Passes & Canyons Blog

When I was a kid I occasionally had the opportunity to ride motorcycles and they were all pretty small. First you have to understand that what constituted a “big” motorcycle back then was not at all what it is today. Years later, when I got my first bike, my 1980 Honda CB750 Custom, it was a bike that, in its day, had been a big bike. Nobody would call a 750 a big bike today.

But when I was just starting to ride, generally on bikes owned by friends, we were talking small. What I coveted was what we called simply the Honda 50, the step-through bike that I guess was officially the “Cub.” My mother never let me buy that bike but when I rode on friends’ bikes they were bigger than that, generally in the 90cc to 305cc range.

When I rode that 305 Scrambler it seemed like a plenty big bike. Then in college I had a roommate who had a CB350 and that definitely seemed like a big bike. Around that same time the sister of a friend bought a 250cc Suzuki and she let me ride that. That seemed like a big enough bike.

Years later, now living in Denver, my friend Christopher came over one night on the used BMW bike he has just bought. I don’t remember how big it was but it was way bigger than any bike I had ever been on before. He offered to let me take it for a spin and I declined. I was scared of that thing. I was scared if I took off on it I might not live to get back. And the truth is, that was probably a good decision.

A couple years after that, though, my friend John showed up on the 750 Virago he had just bought and I was thrilled to climb on behind. It just took a few rides on behind John to convince me that I had to have my own. There was a used bike shop just a few blocks from my house and John and I paid them a visit.

I immediately started looking at what they had in the 400cc-450cc. John told me no, I really didn’t want to get a bike that small because if I did I’d be looking to trade it in on something bigger in just a few months. Words of wisdom.

He steered me to a group of 750s. They looked huge to me but John was the experienced one and I trusted his judgment. I ended up buying the CB and John rode it home for me because I didn’t have even a learner’s permit. I got one right away and started riding every chance I got, learning how to handle this big thing.

I must have learned because I took my motorcycle license test on the 750 and passed, albeit on my second attempt. I learned later that most people borrow a smaller bike to take the test on. I passed it on my 750. I still think that was quite an accomplishment, especially considering that I was self-taught.

Of course after awhile the 750 didn’t seem too big at all. It was just right. So right, in fact, that it was what I rode for a long, long time afterward. While all my friends were moving up to bigger bikes I stayed with the Honda. I was in love with that bike.

The time did come, though, when I was looking for something more. Not size necessarily, but comfort. We had taken a trip to California and my butt was really hurting by the time we got home. I went out and bought this 1000cc Kawasaki Concours I’d had my eye on and once again it was a big bike.

It took me a year or more of riding until that thing started feeling not huge. But again, I did get used to it. At first I wouldn’t ride without wearing boots with tall heels; now I hop on with just sneakers on and don’t think a thing about it.

I think I will finally draw the line right about here, though. We rented a big Harley while up in Canada a couple years ago and that thing was just too much. Not the height, but the weight. I got in some gravel at one point that was deeper than I thought and it was all in the world I could do to keep it up. Stuck in heavy traffic in Vancouver, inching forward, it was not fun.

No, you know, what I really like these days is my 650cc Suzuki V-Strom. I don’t want to go traveling on it–that’s for the Concours–but for just about anything else, this light, agile bike is a blast. Size really does matter.

Biker Quote for Today

Watch out for everything bigger than you, they have the “right of weight” — Bib

I had hoped to ride yesterday but I woke up to snow falling, and though it came and went during the day there was not to be any two-wheeling.

When riding is constrained it makes it tough to tell new stories about riding adventures. So I start thinking about old stories.

Like my very first motorcycle ride, at age 15. Hard as it may be to conceive, way back then, in Nebraska where we lived, you could ride a small motorcycle without a license at 15. And they rented Honda 90s at the local 7-Eleven by the hour. This was back in the days of “You meet the nicest people on a Honda,” when the bad-guy biker image was starting to turn.

