Church of Choppers Blog

The Hillclimber: George Sauer

A photograph from his youth reveals a naturally strong and muscular bearing, the physique of a wrestler. At 88 years of age not much has changed about George Sauer. Compact and energetic, he still moves with the coiled gate of an athlete. His vice grip handshake is not the result of someone trying to impress you with his strength. It just happens.

By the time I heard about George his reputation had already taken on the status of legend. A rider myself with a particular obsession for the more obscure sport of motorcycle hill climbing, there was something serendipitous in the fact that he was not just a competitor, but a champion in that sport for nearly fifty years. The fact that as an octogenarian he was not only competing but also still winning hill climbs, only peaked my curiosity.

Truthfully, I found it hard to believe. Hill climb competitions aren’t a casual pastime. Don’t believe it? Youtube it and watch what happens. Bones are broken and ribs are crushed in violent, air-born crashes as riders try to scale the face of near perpendicular hillsides. Given his stated age of 88 years old, it would be easy to presume it had to be an innocent, but exaggerated, miscalculation, but as I was soon to discover, exaggeration is not a trademark of George Sauer’s conversations.
His athletic accomplishment at that age buries any longevity achievement in any sport that I can think of. The championship competitive skills of most professional golfers begins to diminish before their mid 40’s. The median age for membership in most senior division golf tournaments is 55. Rare is the professional baseball, football or hockey player that makes it out of their thirties as a serious contender.

Sure it happens, but it’s a novelty. Basketball? Forget it. And at 45 George Foreman was an aberration. Shave nearly twenty years off of George Sauer’s age and you’re still in an age group that lives with a serious concern of falling and breaking a hip.

Everything about George Sauer seemed exceptional.

And so, on a warm Sunday afternoon with the privilege of assist from Steve Skorupa on camera and Paul Savage as acting social director to George’s extended family, we descend on his Shadow Hills home to discuss all things motorcycles, hill climbs and feats of human endeavor that seem to defy the laws of physics and challenge the march of time.

Gracious with an old school civility by introduction, George, iron grip handshake to boot, could easily pass for a man twenty years younger than his actual age. But more impressively, I am immediately struck by his ordinary, unassuming humility when we first meet. The afternoon would bear witness to that virtue and, in retrospect, define the character of the man. It is ingrained in his constitution. So ingrained in fact, that despite the considerable multitude of trophies, plaques and medals adorning every wall, table and shelf in the two car garage where we situated for the first part of our visit, I sensed he was a bit puzzled as to why any one would want to meet, much less interview him about anything.

Modesty is his watchword. As a result, it made an interview challenging at times. When pressed for tips on specific climbing techniques, for example, “Floor it and hang on,” would be as forthcoming he as might get. And he’s not being coy. It’s a reticence left over from another time by a man who is competing and winning in the modern era. The full bounty of awards that surrounded tells me that that is probably not all there is to it. But like most prodigies of a given discipline, the integrity of the man before me suggests that his uncommon talent is something that he can’t quite define. I can only surmise his ability is some uncanny combination of balance and instinctual acumen for the torque and power band of his bikes. In short, it’s a gift. His most vivid recollection of the hills he’s climbed are inextricably linked to the type of bike he was riding and which gear he was in when he climbed it.
“I’ve ridden them all but my first bike was a Yamaha,” he reminisced, “then I switched to a Honda CR500.”

He stuck with Honda for well over thirty years until only recently,
“In these last few years I’ve switched to a KTM 500. The technology today is so superior to what they used to make.”

Eventually the small talk finally turned to the specific hills he’s climbed. While most of his victories have been in the California competitions he recounts the fact that he made his way to Utah on occasion to compete in the fabled Widowmaker Climb.
The Widowmaker was immortalized in the great 1971 Bruce Brown documentary “On Any Sunday”, where the first rider to ever make it over the top of that legendary hill was captured on film. The Widowmaker has since become a yearly hill climbing tradition where riders come from all around the world to compete. But while the name remains the same the hills where the hill-climb is held have changed. George is one of the few riders left who can say he climbed the original.

“I climbed the Widowmaker a few times but I only made it over the top of the Matterhorn once,” he said, reverentially, when I inquired about the late great, and seemingly unconquerable colossus of Southern California. To climb the Matterhorn even once puts him in the rarified air of a precious few.

“In old school motorcycle circles, the mention of that legendary hill is tantamount to referencing Mount Everest in the parlance of mountaineers. Located in Saddleback Park, California, the last fifteen feet of the Matterhorn, otherwise known as “The Wall,” was calculated at 89-degrees. Just about vertical. By the early 1960’s, 10 years since the park opened, it remained unconquered. Like Oscar the Bull was not ride-able, and the four-minute mile was not breakable, the Matterhorn was not climbable. But eventually, all legends must fall. Sometime in 1963, a rider on a 750 Triumph broke the crest of the Matterhorn for the very first time. Tragically, only a few short years after the first climber put a tire track on the summit of the Matterhorn, park officials took a bulldozer and knocked “The Wall” off the top of the hill to make it more accessible to other riders. In an act of sacrilege, the very component that drew challengers from far and wide was destroyed. While the hill was still impressive, the myth of the Matterhorn would never be the same.
Sadly, Saddleback Park has long since disappeared into a landfill and real estate development. George had no recollection of the Matterhorn being altered but the dates determine that he was actively climbing while “the wall” still stood. He then gave a recollection of the hill that sounded hauntingly familiar.
“It got very steep at the top,” he said, with a gesture of his powerful hand, “ it looked like the hill was curling over on top of you.” Given that he made it over only once, it stood to reason that George Sauer had matched wits with the great “Wall” of the Matterhorn and prevailed.

