, too.

 


[00:48:34.960] - Big Rich Klein

Absolutely. You got to find somebody to fund that.

 


[00:48:39.090] - Doug Hayduk

That's the problem. I needed money. I was not wealthy. I won't say I was not wealthy enough. I was not wealthy at all. I was hurting financially. I was struggling. I was living in a Volkswagen, a red Volkswagen Eurovan, sleeping in the heated parking garage in Park City Mountain Resort during the Olympics, I got kicked out of my apartment because they could rent my room out for $500 a day instead of $500 a month during the Olympics. So I got kicked out, and I had the keys to this Lodge that was owned by the Park City Mountain Resort. I had the keys where I could store the spare parts and the spare wheels or skis to my gravity sleds in this Lodge called the Munchkin Lodge. And it was a big warehouse. And I had the keys to go in there. And I set up camp in there. And I lived there for three months until in April, they came because there was a warm day and the water was melting and it was coming inside the building. And so they sent some guys in there, and they saw us like, there's somebody living in here.

 


[00:49:46.980] - Doug Hayduk

There was no heat. There was no heat. And I had one giant long extension cord that would run to a little heater. Little tiny space, little tiny $10 heater that would blow on my face so I could sleep in the night.

 


[00:50:00.630] - Big Rich Klein

What did they do when they found out that you were they didn't get mad at me.

 


[00:50:05.410] - Doug Hayduk

They said, well, you really need to be out. But it was already the end of the season, right? They were sympathetic. And I became a legend in Park City Mountain. In Park City. It's like this guy was sleeping in the mushroom Lodge, and it gets down below zero. I had two downsling bags. I was a boy Scout. Yes. And I had a girlfriend in there once. Spent the night with me during the Olympics. Whatever money I had, I spent on Olympic tickets.

 


[00:50:30.030] - Big Rich Klein

So that's pretty crazy. I'm loving those stories.

 


[00:50:34.590] - Doug Hayduk

Yeah. Living for free in Park City during the Olympics, I was pretty proud of myself. And I would go sneak into some condominiums and use my library card to get through the gate and go into this hot tub and shower and bathe in the bathrooms for this little hot tub and a condominium complex. And I did that at like four in the morning to get all prepped and ready to be live on the Today show. Little did they know that's what I was doing. And I was defecating into a little tiny plastic bag and throwing my trash in the dumpster every morning. It was crazy, but I did what I had to do.

 


[00:51:12.780] - Big Rich Klein

It prepared you for trips to Baja.

 


[00:51:17.710] - Doug Hayduk

That's right. It lowered my standards of living to where I could go with Pistol Pete and sleep on the floor and have bathrooms that didn't have hot water and no flush toilets. I'd like to start getting into off road racing and how I got it. Now all this is kind of set up into how I got into offroad racing. And I started alluding to that by meeting Walker Evans and rock crawling. And I had already cut my teeth in video. And I felt confident I could sell myself as a videographer. In 2004, I went to my first off road race. It was the Baja 1000, okay? I acquired some money. I inherited a little bit of money. I bought a pickup truck, four wheel drive pickup truck in a shell and a motorcycle and took it all down and camped at the Ojos Negroes jumps of the Baja 1000. And I met a guy who's very well known as San Felipe Martin Romeo. He owns the Beans and Rice restaurant. He was trying to do video. And I said, I'd work for him. And he got me on his media pass. And I didn't know anybody.

 


[00:52:25.790] - Doug Hayduk

I didn't know any of the racers. All I knew that Baja racing was badass, right? I'd seen some videos. There was no YouTube then this is pre YouTube. There's anything on the Internet about it, but you could see some DVDs and maybe there would be a five minute segment on Wide World of Sports or something. Just the same with bike racing. There'd be a little tiny segment that would just get you kind of excited about the sport and then nothing more. And growing up in Western Colorado, there were some off road racers here, but I didn't really know. I knew motorcycles, though, and I knew motorcycle racing. And I felt kind of confident. And I had the video and I knew the DVDs were selling. So I went in with the goal of selling DVDs again. Where there's no YouTube, there's no free content. So people would buy DVDs, right? Between the years 2004 all the way up to about 2009, if you put out a DVD, even if it was crap, you could sell a thousand of them because there was not a lot available. So I did that. I produced three DVDs about 2005.