My friend John and I went over one day with enough money in our pockets to rent a couple bikes for maybe two hours. It probably cost about $3.50 an hour, so that was big bucks for us. Unfortunately, I don’t remember much at all about that ride, other than that we did it. I do seem to remember we did some riding around on some dirt in a local vacant lot.

The next summer my family moved but I spent that summer working at a camp on an island up in Minnesota. The guy I bunked with had a brand new Honda 305 Scrambler that he rode up from Minneapolis and he offered to let me ride it anytime I wanted. So I did. Oddly, I don’t remember riding it all that much, which seems very odd to me now.

The one thing I do remember is one day I was going to town to get some supplies and as I took the key for the bike he told me he didn’t want me taking the girls who were going with me for rides. I guess he figured that wasn’t necessarily safe. Of course that was exactly what we intended, but we assured him we wouldn’t do that.

And then we proceeded to do exactly that. I took one for a ride in the country and took the other into town to get what we had come for. Must not have been big, whatever it was. This Scrambler was pretty torquey so at times I ended up doing wheelies as I tried to take off. We were getting back on the bike in town and some young guys came along and saw us and started yelling “Look at the girl on the bike!” Yes, she was quite pretty.

It wasn’t my intention but as I took off we wheelied. I’ve always thought that was pretty dang cool, with those guys watching, to wheelie out with this babe on behind me. Back at camp my bunkmate asked if I had taken the girls for rides and I hated to lie so I didn’t. He never let me ride his bike again.

My next opportunity to ride was in Decatur, Illinois, where my family had moved. This was another friend named John, and he and his brother Steve each had little 125s, probably Yamaha. Steve didn’t mind if I rode his so John and I took off.

I had no idea about counter-steering at that time, so as I rolled down their somewhat steep driveway and tried to turn the motorcycle the way I would turn a bicycle things did not go well. I would try to turn right and that made the bike want to go the other way and I crossed the street and ran straight into the curb, sending me flying onto the neighbor’s lawn.

No damage done, though, so I picked it up and we rode off.

Out in traffic it started getting dicey. I still wasn’t getting this steering thing and at one point as we moved into a left-turn lane I watched anxiously as I just barely managed to avoid clipping the median on my left. Clearly there was something going on that I didn’t understand.

Other than those particulars I really don’t remember much about that ride either.

There were other rides on other bikes in later years, but far too much time passed before I finally bought my own. Now when some of the guys I ride with at times tell me they haven’t had the bike out in six months I’m just amazed. I guess I’m trying to make up for lost time.

Biker Quote for Today

I ride not to add days to my life, but to add life to my days.

You wouldn’t believe the number of people who want to spam you–you, the readers of this blog–and the kind of crap they want to foist off. Or maybe you would.

I figure I get on average about 10 emails a week from people asking to do guest posts for the blog, promising the very best in quality and interest for my readers. My reply is very straightforward. I paste in my boilerplate answer and send. The boilerplate basically says that I know they get paid for getting links to their client sites placed on good sites like mine, and if they’re going to get paid I want to be paid, too. But first, even if they’re willing to pay me, the content has to be good. I’m not going to spam my readers.

For most of them that’s it; I never hear from them again. A few express interest in the paid post and they send me what they want me to run. I cannot tell you the dreck I receive. Let’s take the most recent one as an example.

In reply to my boilerplate reply, this woman said OK, she’d be willing to pay, but as a freelancer she only gets $40 for each placement, and I ask $50, so would I be willing to take $20? I told her no, I really don’t care if anyone pays me because for me the blog is not work. I’m a writer and I do it for my own pleasure and satisfaction. So no, I’m not going to cut my fee.

