(click to enlarge photos)
Published in The Seattle Times online on August 6, 2026
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on August 9, 2026
Queen of the Desert:
How Tammy Sessions broke barriers riding to motorcycle fame
By Jean Sherrard
“Would you like to do that?” Fred Sessions asked.
It was 1967, and he and his 12-year-old daughter Tammy were watching cross-country motorcycle racing on TV — loud, dirty, dangerous. She’d been riding dirt bikes for two years but never considered racing.
“Absolutely!” she said. “When can we start?”
Growing up, Tammy Sessions had certain advantages. Foremost was
her father, a Bellevue health club owner who took early retirement to dedicate the next five years entirely to Tammy and her sister Jody’s racing careers.
“I never got in trouble,” Tammy recalls with a laugh, astride her Husqvarna 350cc at Kent’s Binford Field of Dreams, “because I didn’t have time.”
Fred drove Tammy from race to race, then sent her across the country with Pat Marinacci, a racer ranked 67th nationally.
Her first race was in Mattawa, Grant County, in 1968 on a 120cc Suzuki that “had no business being out in the desert.” She earned a third-place trophy topped with a pink powder puff.
Her little sister, Jody, watched from the sidelines. “I want one of those,” she said. Fred started Jody racing the following year, at age 6.
Tammy broke records — and bones, her collarbone three times, among others. When she stepped up to the national Camel Pro Series on her 360cc Astro Bultaco at age 20, she arrived, as she recalls, “with hair down to my waist, wearing a bright pink leather suit, standing about 5-foot-4.”
Fathers of her male competitors muttered in the pits, but she let her throttle hand do the talking.
From the sport’s earliest days, the American Motorcycle Association, the sport’s governing body, had ruled that women could not race professionally. In 1971, fellow rider Debbi Selden Pugh, paying her attorney $5 an hour, took the association to court and won.
Sessions, of Kent, and Selden Pugh, of Tacoma, found their groove on the flat track and never gave it up — cracking, as motorcycle historian Tom Samuelsen puts it, “the dirt ceiling for all women across the United States.”
Tammy won 18 major races, becoming a legend on the desert circuit. At 46, she trained solo near Vantage, Kittitas County, and the Columbia River for her final professional
outing. Before each session she handed a convenience-store clerk her father’s phone number: “If I’m not back in two hours, give him a call.”
Today, at 71, she still rides for the joy: blue highways, back roads, extended trips under the stars. As president of Seattle’s Pacific Northwest Museum of Motorcycling, she remains a life member of the Stumpjumpers Motorcycle Club, which sponsors an annual race in Eastern Washington, the Desert 100.
“I wouldn’t change a thing,” she says, then guns her engine across an open field, stands in the saddle and lets out a whoop.
WEB EXTRAS
Check out our narrated 360 video of Tammy riding her Husqvarna at Binford’s Field of Dreams in Kent.
And if you haven’t visited the Field of Dreams, just south of Binford Auto Wrecking, here’s a video tour of the field, bordered with many dozens of classic vehicles they couldn’t bear to wreck.