 


[00:53:33.500] - Doug Hayduk

I was in Prune, Nevada, at Casey folks best in the desert, terrible Town 250. And I met Pistol Pete. I didn't really know who he was, but he had gotten like third place. And he asked me, hey, do you have any video of me? He's really Pistol Pete. Pete Soren. The reason we know each other and the reason I know a lot of people in off road is because of Pistol Pete. And God rest his soul, you know, rest in peace, Pete. He's been gone for about three years now. Two years. Three years, yeah. And he was just a real outgoing, real loud guy and a good racer. And I said, I'll send you some of the videos, give me your address. And he goes, how about this? We're going to go down and do a race in Rocky Point. It was that race organization out of Tucson.

 


[00:54:29.640] - Big Rich Klein

I believe that Southern Arizona desert racing.

 


[00:54:33.850] - Doug Hayduk

That's it. S-A-D-R. Yeah. He said, we're going to go down to Rocky Point. You know, where Rocky Point is. I said, no, this is just like San Felipe, except it's on the mainland. Come with us. You can come with us. And that's when I really met Pistol Pete. He introduced me to his family, and that was wonderful because I'd never had any of the desert racers. I was still pretty new, but I didn't know anybody. But Pete made sure I got to know people, including his family, his dad, Cowboy Pete was a family racer. It wasn't just him and the boys. It was him and his family, his wife, and they'd bring an RV down, and I got to meet everybody. And of course, that's when I met Fast Eddie Brian Eliason, who you and I have in common.

 


[00:55:14.410] - Big Rich Klein

Yes.

 


[00:55:14.710] - Doug Hayduk

Who's just a really fun, exciting crack up character that keeps the entertainment level up all the time.

 


[00:55:21.650] - Big Rich Klein

My brother from another mother.

 


[00:55:23.650] - Doug Hayduk

He is. He's fun, and he's one of the few guys I still keep in contact with. He's gotten out of desert racing, but I still talk to him about it and we talk about Pete, and we have that in common, and you in common. And it's a bond that is strong.

 


[00:55:39.050] - Big Rich Klein

Yes.

 


[00:55:40.410] - Doug Hayduk

That's one thing that off road has done for me more than bike racing.

 


[00:55:45.270] - Big Rich Klein

I think it's those long trips across with three guys in a pickup truck trying to get to the next pit stop or to go get tacos because you got a couple of hours to kill while pre running or whatever and just shooting video and trying to get I can remember those days, the video that you shot where we saw the donkeys and fast that he tried to go ride the donkey and he was calling the donkey Cameron.

 


[00:56:27.070] - Doug Hayduk

I don't know where he comes up with these ideas in his head, but, man, he just has this great sense of humor that just comes out. It's goofy, but, yeah, it breaks up the monotony because we're out in the middle of nowhere. I remember that exactly what happened and when that was. And yeah, we're waiting to the next point where Pete is pre running or somebody else, somebody's in the pre runner. And we're just trying to kill time and trying to get to the next place. And we just kind of have to entertain ourselves and we have to depend on each other down there. We're in Mexico. Some people speak Spanish, some don't. Some people have been there before, some haven't. Some people are mechanically inclined, some aren't. Some are good drivers and can drive in the night. Others shouldn't be driving at nighttime. They get sleepy, some drink, some don't. And so that whole combination gets the job done. And it takes a whole bunch of several people that all have different skills and levels of ambition and ability, and then you become dependent upon each other.

 


[00:57:25.840] - Big Rich Klein

True.

 


[00:57:26.840] - Doug Hayduk

We realize we're in Mexico. We're in a different country. And if something does go wrong, we got to help each other. And so there's a camaraderie that gets built up there.

 


[00:57:36.340] - Big Rich Klein

Yes, it's awesome. I remember almost everybody that were on the teams that when I joined at the Thousand because I only gave her came down for the 1000. I came down once or twice for the 250 for San Felipe. And I was out in Vegas a couple of times with them. And then, of course, when the pirate team put together, and then we Shaffer as well a couple of races.

 


[00:58:10.440] - Doug Hayduk

I remember when he was racing. Yeah.

 


[00:58:15.930] - Big Rich Klein

I missed those times. But I don't know if my body it was a lot easier to do when you were younger.