Somewhat to my surprise, I got a follow-up from her saying OK, she’d pay the $50, and here’s the piece she wants published. You can’t imagine what garbage it was. Right off the bat, it wasn’t a motorcycle-related piece at all; it was about mountain biking. Hello, do you understand that I run a motorcycle site. And then, even if it were a motorcycle piece, it was one of these totally basic things like “Three Must-Dos for Motorcyclists” with the three items along the lines of get training, wear the proper gear, and get insurance. Oh, now that is really useful information I absolutely must share with my readers. I’m sure none of those three things ever crossed any of their minds. Yeah.

Of course, insurance is the really key thing here. She wants to get a link to an insurance website on my blog. So I fired an email back to her telling her how abysmal the piece she sent me was, and that no, it will not be running on my blog. To my great surprise she emailed right back apologizing for disappointing me and including another piece for me to run. I didn’t even read it; I just hit the Spam button so with any luck anything else she sends me will go straight to that folder.

And that’s the way it goes, week after week. On the rarest occasions I actually get something good, or at least good enough that I don’t feel I’ll be totally insulting you publishing it. If you’re read those in the past and not been impressed then I suggest you just skip over them; I won’t be offended. I mean, the occasional 50 bucks is nice but if in the future I run something and you think I should have turned it down I’d be pleased to hear from you to that effect. Turning off my readers is not worth $50.

Recent from National Motorcycle Examiner
Colorado rider training program ailing badly

Biker Quote for Today

“The engine settled into the climb, with that relaxed ticka-ticka-ticka old BMWs have. It’s not the sound that makes you want to race; more seductive, it tempts you to quit your job and ride to South America.” Riding with Rilke by Ted Bishop

This piece pretty much wrote itself. I just watched as the emails came in.

You may recall me writing about Jerry Pokorny before, or you may know him. Jerry is connected with the British Motorcycle Association of Colorado (BMAC) and he owns quite a few old bikes. In the past few years he has made it out to Utah each year to take a crack at setting land speed records on the salt flats on various of his bikes.

This year’s event is just over and here are some emails I received.

August 11 —
Good news – Bmac teams of George N, John Stoner and Jerry are in the Impound area tonight after qualifying for different Land Speed Records. Tomorrow we are all out before daylight to get in line to run at daybreak. With a little luck and some guidance from Sherm we expect to set three new records tomorrow.

But that’s not all! Frank and Ray will be then following for another record with the Sherminator and George and John will also be going after additional recods later in the week. And Jack Begman is working hard tto get his bike a little faster to reclaim his record so this is going to be quite a week for the BMAC.

Stay tuned, more to follow.

Carpe Diem,

Whiskyman

August 12 —
Great news from the Salt. BMAC teams have set 3 new land speed records. John stoner on Salt Flats Sally, George on his Triumph and Jerry on the Sherminator all are now in the record books. Ray Puckett is in impound tonight (a good thing) and will be running at dawn tomorrow for another BMAC record. Jack Bergman made a great showing but not quite fast enough to regain his record. Now he has retired for the year with a bent valve. And we still have days to go and might see even more records fall.

full details pending – stay tuned!

Whiskyman

August 12 —
John Stoner burned a hole in the piston of his Honda SL 175 making his record run today. He needs a replacement FAST. We only have a few days left here on the salt so we need to see if somebody can overnight one to him RIGHT NOW. No time to order on line so if anybody has one floating around and can help please contact John – his address is in the cc.

Thanks in advance,

jerry

August 16 —
This will give you an idea of what it’s like “racing on the surface of the moon” :>)
Bonneville Speed Week 2013

Following is video from John Stoner’s second run for his record on Salt Flats Sally, and Raymond Puckett’s rookie run on the BMAC Sherminator. These were taken with the GoPro helmet video. Please send out to the BMAC members and thank them for their support!!!

Frank Puckett

Johns run

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-zo_Hw2e-k&feature=youtube_gdata_player

My run

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGTq8i29Lmo&feature=youtube_gdata_player

August 18 —
http://scta-bni.org/Bonneville/SpeedWeek%202013/BonnCertifiedRecords.pdf

Colorado Springs area Teams setting World Land Speed Records include bike’s numbers:

194B
286B (Sherminator)
3286B (Sherminator)
679B
6779B
735B

And our friends from Wales shattered the 125cc vintage records with their BSA Bantams:

375B
376B
3751B

What an awesome year!