As our tour continued we were directed to the larger back garage, which upon entering, felt like stepping back in time to a motorcycle rider’s history museum. In a way it was. I presumed that the full complement of trophies, awards and photographs were contained in the front garage where our interview commenced. As it turned out, they weren’t even half of it. In addition to a collection of climbing bikes, the aging shelves seemed to sag under the weight of all the dusty hard ware. Each one a story, each another adventure. I got up to around150 trophies before I stopped counting. Interspersed among them are photographs of George, younger and older, on or beside different bikes, standing alone and together with different riders. It would take a curator weeks to catalogue and document the entire chronology of artifacts.

George wandered among the tools and bike parts.
“I had a fella’ used to come around and work on the bikes with me,” he held forth in a rare moment of unsolicited conversation. “ He was a good enough guy, but he’d step over things on the floor instead of picking them up when he worked so I had to send him down the road.”

A difficult streak to George, for such a minor offense you might ask? I don’t think so. In typically understated fashion, I have a better than strong hunch there’s more to the story than what George revealed. It sounded more like an anecdote of disappointment than a breach of garage etiquette. Raised in a time when a man kept his confidences, George, earlier in the day, would only vaguely allude to a caution he takes with people. Things have gone missing.

The rest of the garage looked much as it had 40 years before. Tires, gears, springs and sprockets line the walls from floor to ceiling. With an artist’s eye for the stories told in the worn, gritty still life of an engine part, Steve’s camera snapped in rapid succession, from all angles, at every graphic and telling detail. This universe is the laboratory where George customizes his motorcycles with swing-arm extensions to lengthen their wheelbase, and paddle tires to dig through loose shale on a climb, the workshop of a champion.

The third leg of our tour takes us to the large motorcycle trailer that George uses to transport his motorcycles to and from his many hill-climbs. It’s still full of posters, photos and a myriad of paraphernalia from over four decades of competition. One in particular grabs my attention. It’s an early seventies black and white poster of a man separated from his bike and falling backward to the ground in attempt to climb the Widowmaker. The motorcycle floats precariously above him in a state of suspended tension leaving the viewer in uneasy anticipation as to where it might land. On closer inspection the fine print reveals the rider to be: George Sauer.

It’s a greater and more telling image than any of these words can convey. It’s a humbling reminder; even the great and mighty may fall on a given day, and therein lies the challenge. There is the reason they climb, to try and eventually ride over the peak of the next impossible hill. It’s a magnificent shot and it was a glorious spill.

The afternoon wore on and the conversation grew lazy, as George seemed to lose interest in talking about himself and his achievements. Directed to the main house for a final send off I was ill prepared for one last presentation that awaited us. Entering the house we were greeted by one final, brilliant, and staggering display of what looked like a pot of gold at the end of a long rainbow. The gold and silver spires of more than a hundred hill climbing trophies, some more than four feet tall, completely conceal a large fireplace and a substantial part of George’s living room.

‘Oh, yeah, there’s some more.” George said, as an after thought in passing. As stated earlier, exaggeration is not trademark of George’s constitution. The garages alone contained enough hard ware to start a moderate size war. By conservative estimates, his collection of hardware alone numbered around four hundred awards, more than forty years of competitive achievement that staggers the imagination.
At one point, George looked over the display but his thoughts were far away from motorcycles. In a rare glimpse into the personal thoughts of a private man he briefly mentioned how much he missed his wife who had passed away a few years before. When I inquired about her thoughts about his potentially hazardous pastime.
“Oh,” he said after a long pause, “she was fine with it.”
There was a loneliness in the words.

After a day of curious speculation I pointed out a scar that runs from the middle of his right biceps muscle to his wrist.
“Motorcycle injury?” I inquired.
“Oh yeah,” he said, as he trustingly held forth his sinewy arm for inspection, “I was riding and went off the road when…” in typically modest fashion, he dismisses the rest of the story with a wave of his hand as though the rest was too unimpressive to tell, like discussing the weather.

While his recollections are brief and to the point I couldn’t help but take away the impression that he enjoyed our small afternoon of talk about motorcycles and hill climbing as much as I did. It had been an honor and a privilege to know a man who was so great, perhaps the greatest, in an obscure event that I have such a simple and inexplicable fascination for – one man, one hill and a motorcycle.
In an act of generosity, George’s family presented me with a parting gift of a framed autographed photo featuring George and his motorcycle at the base of yet another steep climb.

I’m reminded one more time of his hydraulic grip as we shake hands.
“You guy’s are all good guy’s.” he tells us as we say our good byes.
As we pull away, picture in hand, I’m left with one fleeting impression of this modest and extraordinary gentleman.
If heaven lies directly above us, and one were to stack all of Georges hill climbs, one on top of the other, he’s already climbed the distance it takes to get there. And if by some accident of the universe he found himself at the gates of hell with a motorcycle under him, the odds are better than fair that he could climb his way out. The smart money is on George.

Words by: Mark Gleason

Photos by: Steve Skorupa