Passes & Canyons Blog

I took the V-Strom out for a first ride of December on Sunday. It would have been a crime not to take advantage of such a nice day.

So how warm was it really? We have thermometers outside our windows in the front of the house and in the back. Our house faces south, so in the front there is sun, while in the back there is shade. The difference in the two readings can be 4 or 5 degrees. The thermometer in the rear said 52.

OK, so how warmly do I need to dress? This is the winter guessing game that I play again and again. It’s easier when it’s only 30 degrees–I put on all the warmest gear I have. At 52 it gets tricky.

I opted for just jeans, no long underwear; my winter gloves, not to be confused with my heated gloves; and a sweatshirt and my electric vest. No scarf. I wavered on the electric vest, wondering if I really needed it, but decided it wouldn’t hurt to have it just in case. But 52 is pretty warm.

However, the wind chill at 60 miles an hour knocks that perceived temperature right down 10 or 15 degrees. Within a mile I had flipped on the vest and with my legs getting chilly I was wondering if omitting the long underwear had been a mistake. Plus, my hands were getting pretty chilly.

I got over it though. It didn’t take long and I wasn’t minding the cool legs and my hands didn’t feel so chilly. It was a really nice, sunny day, and I was glad to be out on the bike. Of course the fact that the electric vest was keeping my core nice and toasty made a huge difference. But after awhile I even cracked my visor so I’d get some breeze on my face. It felt good.

Didn’t see a lot of other folks out on bikes, just one guy on a sportbike on Parker Road. Come on now, you’re telling me you weren’t driven to get out on such a nice day? It’s only going to get colder, at least for this next week.

I didn’t go a long way; I’ve got this shoulder that was hurting me pretty bad because of some strain I put on it doing some work on my driveway earlier in the day. That was another project that needed to be done on a warm day and it was actually my first priority. I’d go for a ride afterward. But that meant when I got on the bike I was hurting.

Still, I got out, and it was nice. I suspect next time I get out on a bike it’s not going to be so nice. But in that case I won’t need to play the guessing game.

Biker Quote for Today

When life gets you down, remember, it’s only one down and the rest is up.

I did a radio interview today. Bernie Jwaszewski had contacted me and wanted to talk about the website for the benefit of people interested in touring Colorado. Bernie does a podcast/radio broadcast called “Bernie’s Colorado Journeys” on KCMJ.org or at 93.9 FM.

Seems Bernie has been into touring for a long time but just last year got himself a Harley trike. That opened up a whole new world for him, as you might well imagine. So he is interested in the best motorcycle roads in Colorado. Bernie, you came to the right place.

So we talked about the Passes & Canyons: Motorcycle Touring in Colorado website.

First off he asked about myself and why I built the site. That was easy: it combined my interests in writing, motorcycling, and tech. And then we went through each of the tabs at the top of each page that go to the main pages on the site, discussing each as we went along.

What was interesting for me was to have a chance to see the site at least partially through someone else’s eyes. For instance, Bernie looked at the page for motorcycle-accessible campgrounds along the Peak-to-Peak Highway and he came to the conclusion that Cold Spring Campground would not be suitable for someone pulling a camper. No, no, no, I assured him. The campground has pull-through sites but I just don’t go into that because the website is about motorcycles. I also mentioned that the campground pages are very dated and it is my intention in 2017 to update all of them.

That was the other point of interest for me. Time and again we would discuss this section or that page and I would add that my intentions are to expand this or update that or redo this–it just comes down to time to do it all. Hopefully I will find that time once I am no longer working for the National Park Service (hello end of January). But the updates and revisions I want to do could probably keep me busy for a solid month.

And then there are the other states in the region. When I first started building the site it was my intent to then do the same for other states in the west. When you figure I’ve had this site up for 11 years now and still have a ton of work that I don’t have time to do, it’s not hard to see why that plan has never gotten off the ground. But I haven’t given up on it. I’m thinking that maybe I’ll do a Kickstarter campaign to raise funding and then just go off for a month to two months and do an entire state all at once. Ride and shoot pictures and gather information during the day and build pages in a motel room in the evening. Get up the next morning and do it again. We’ll see.

So I’ll be interested to see what Bernie does with the interview. I mean, I’m sure he’ll want to do some editing, so it will be interesting to see what he focuses on. Also, just a note, he has also spoken with Steve Farson, who wrote the book The Complete Guide to Motorcycling Colorado. Steve’s book is very good and I’ll be interested to listen to Bernie’s podcast with him, too.