 


[00:58:25.650] - Doug Hayduk

Oh, I know. Believe me, we know we're the same age and I'm the same way. I have to watch myself. And that's what a lot of times I'll drive myself if it's a San Francisco. So I know I can bail out or I can go to sleep on my own schedule. I can't pull all nighters and I can't hike halfway across the desert and I can't lift 150 pound off road trophy truck tire over my head. My shoulders are too messed up from motorcycle crashes, so I have to watch myself. I can't do what I did ten years ago or 15 years ago. But back when we met, I remember when you said Mike Schaeffer was there also, it was Dave Cole. And when I go to King of the Hammers and I see Dave Cole, he comes up and hugs me and shakes my hand. And I wonder why. Once I ask him, Why are you being nice to me? How do you even know who I am, really? Because I'm not involved in King of Hammers, except for a guy with a camera that runs out. There he goes, you helped me get going.

 


[00:59:23.120] - Doug Hayduk

And off road racing with Pistol P. You were there and helped me out. And this was about 2005 2006, I think 2007 when you were getting into it with Pete, and it was a bond in a Camaraderie that he appreciates to this day, 15 years later.

 


[00:59:39.430] - Big Rich Klein

Yeah. My first trip to Baja was with BFG Pit myself and my son went down and worked one of the BFG Pits. And it was the year they shot Dust to Glory Three. And then we didn't go down. And then the next time we went down, I went down in 2005. And that was with Pete, I'm pretty sure. Or maybe it was a combination of Pirate and Pete with Lance and Rogue and Schaefer and all those guys with the Terminator. Yeah. Some fun times.

 


[01:00:23.990] - Doug Hayduk

That's what's when I met you guys down there. Yeah. And so getting back to Pistol Pete now, I started hanging out with him and he couldn't pay me. He always said he was a working class guy trying to hang out in an expensive sport of unlimited vehicle racing, desert racing. And he couldn't pay me, but he could give me food and the Camaraderie and introduce me to other guys, which he did. And then my first real paid gig, Besides selling DVDs, came with Cops Racing, which was John Langley and Sons. Right. People know John Langley is the producer, the creator and producer of the very first reality show on TV, which was Cops, Bad Boys, Bad Boys, What You're Going to do? That was technically the first reality show on TV in 1988, I think, started and I think it's still going on. And so they knew they wanted to do an off road reality show called Road Warriors. And this is about 2008, 2009. And they knew that I was Pistol Pete's video guy or hung out with him. And so they said, oh, you know, Pistol, you get along with him. He'll let you hang out with him.

 


[01:01:46.340] - Doug Hayduk

Why don't you just run around to a camera and film him? Because they wanted Pistol Pete with his personality, which he has a lot of. He's not afraid to speak his mind, as we all know. He'll insult anybody on a moment's notice and tell you what he thinks. If it's a piece of crap, he'll let you know. So Cops hired me and they paid me good wages because they were professional Hollywood film company.

 


[01:02:20.440] - Big Rich Klein

Right.

 


[01:02:21.400] - Doug Hayduk

So I did that for a couple of years. That was nice. And unfortunately, the Road Warriors TV show didn't work out for reasons I don't know. It just never got off the ground. I guess they were just unable to sell it to a network.

 


[01:02:36.450] - Big Rich Klein

Yeah, probably there's a lot of that.

 


[01:02:39.090] - Doug Hayduk

They had to produce some pilot shows, which they did. I have a tape. I have a DVD of one of the pilot shows, and they actually showed it around and it's probably found online, but they never got it off the ground. It's too bad they didn't have the whatever.

 


[01:02:59.350] - Big Rich Klein

You got to be able to Hollywood has this preconceived idea of what will work and what won't work.

 


[01:03:08.770] - Doug Hayduk

They have formulas or they have one formula.

 


[01:03:11.180] - Big Rich Klein

Right.

 


[01:03:11.450] - Doug Hayduk

I've been told that all movies have the same formula. There's a bullet list of about five things you go through of crisis and leading up to redemption at the end. Right. And that's it. All movies, they don't seem the same. They are the same because they're all the same kind of plot line.

 


[01:03:31.750] - Big Rich Klein

Exactly.