A big thanks to all our sponsor for helping us achieve these records! Note the photo of the Sherminator fairing – Advertisers and Sherm on board for all the runs! He was an inspiration!

Whiskyman

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The OFMC gets wet

Biker Quote for Today

They say never ride faster than your Guardian Angel can fly. Given my luck, I wanna know if the bitch is drunk or on a smoke break.

For five years now I have written for Examiner.com as their National Motorcycle Examiner, though of late I’ve been doing a minimum of work for them. Here’s an example of why.

I was putting up an article recently and found that when I filtered my content list for just the unpublished pieces there was more than the one I was working on. Turns out someone down there in their infinite wisdom decided to unpublish a piece I put up in 2010, presumably because it contained objectionable material. Now? After all this time? And what was objectionable about it?

So I’m going to republish it right here and let you see if you can figure out what they decided they didn’t like.

Only a biker knows . . .: Motorcycle wit and wisdom, #15

Dang, those bikers are quotable. It all started with the line, “Only a biker knows why a dog sticks its head out the window” and now we’re back with out 15th batch of amusing, sometimes thought-provoking, frequently dead-on biker quotes. Enjoy.

• You ain’t livin’ unless you’re livin’ on the edge.
• Bounce like you’ve got hydraulics in your G-string.
• Never look where you are going, always look where you want to go.
• On a motorcycle, you’re penetrating distance right along with the machine. In a car, you’re just a spectator; the windshield’s like a TV. — Von Dutch
• If it’s too loud you’re too old.
• You’re a biker wannabe if you spit out the bug that just flew in your mouth.
• Some people ride to enjoy life, some ride to travel, and some people ride to bars.
• Don’t die wondering, die wandering.
• Adventure is not the road we travel, it’s the obstacles we overcome.
• At the end of the day, you’ve still got to twist that throttle.
• Gravity: Obeying the law is for pussies.
• I don’t know, it’s kinda weird, but the constant chest pains seem to go away when I let the clutch out on my bike.
• Scars are tattoos with better stories!
• Remember kiddies, bikers have more fun than people.
• Remember when sex was safe and motorcycles were dangerous?
• If motorcycles are not allowed in heaven then I’ll ride mine to hell.
• Midnight bugs taste just as bad as noon time bugs.
• I’m a highway junkie! Lord, I love a white line!!!
• Dream as if you’ll live forever, live as if you’ll die today. — James Dean
• It’s not the bike so much as it’s the rider. Put the stock pistons back in the bike and quit messing with stuff you don’t understand.

OK, there you go. Something in there is pretty offensive, right? My best guess is that it’s that line about gravity, and they got some cock-eyed idea that it was referring to female anatomy as opposed to being a synonym for wussies or wimps or something like that. There are a lot of reasons I don’t write much for them anymore and this is just one more on the list. Too bad, it was a good gig for a while.

Biker Quote for Today

Motorcycles are better than men because motorcycles don’t pass gas and belch all the time. If they do, you can do something about it.

I spoke with Craig Vetter last week, working on an article that I hope I’m not too late getting to Rider magazine. Vetter, as you probably know, is the designer of the Windjammer fairing and a lot of other things, and these days he’s really focused on fuel efficiency.

Vetter has worked out the design for what he calls The Last Vetter Fairing, which is body work that creates a streamlined motorcycle with upright seating and room to carry four bags of groceries.

He told me that in a recent test ride, with two identical motorcycles, one streamlined, the one that was streamlined got double the gas mileage of the stock bike. But he also talked about the power you need to push a bike down the road at 70 mph, and that comes out somewhere in the 20-25 horsepower range.

