Gear Selection Is Escape Planning

You are cruising NM-14 at 35 mph through the curves south of Sandia Park, and an elk steps onto the shoulder sixty feet ahead. Your escape is right there — a clean lane to the left, no oncoming traffic, enough room. But when you roll on to move, nothing happens for half a second. You are in fifth gear and the bike is lugging. By the time the power arrives, you have lost twenty feet and the geometry of the escape has changed.

That half-second delay is not a mechanical problem. It is a gear-selection problem, and gear selection is not a comfort decision. It is escape planning.

The question the curriculum asks

At your normal cruising speed — 35 mph, 45 mph, whatever your daily route actually runs — can you add 10 mph within two seconds without touching the shifter?

If the answer is no, you are riding in a gear that keeps power locked behind a downshift scramble. You have given away the first half of every evasion before it starts.

The Mañana Moto curriculum calls this the Goldilocks Zone — the RPM range where the bike accelerates cleanly without hesitation and decelerates predictably without a binary engine-braking snap. Find it on your bike, at the speeds you actually ride. It is not the gear the manual recommends for fuel economy. It is the gear that keeps the next move available right now.

Why October makes this matter more

New Mexico is in the peak of elk rut, and it runs through early October. Archery season ended September 24; rifle seasons start this month. That means two overlapping risk layers: animals moving unpredictably during rut, and animals displaced by hunting pressure into areas they do not normally cross.

The documented numbers: around 1,200 wildlife collisions occur each year in New Mexico, costing about $20 million annually (Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, 2024). The 2022 Wisconsin data shows that of five people who died in 16,278 vehicle collisions with deer, four were motorcyclists (Wisconsin DOT, 2022). Riders face disproportionate risk in wildlife crashes — no protective cage, more vulnerable to the impact itself, and to the loss of control that follows it.

NM-14 through the Sandias, NM-4 through the Jemez, and the mountain routes around Los Alamos all sit inside the elk's range and inside the October risk window.

Dawn and dusk are the high-probability hours. If your commute or your evening session puts you on a mountain route during those windows, you are riding the overlap of animal activity and reduced visibility. Gear selection becomes the difference between power on demand and power two seconds late.

The proactive shift

The curriculum's phrasing: downshift before you need the acceleration — as the gap in traffic starts to open, not after it has.

On a mountain road with limited sight distance, that principle extends to the whole route. You are not shifting for the corner you are in. You are shifting for the straight that follows it, where an animal might be standing when you come out of the curve and your eyes reach it.

Riding NM-14 south of the Sandia Park junction in fifth gear at 3,200 RPM gives you smooth, quiet cruising. It also gives you a bike with no response until you drop two gears. The trade is not worth it. Fourth gear at 4,200 RPM sounds busier and uses a little more fuel, but when the next sixty feet hands you something you did not plan for, the throttle works.

This is not about riding faster. It is about riding ready.

Mechanical harmony

The curriculum's term for the standard: the bike is always in the correct gear for the next likely maneuver. Not the current one — the next one.

That does not mean second gear at 50 mph. It means the gear that lets you answer two scenarios without a shift: maintaining speed if nothing changes, or accelerating out if something does.

On a descent — NM-536 before it closed, or the west side of NM-4 dropping into the Jemez valley — holding the grade with the gearbox instead of riding the brakes keeps your stopping power cool and available. Pick the gear that lets the engine hold a constant speed downhill without constant brake pressure. If a deer steps out halfway down and you need to stop hard, you want brakes that have not been cooking for two miles.

The same principle applies in reverse on an uphill approach to a blind crest. You are not lugging up the grade in top gear and then scrambling for a downshift when the crest reveals cross traffic. You hold the gear that keeps power available before the picture changes.

Your ears are an instrument here. No clunking gears, no mismatched RPM screams. Acoustic cleanliness — smooth, deliberate shifts that the bike executes without complaint — is a legitimate, checkable measure of riding quality. If your riding sounds busy, it probably is. If it sounds mechanical and harsh, the harmony is missing.

What to do

First: learn where your bike's Goldilocks Zone actually is. Pick a clear stretch of road at your normal cruising speed and try the 10-mph test in different gears. The gear that delivers clean acceleration within two seconds, without hesitation and without protest, is the gear you should be in when the picture is stable and the next move is unknown.

Second: stop defaulting to top gear just because the speed is steady. Steady speed on a mountain road with sight-distance limits and wildlife crossing pressure is not the same as steady speed on an Interstate. The first scenario asks for response readiness; the second asks for efficiency. Recognize which one you are in.

Third: if you are riding dawn or dusk on NM-14, NM-4, US-550, or any route crossing elk range during October, drop one gear from where you would normally sit. The fuel cost is negligible. The response-time gain is the margin.

Gear selection is not a comfort choice. It is the first move in every evasion you might have to make, and you make it before the hazard ever appears. The half-second you give away by riding in the wrong gear is half the distance you had to work with.