 


[01:03:33.070] - Doug Hayduk

That's what they want. And Road Warriors really didn't deliver that right.

 


[01:03:38.030] - Big Rich Klein

Well, the thing is, though, is that if it doesn't, it needs this artificial drama, and especially for any kind of reality TV or all the reality shows have that crazy drama.

 


[01:03:55.910] - Doug Hayduk

You know, they're coached, they want you to fight, they want you to argue. They don't want to kick out the bad boys because they're the one that created the drama. So they keep them in the show, correct? Yeah. I watched The Bachelor in those shows. I watched those. And you can just tell what they're doing behind the scenes to make people excited about it or else it gets boring.

 


[01:04:13.680] - Big Rich Klein

Yeah. That's why rock crawling. We actually had a show go all the way up to the television part of the Weinstein Group. And then that was when Weinstein got busted in that whole Me Too thing. That production company just went to shit real quick. And we lost the production of that because they were like, okay, we're going to do this. We were within like a week or two of selling the TV show. And the way we had produced it, which was real, it was going to be following drivers. It was going to be like dust to glory. But with the rock crawling. And it was really good the way the guys that had shot it and put it together.

 


[01:05:11.350] - Doug Hayduk

I'd like to see that sometime.

 


[01:05:12.820] - Big Rich Klein

We lost it. Yeah. It was terrible. I mean, it was very sad, but it was pretty cool. But that happens. The production companies, the ones that I've dealt with, typically it doesn't go past the interview phase because I tell them I'm not interested in bullshit TV. I don't want a combination of American Chopper, Swamp People and Ice Road Truckers. And I had this one lady at one time go, well, that swamp people. That's one of my shows. And I said, then, great, because you know exactly what I don't want. And she goes, well, that's what people buy. And I said, that's what you want them to buy. So you've created this whole thing that's all that people will watch. And I said, I don't believe that's true.

 


[01:06:10.390] - Doug Hayduk

You want them to set the bar higher?

 


[01:06:12.120] - Big Rich Klein

Yeah. So what I got to do at the what I told him is I said, well, this will be the thing we'll do a show. But if you edit it and make any of my drivers look like idiots or myself look like idiots, I'm going to walk into your office and somebody's going to get a beat down. I'm not afraid to go to jail for my sport. And she goes, you'd hit a woman? And I said, no, but I'll bet there's a man in that office. He's going to take one for the team. And I never got another call back.

 


[01:06:48.610] - Doug Hayduk

They didn't like your attitude.

 


[01:06:50.010] - Big Rich Klein

No, they did.

 


[01:06:51.020] - Doug Hayduk

You're asking for a little too much control. By their measure, yes.

 


[01:06:54.600] - Big Rich Klein

Except for the two guys that had come over from real world, and they were like, they saw the sport of rock crawling on some videos that were on YouTube or something, and they were like, well, this is really cool. Who do we need to talk to? And somebody gave them my number, and we actually went pretty far with it, but just couldn't make it happen. Unfortunately, we're so close.

 


[01:07:20.600] - Doug Hayduk

Yeah. From Cops that's Cops round up to about 2010 with Pistol Pete.

 


[01:07:30.490] - Big Rich Klein

Okay.

 


[01:07:30.990] - Doug Hayduk

And the TV show didn't work out. Cops would still call on me to shoot some video, or they want me to drive out to Barstow and meet him and shoot some video of them doing testing. And then I ran into a guy named Rusty Stevens, who was from Amarillo, Texas, and he had Pampa, Texas, to be exact. And he had become a millionaire by doing all the landscaping and Earth work for T. Boone Pickens, who has a humungous 50 or $100 million Ranch up somewhere by the border of Texas, Arkansas, and Oklahoma.

 


[01:08:14.010] - Big Rich Klein

Right.

 


[01:08:14.650] - Doug Hayduk

And he wanted to become an offroad trophy truck racer. So instead of working his way up through different categories, which I think you should do, which, coming from bicycle racing, is essential by the rules. You have to start a beginner and then work to intermediate and then get into the professional level or the highest level right off road racing.

 


[01:08:36.380] - Big Rich Klein

Just buy your way in.

