Passes & Canyons Blog

I have a new title. I am the official National Motorcycle Examiner. That means that in addition to the three blog postings I do here each week, I am now making three posts each week to Examiner.com, writing about . . . motorcycles!

Who or what the heck (you may ask) is Examiner.com? I can answer that question.

The San Francisco Examiner is an old, established newspaper in San Francisco. In recent years it has gone through a series of transformation, which you can read about here on Wikipedia.

Most recently, local Denver billionaire Phil Anschutz has purchased the Examiner and has started turning it into a national publication. One aspect of this is Examiner.com, with local home pages for cities across the country.

That’s where I come in. While the Examiner.com sites aggregate hard news feeds from other media, they enlist local experts (their term) to write about their passions. Ernie Tucker found me through this blog and asked me if I’d like to write for them. Oh, please don’t throw me in that briar patch! I said yes.

Now I won’t lie to you, I am indeed making some things do double duty on this blog and on Examiner.com. But so far I’ve only copied one item verbatim from one to the other. In a few other cases I have written about the same things but they were two distinct pieces. For the most part I really am writing six articles a week now instead of three.

So if you’re really interested in reading about motorcycles and motorcycling, and you like my stuff (thank you!), I urge you to become a regular visitor at Examiner.com.

Note, years later: Examiner is no longer in existence.

Biker Quote for Today

Enjoy the ride . . . the rest takes care of itself.

We’ve had a phenomenal winter for snowfall in the mountains and that has an impact on some of the best motorcycle roads in the state.

The good news is that Independence Pass, CO 82 between Twin Lakes and Aspen is finally open. From what I’ve heard, though, it is still subject to periodic closures depending on conditions. I’d check first before heading that way.

CO 5 to the top of Mount Evans is also open, as is the Pike’s Peak Highway, which goes to the top of that 14,110-foot mountain.

Trail Ridge Road, on the other hand, is still closed. The Colorado Department of Transportation says the closure is “between Milner Pass and Rainbow Curve due to adverse conditions.” They don’t say when it will be open.

A couple other passes that are still closed are only of interest if you’re the sort who doesn’t mind doing some dirt.

Kebler Pass, coming down from Crested Butte toward Paonia is still closed. You can get to Crested Butte on CO 135, which is paved, but the stretch over Kebler, County Road 12, is dirt.

Likewise, Cottonwood Pass is still closed. Again, you can get up the east side of Cottonwood from Buena Vista on a paved road. Just don’t think you’re going to get down the other side, whether you ride dirt or not.

We love the snowfall. The skiers had a good winter. Our reservoirs will be full this summer. But you’re going to have to be patient before you can ride some of these roads.

Biker Quote for Today

Ride often, ride well, have fun.

Well, OK, not quite. You might think that a rally for the folks who ride a bike that has been in production for nearly 20 years with only minor changes — very much like the old Volkswagen Beetle — would be a huge gathering.

In fact, approximately 250 Kawasaki Concours riders gathered this week in Frisco, CO, (no, Frisco is not short for San Francisco) for the Concours Owners Group 2008 National Rally. And unlike some rallies, nearly everyone rode their bikes to this event. No trailers for this group.

So, I have a Concours. I was there. I wasn’t there for very long, however. The rally started on Monday and I was starting a new job on Tuesday. Rats. So I cruised up on Monday just to say hi and shoot a few pictures.

Those Connie riders are an independent bunch, however, so efforts to get a lot of the bikes together in one place for a photo failed. Harry van der Laan, of Delfzijl, Netherlands, tried to set that up for me. Thanks just the same, Harry. Harry, by the way, is probably the Concours owner who came the farthest for the rally. He didn’t bring his bike all the way from Europe, though. He bought one here a couple years ago and stores it with Rick Hall, another local Connie rider, when he’s not here. He also makes it available to bikers from other countries who come here to ride. Nice guy.

So I had a nice ride in gorgeous weather while most folks were slaving at the office. And I did see more Connies in one place than I’ve ever seen before. And I met some nice folks.

Hey! That’s about got it covered. That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?

Biker Quote for Today

There’s something ugly about a NEW bike on a trailer.

I’ve always figured I was pretty good on slow, tight turns on a big bike. Heck, I passed my original motorcycle driver’s license test on my CB750. I think most people borrow little 250s or something like that to take the riding test, but not me.

Well, I saw some guys perform on Sunday that did stuff I’ll never be able to do as long as I live. This event was the annual Top Gun Symposium of the Blue Knights Law Enforcement Motorcycle Club. All the contestants were motorcycle patrol officers riding their regular patrol bikes. Most were Harleys but there were also BMWs and Kawasaki Police Specials.

Take a look at this guy. That’s a heck of a tight turn and sharp lean angle and he’s probably going less than 5 mph. Can you do that? I can’t.

This guy wasn’t even the winner, or one of the top three winners. Altogether there were 39 officers competing from a number of different departments, with winners in three categories to correspond with the three makes of bike. The best of the best was named Top Gun. He was one of the guys on one of the Kawasakis.

All in all, it was a pretty good show, and it drew a nice crowd, mostly on bikes. What can I say? Heck, I was impressed.

Biker Quote for Today

A good rider has balance, judgment, and good timing. So does a good lover.

My apologies to anyone who tried in vain to reach this blog or website in the last 36 hours. A fire at what is reportedly the largest web server facility in the world, in Houston, put thousands of servers and tens of thousands of websites — including this one — out of commission for a day and a half. Here’s the notice my web host put up:

Server Issues:
We would like to make our customers aware that we are currently have some issues with our NS1.NETPIVOTAL.COM Primary nameserver and the Rose.netpivotal.com server. On Saturday evening at 4:55 in the Houston data centre where the two servers are located, an electrical gear shorted, creating an explosion and fire that knocked down three walls surrounding our electrical equipment room. Thankfully, no one was injured. In addition, no servers were damaged or lost and the data is still safely on the server. There is no impact in any of our other servers.

So if you were inconvenienced, I’m very sorry. But I’m glad you’ve returned.

It was a really bad time for this to happen because I know from the statistics that this is the busiest time of year for this website. You may recall just two months ago that I was crowing that the website had had 3,000 unique visitors in one month for the first time ever. Well, just two months later we hit 4,000 unique visitors.

Now, this is really exciting for me but let me put it in perspective for you. This website went live in November of 2005. The first month it had 1,000 unique visitors was July of 2006. It was then June 2007 when it first had 2,000 unique visitors in one month. The 3,000 mark was hit then in March 2008 and now, May 2008, it already hit 4,000! And the very next morning the servers went out and everything was offline for 36 hours!

So welcome back, and now maybe we can get back to discussing important things, like motorcycles.

Biker Quote for Today

If you can’t get it going with bungee cords and electrician’s tape, it’s serious.