And one other thing: I’m interested to explore Bernie’s site. Who knows, maybe he has found some places in this state that I’ve never seen. You never know.

Biker Quote for Today

A cold hamburger can be reheated quite nicely by strapping it to an exhaust pipe and riding forty miles.

I gave an overview of Roy’s Mystery Ride last week but that report was necessarily short on details. It’s often the details that make something really interesting so that’s what you’re going to get here.

Heading out from Performance Cycle this route immediately put me on roads in the Tech Center (I use that term loosely, I guess) that I had never been on. That’s a plus right from the start. Winding around a bit I turned onto Jordan Road headed south. Next I needed to turn left onto Pine Lane.

The hardest part about this ride was having such detailed directions and needing to stop and consult them frequently. Mileage was very precise but I didn’t zero out my tripmeter before starting so I made it a little harder on myself than I could have. I kept looking for Pine Lane, even pulled over at one intersection to consult the directions again, and kept going south. Too far south, I was convinced. And then I reached Hess Road where Jordan ended and I turned around and headed back north. It turned out Pine Lane was where I stopped to consult the directions, and I apparently didn’t see the street sign when I stopped. OK, back on track.

Pine Lane took me east into the hilly area beyond Parker Road and there were numerous interesting sights to locate: a giraffe, a pair of pink pigs, a psychedelic cow, and much more. These were all things we were to watch for. The point of this ride was to be observant while riding your motorcycle.

It was funny to see how easy it was to identify other participants on this ride. I’d be consulting the directions and someone would go past on a bike. A couple miles later I’d pass that same rider and he would be looking at a very familiar piece of paper.

The route led down through Elizabeth, on roads I had mostly been on before, and then on south from there to Elbert. I think I may have only been to Elbert once before, but I saw then that there is some very intriguing landscape around there. My memory was confirmed and now I want to go back there again and do some real exploring.

Heading south out of Elbert I was looking to go east on Sweet Road. The main road seemed to sweep to the right (west) at one point, and that was Sweet Road, but that didn’t seem right so I stopped to consult the sheet. While I was there two other bikes blew on past, with one yelling to me “This is west!” And they kept going. I looked to the south and there was a road heading east about another 100 yards down that way. I went to check and it was Sweet Road. I was on track; they weren’t.

More zig-zagging around carried me further and further to the southeast. Finally Falcon Highway carried me west again and then the route cut through a neighborhood in the eastern suburbs of Colorado Springs where they seem to have a penchant for interesting lawn ornaments. I can’t imagine what it took to design this route.

A stop at a shopping center was built in, so I got a mocha at Starbucks and waited for other riders to show up. A few did, circling the parking lot, but nobody stopped, except a couple who needed gas. So I pushed on. Now the roads were carrying me back east, away from town, and once again into the Black Forest area. McLaughlin Road, Eastonville Road, Meridian Road, Hodgen Road: all of them could be called highways. And if they were called highways I would have known they existed, but they’re not so I didn’t. Now I do.

Then once again it was time to cut through a neighborhood. I’m sure the folks living there wondered why all these bikers were going by this day. That road wound around and eventually came out to CO 83 and then it was just a straight shot back to the Denver area and the finish point.

The whole thing was such a nice ride on a gorgeous autumn day that I told Judy I would take her on a repeat if she has time in the next few days. And next time I won’t have to stop so often to consult the sheet.

Biker Quote for Today

True happiness is when you think of your bike and an automatic smile is on your face.

OK, now this is my idea of a group ride.

On Saturday I went on “Roy’s Mystery Ride,” apparently a traditional thing for the Rocky Mountain Motorcycle Riders Club (RMMRC), my first with the group. There were a number of things I liked very much about this ride.

First off, each rider was sent off individually, spaced a minute apart or more, so there was never a pack. I don’t like riding in a pack. The OFMC rides in a pack and I’ve never been thrilled with that since we grew to more than three or four guys.

The way it worked, each rider was given a sheet of directions (see photo). You follow the directions step by step until you reach the end. The focus of this ride was observation, so you weren’t just looking for the next turn, you were also looking for some odd stuff along the way.