 


[01:08:37.880] - Doug Hayduk

You can just buy your way in. And he did that. And he went and bought BJ. Baldwin's old trophy truck and fixed it up and hired a team manager. Promotions manager. A giant shop in the motorsports park at Las Vegas. A giant shop. A giant shop, which I think was $10,000 a month rent.

 


[01:09:07.290] - Big Rich Klein

Jesus.

 


[01:09:08.280] - Doug Hayduk

Yeah. A motorhome, a pre runner offices that had costs in it so people could sleep in it. But he would go out and do the races, and either from the performance of the truck, it wasn't a great truck, or BJ wouldn't sold it. Right. You got to wonder about people selling their old equipment, because it's probably because it's not working for them. And it wasn't. It was a Porter mid drive, mid engine. Porter V drive, I think. Yes. Since it's mid engine, had to have a V drive, and those don't hold up unless you're Robbie Gordon. Even then, he's had his problems. So anyhow, he never finished a race. My video, I got very frustrated because my videos would never work out. I can never produce a good video from because they never finished a race and I never know exactly what exactly happened. I'd get the report afterwards or I'd go home, just ejected. Like, well, he didn't finish. I didn't even get to see him out there the whole race. So I worked for him for a few years and it was fun. We went down and did a couple of races in Mexico, the code races, which are fun.

 


[01:10:20.960] - Doug Hayduk

And again, I meet more people.

 


[01:10:22.710] 

Right.

 


[01:10:25.330] - Doug Hayduk

Since then, there's been no need for DVD production. So I'll show up in a race beforehand. I make a contract with a few guys that still produce videos for teams. And all I do is go out there and give them my footage so I don't have any big responsibility of a finished product. All I have to do is shoot a bunch of content of our racers that are paying for foot paying for a video, and I dump it all in their laps when I leave and I come home and I don't have to do anything. I don't have to edit. I don't have to gather footage. And that works well for me right now.

 


[01:11:02.270] 

Awesome.

 


[01:11:03.210] - Doug Hayduk

And that's what I'll be doing this weekend. I'll be working for a guy out of Phoenix. He gets me a media pass. I'll meet him at registration. I go out and shoot for two days, and he tells me who to shoot, where to shoot. And I collect a little check and I get to see the badass off road racing and hopefully get to rub elbows with your friends. Yeah, I get to see people I have friends. I would say that half of my Facebook friends are people that I hardly know. I probably have 500 Mexican off road racing fans because they know I'm a video guy and I'll show little videos on YouTube. They want to see what videos and photos I take. And it's great. And the same thing in Offroad. There are people that know only from Offroad, and I don't call them. I don't talk on the phone. We just meet at an off road race every month or every six months. Sometimes a whole year will pass it. But I meet them in Tech and Contingency in Ensenada and they remember me and I remember them and we shake and hug and maybe go have tacos together.

 


[01:12:02.630] - Doug Hayduk

That's pretty amazing. It's pretty cool.

 


[01:12:04.660] - Big Rich Klein

So with Facebook, have you been on the band from Baja Talk site that my buddy Steve Sullivan had set up?

 


[01:12:14.410] - Doug Hayduk

No, I haven't.

 


[01:12:15.580] - Big Rich Klein

You should check that one out. It's banned from Baja Talk or something like that.

 


[01:12:20.830] - Doug Hayduk

Okay.

 


[01:12:21.420] - Big Rich Klein

Steve Sullivan was a Vora racer when I owned Vora and ran around in that whole scene and everything. And he lives down in Ensenada now. He retired down there and he's got a compound and all the racers or a lot of racers go by his place and everything. So it's pretty cool. So you should check that page.

 


[01:12:51.850] - Doug Hayduk

I will. Yes. You being from Sacramento, you're a Vora guy. I'll tell you, I've only shot one Vour race because it's kind of out of the way. And they were generally smaller races per city. But there was one Vora race I went to, and it was unique in that it was a combination Vora.

 


[01:13:14.150] - Big Rich Klein

The $500.

 


[01:13:15.680] - Doug Hayduk

This is when Roger Norman owned HDR. I think he was in the process of trying to buy score and trying to make it happen, and it wasn't happening. And he created resurrected HDR, and he and West Harbor got together with the owner of the brothel outside of at the Mustang Ranch.

 


[01:13:44.990] - Big Rich Klein

Gilliam or Gilliam the last name, I forget.

