Gerald R. Freeman Campground · Sutton Lake, WV

RIDE TO BUD MAN

Drive it in 3D ›

Cans 0/3
Year One
Light 100%

He camped in the tent beside ours and he did not mind us one bit — he came over. Race the gang: out to his site, one can at a time, back to our tent. First to three before the light goes.

Pick your rider

All eighteen are here. Nobody had these kids yet in the Bud Man years and the wives were not on the trip, so most of this roster is riding several years before it existed. Ride anyway. Every outfit is the one they actually wore in the 2016 photographs.

The map is the real one, and until today it was not. This ran for two days on geometry pulled off the printed campground map, which turned out to be a schematic — the lot numbers and the loops were right, the shapes were not. Every position here now comes from the campground’s own published site coordinates, checked one by one against public aerial photography until each lot landed on the pad you can see from the air. The roads are the real roads. The lake is really there. That is Sutton Lake along the south edge, traced from the surveyed shoreline, and it is the reason the whole map was rebuilt: year one of the tape puts Bud Man “down on the lake’s edge”, and there was no water anywhere on this page. One step here is one metre, so the distances are the distances. 99 is the gang’s own site and it is where you start both years. You race the gang, not Bud Man. He is the one handing them out, because that is the whole of what the record says he did — he joined in rather than complaining. Four of the five riders were really there; Brian was not. His first year was 1997, after Bud Man — in fact “before Brian” is how these years get dated at all. He rides here because Shawn wanted him in the race, and the pick screen marks him a ringer rather than pretending otherwise. Bud Man’s tent is placed, not known. The tape says he was down on the lake’s edge one year and up by the creek near the entrance the next, so that is where he is put — the exact lot was never recorded and is not guessed here.

The loop names are the ones in use today. Honey Bee, Black Bear, Monarch, Brook Trout, Golden Delicious and Cardinal come from the campground’s current site listing, along with each lot’s real pad size and tree cover — which is why a tight wooded site gets a small tent and an open pull-through gets the big one. Whether those were the names back in the tent years, nobody here remembers. The camps themselves are dressing, not record. Who was in which lot on any given weekend was never written down. What is true is that the gang was in tents, every year, which is why you will hardly see a camper out there.