And here’s the kicker. If you’ve got too much power you’re not going to see any major miles per gallon increase with streamlining, he said, because all that power eats up too much gas.

“What you would notice is you could go probably 200 miles an hour. But where is it legal to go 200 miles an hour?”

I get the point but it still kind of tickles my fancy to think of my Concours going that fast. “I hit 189 miles an hour but the dang thing only gave me 68 miles to the gallon! What a gas hog!”

So anyway, it was a really good conversation and I couldn’t begin to use all the interesting stuff in that one short article for Rider so all the extra will make for some good blog posts here. Stay tuned.

Recent from National Motorcycle Examiner
Only a biker knows . . .: Motorcycle wit and wisdom, #27

Biker Quote for Today

I wanna ride this road!

If you’ve been reading this blog you know that I end each post with a “Biker Quote for Today.” I gather these quotes from a lot of places. Some I just run across; others I find by searching. One of my most fertile places to search is the discussions on Adventure Riders, or ADV for short.

More than most motorcycle forums, the ADV folks really get into putting cool, funny, interesting remarks in their signatures. Anytime I’m on the site I keep my eyes open to see what gems I can find.

One such gem was the quote I used on Oct. 22, at the end of my “Hoping For Warm Hands In Winter Riding” post. It read, “There’s no adventure in turning around. — Shoganai”

Well guess who I heard from: Gwen Phillips (aka Shoganai).

Gwen said she had been searching on Google “for an old thread I started on an old forum years ago” and lo and behold, “I was stunned to find something I said to Jim aka Drif10 this year when he came to visit our home.” So she was tickled and wrote that she was honored to be quoted.

And actually, I had heard first from Drif10. He noted in regard to Gwen’s quote that, “And she isn’t kidding about that quote, either. She’ll take a road bike places that make me think twice about taking my dirt bike into.”

Good for you Gwen.

This is actually the second time I’ve heard from someone I quoted. Believe me, I really enjoy getting these emails. And I really enjoy the quotes. Some day I’m going to put together a book with the quotes and pictures that match the quotes, more or less. Really, I am. I’ve already got part of it done. But at this rate it will be a few more years before I finish it. I guarantee that when it’s ready you’ll hear about it here.

Recent from National Motorcycle Examiner
Book review: How to Ride Off-Road Motorcycles

Biker Quote for Today

Bones heal, chicks dig scars, pain is temporary, glory is forever. — Evel Knievel

I know where I’m going to be at least part of the day on Sunday. ABATE of Colorado is putting on a Motorcycle Expo at Aurora Town Center, which is what they now call what used to be the Aurora Mall.

I know that Terry Howard and the crew at ABATE have put a lot of effort into this thing. Here’s a list of what will be going on.

• Noise testing — See how loud your bike really is, and how it compares to legal limits.
• Police demos — These guys are some of the best bike handlers you’ve ever seen. You wish you were this good.
• Ride in bike show — Enter your bike and see how it compares.
• Riding gear vendors — See what’s new, what’s too cool to pass up.
• Swap meet vending for used parts — A must-check-out for those of us on older bikes.
• MOST and SmarTrainer display — Learn about rider training opportunities.
• Motorcycle games — Set up by Don Gunn. Have fun on your bike.
• Motorcycle dealer displays and demos — See what’s available all in one place.
• Riding organizations — Colorado Sportbike Club, Motorcycle Roadracing Association, dirt-bike school info

And more. The groups sponsoring this event include:

• ABATE Rider Education
• Motorcycle Operators Safety Training
• Colorado Sportbike Club
• Motorcycle Roadracing Association
• Thunder Roads Colorado
• United Dirt Bike School
• Erica Rae’s kids

Huh? Don’t know what the scoop is with Erica Rae’s kids. Maybe I’ll find out.

So as I say, I’m definitely going to be there on Sunday. If you’re there at the same time, say hi.

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Zero Motorcycles reports massive sales growth in first quarter 2012

Biker Quote for Today

I ride, therefore I am.