 


[01:13:48.370] - Doug Hayduk

Yeah, go ahead. I'm trying to think. Well, his son has an off road shop in Reno.

 


[01:13:53.270] - Big Rich Klein

Yes.

 


[01:13:54.080] - Doug Hayduk

And so there's all these connections, and we had the race there, which was on Roger Norman's property, which is now would go right through the front door of the Tesla Gigafactory.

 


[01:14:03.770] - Big Rich Klein

Correct.

 


[01:14:06.350] - Doug Hayduk

The start line was at the brothel, the Mustang Ranch, and would go right up the Canyon there where that Western America industrial park is that Roger Norman is a partner with and owns it all. And now it's filled with giant warehouses and rail lines, rail heads. But that race was there, and it was a combination Vora. It was called the Extreme Extreme 500 or the Extreme 250 or something. It was a neat. It was a great race.

 


[01:14:41.250] - Big Rich Klein

Yeah. I think they combined on the Independent I want to say the Independence Day or Independent 500 or something. They called it. I may be wrong with that, but that's what I kind of remember.

 


[01:14:54.990] - Doug Hayduk

Yeah. And it was out of one of the hotels there in Sparks, and it had a big to do. It was a lot of action, a lot of excitement. And it was all private land. So I could ride my motorcycle all over the damn course and shoot video wherever I wanted. There was no land managers around.

 


[01:15:13.270] - Big Rich Klein

Yeah. Good old Bureau of Land Management.

 


[01:15:17.450] - Doug Hayduk

Holy smokes. I've had my run ins with them. I still hear about them. I try to get around, and sometimes I take my motorcycle and I'm taking my electric bicycle to try to get to this place called Beer Bottle Pass down by Gene and Prim. And it's kind of a faraway place. And I know I can't drive there, but I think I can ride my Ebike there and shoot video there and get something unique. That's my plan. If the land managers don't come after me and tell me otherwise.

 


[01:15:49.780] - Big Rich Klein

Right. Well, this will release after that. I don't think I have a lot of Bureau of Land Management people on it.

 


[01:16:02.250] - Doug Hayduk

They won't be waiting for me.

 


[01:16:03.580] - Big Rich Klein

Yes. They're not any of my normal listeners, I can tell you that.

 


[01:16:07.510] - Doug Hayduk

Yeah. Well, I've met some good ones. I've met some individually good ones and some of them are off road fans, but some of them aren't anyhow. I think that's about my whole story. It kind of brings me up to where I am now, just kind of doing contract video work. And I got hooked up with found out my College, my Colorado School of Mines, the mechanical engineering seniors have a senior project and they're building a truck. Hopefully it's done now. And they're racing the San Felipe 250 in three weeks.

 


[01:16:39.240] - Big Rich Klein

Really?

 


[01:16:39.740] - Doug Hayduk

And I've been their consultant. They found out how much I knew about off road racing in San Felipe and hotels and restaurants and the course. I've been mostly coaching them on trying to get that damn thing out here to Grand Junction so they can test it and find out, work out the bugs before they go race it in the San Felipe race and waste their money.

 


[01:17:00.480] - Big Rich Klein

Are you going to go down to San Felipe with them?

 


[01:17:02.700] - Doug Hayduk

So I am I'm going to go down there and kind of show them the restaurants, show them the nightclubs, show them the tell them stories.

 


[01:17:10.410] - Big Rich Klein

Make sure they're old enough.

 


[01:17:13.950] - Doug Hayduk

They look like they're young kids now. They're probably 20, 21, 22 years old. They look like little tiny kids. Oh, yeah, I'm going to do that. But I'm really winding down now, and it's been very by and large, really satisfying, a really interesting experience getting in the off road racing world, rock crawling, desert racing, motorcycle racing. I feel very privileged to have the position and the wherewithal to make it happen and get involved. And the people I've met like Fast Eddie, I could call him right now and ask him to borrow money or to sleep in his house tomorrow night and I would get results. I've made some close friends and with you as well. I always see you like once or twice a year. But there's a respect and a camaraderie that is really pretty cool that comes about from the off road world.

 


[01:18:07.400] - Big Rich Klein

Absolutely.

 


[01:18:09.030] - Doug Hayduk

You must have it all over the place.

 


[01:18:11.250] - Big Rich Klein

You know what? You know, we have a great community, and that's really important. More important to me now than when I got started in this. I didn't realize what we were building, but it's after 21, 22 years of doing this now.

 


[01:18:34.570] - Doug Hayduk

It'S been really satisfying friends that you have and people that will shake your hand and do something for you or if you've got any problems or you get a flat tire on a Sunday or transmission problem on a Sunday and you're in Moab, there's somebody that will get you on your way and get you going home or feed you and give you a place to stay or sometimes just somebody to just sit and talk to you for a little bit and reminisce about old days. So it's worth a lot.

 


[01:19:02.080] - Big Rich Klein

It is.

 


[01:19:02.990] - Doug Hayduk

I appreciate what level I have.

 


[01:19:06.910] - Big Rich Klein

Excellent. Well, Doug, I want to say thank you for spending the time and having this conversation and talking about the history. I learned a lot about you. I knew that you had the bike racing and the off road and the rock crawling, but some of the other engineering inventions and things, I didn't know about those.

 


[01:19:32.100] - Doug Hayduk

Yeah. When you're an off road, you're focused on what's in your immediate environment. Pistol Pete couldn't believe that I had a Masters degree in engineering. I didn't want to flaunt it, and I didn't want to try to act like a boss because I wasn't. Pete was the boss. And he also had an incredible knowledge of building off road vehicles that went way beyond engineering book learning engineering. And he had the practical skills of getting a vehicle to the finish line, which is damned impressive. Yes.

 


[01:20:10.130] - Big Rich Klein

I still think he was probably one of the greatest drivers and was playing in the arena with the guys that had all the money. And if he would have had the backing of what Menzies or Baldwin or any of those guys got. Oh, yeah, he would have been a consistent winner. I still think he could outdrive all those guys.

 


[01:20:40.790] - Doug Hayduk

He knew that he would say that, and I knew it frustrated him and he would break down and yeah, he was a great driver. I got the opportunity to be in his PreRunner at scary speeds with him sometimes, and he never screwed up. He was really good. He never screwed up. When I was in the car with him and it was very impressive. And he had a problem with one of his eyes. He would have even been better if he had perfect functioning eyes. He had an eye that had problems with what do you call it? The cornea, the retina, the exposure of the eye.

 


[01:21:25.280] - Big Rich Klein

I think he got hit with a golf club.

 


[01:21:27.170] - Doug Hayduk

He did accidentally. He got hit with a golf club out on the golf course.

 


[01:21:33.710] - Big Rich Klein

People. It was not intentional.

 


[01:21:38.430] - Doug Hayduk

You might think it was and you might think you'd believe it if I told you it was Robbie Gordon.

 


[01:21:44.190] - Big Rich Klein

We'Re not going to throw Robbie under the bus that time.

 


[01:21:46.450] - Doug Hayduk

That would make more sense. All right. Yeah. Well, I appreciate talking with you, and I hope that we'll do it and I hope to see you.

 


[01:21:59.590] - Big Rich Klein

I'll be around Easter. I'll be back in Moab.

 


[01:22:03.090] - Doug Hayduk

I like to run around Easter Jeeps before and look at all the high tech toys. And it's fun to see that going on that week. So I'll see you there and run into you and we'll have to get together for a coffee or a meal or something like that.

 


[01:22:17.400] - Big Rich Klein

Absolutely. Let me know when you come into Moab during that week before and I'll be around and we'll hook up.

 


[01:22:25.100] - Doug Hayduk

Sounds good, Rich.

 


[01:22:26.170] - Big Rich Klein

All right. Thank you, Doug.

 


[01:22:27.430] - Doug Hayduk

Thank you. Is that it?

 


[01:22:29.030] - Big Rich Klein

Yes, that's it.

 


[01:22:30.310] - Doug Hayduk

Good night.

 


[01:22:30.940] - Big Rich Klein

Good night.

 


[01:22:33.150] - Speaker 3

If you enjoy these podcasts, please give us a rating. Share some feedback with us via Facebook or Instagram, and share our link among your friends. Who might be likeminded? Well, that brings this episode to an end. Hope you enjoyed it. We'll catch you next week with conversations with big rich. Thank you very much. Bye.