Effectively, what this meant for a single rider was that you had to stop and consult the directions frequently. I was able to retain two or three–at most four–items ahead and then I had to stop again and look at the sheet. This resulted in a lot of leap-frogging as one rider would pass another who was stopped to look at the sheet, and even a small congregation at one particular spot where you needed to park and look off in the distance for the particular point of interest. So we were sort of a group but also very separate.

The ride itself was really fun. We went down so many roads I had never been on, through some beautiful country, and I loved it. Basically, we did a lot of miles through the Black Forest area each of I-25 between Denver and Colorado Springs. This is mostly up on the Palmer Divide and I had no idea there was that much forest east of I-25. I want to look at a satellite photo of this area to really get an appreciation of how extensive it is. It’s like being in the mountains but you’re not in the mountains.

Think about it this way: We’ve all been down I-25 between Denver and Colorado Springs. And we’ve all been down CO 83 between them, too. Now go another set of roads to the east. They exist and they are sweet. Who knew?

The ride started at the pretty new Performance Cycle location ultimately ended up at the new BMW of Denver location. BMW of Denver just opened in their new location on Oct. 1 and they were having a blow-out intro on Saturday: food, band, showing the place off.

Once everyone had arrived and had time to get a bite to eat, Roy called us all together to hand out the door prizes. As it turned out, there were more prizes than there were participants. That meant everyone got something, and all the prizes were of greater value than the $10 registration fee we had each paid to participate. What’s not to like about something like that?

So far I’m definitely liking being a member of this group.

Biker Quote for Today

It’s ride o’clock somewhere.

Judy and I just got back from a 10-day road trip (nope, by car) and we spent a lot of time in the boonies. The car has the serious dirt to confirm it.

And you know what? A lot of these way-out-there spots we were in we saw people on motorcycles.

For instance, we were up at the Gates of Lodore, which is in Dinosaur National Monument, up at the far northeast corner of the monument almost to Wyoming. The road to get there is not paved.

That didn’t discourage four guys from Colorado Springs who came rolling into the campground our second day there.

Leading the way was a guy on a KLR 650. Judy made note as he went by that he must be really tall because his knees were sticking way out to the side. The other three were on various Beemers, one of them so loaded you might have thought the guy was going around the world. They were a couple adventure-type bikes and what I took to be a GS 850.

So of course I had to go over and talk with them.

Judy was right. The guy on the KLR must have been 6-foot-4 at least and sitting on the bike with his feet on the ground he looked like I would look sitting on a scooter.

He told me that in the beginning they all had KLRs but one by one the other guys went to Beemers. He stuck with the KLR because it was light and he had no problem going lots of places where the other guys didn’t want to go. So he’ll sometimes take off and meet up with them again later, much as I like to do when I ride with the OFMC on my V-Strom and they don’t want to take their Harleys (and Indian) off pavement.

These guys had left Colorado Springs two days before and had spent one night at one guy’s condo in Frisco. The second night two of them got a motel in Meeker while the other two camped at Maybell. I’m guessing the heavily loaded guy was one of the campers.

The group was headed to the Flaming Gorge and I had not realized there were roads going through on up to Dutch John. Sort of. The road out of Maybell, CO 318, is paved to the state line and then Browns Park Road is gravel. You have to follow that all the way up into Wyoming to WY 373 coming down from Rock Springs along the east side of Flaming Gorge. Then go south to Dutch John on what becomes U.S. 191 once it gets into Utah. Probably about 30 miles on gravel.

And then they’d head home after a couple days at the gorge. Life is good when you and your buddies have motorcycles.

Biker Quote for Today

Never let your free spirit get trapped in a cage.

When I first built the Passes & Canyons website I had all I could do to just ride, photograph, and write about all the paved roads over passes and through canyons in Colorado. Anything unpaved was just left out, at least for the time being. Then after awhile I did add the Dirt Roads and Side Trips page, with a few dirt roads.

One of the roads on that page was Guanella Pass. While the road on the Clear Creek County side coming up from Georgetown was paved, heading down to Grant on the other side, in Park County, was not. So it didn’t get a full page of its own.

But guess what! Guanella Pass has now been paved all the way. And it’s a really nice ride, not that far from the city. If you haven’t been over it you owe it to yourself to do so. Probably the best direction is from Grant to Georgetown because that way you come down the steep descent into Georgetown and it’s a good view.

So now I need to add Guanella Pass to the website as its own full-blown page. And the first step in doing that would be to ride the route, shoot photos, and gather information. That’s what I did last week. In fact, I didn’t just ride it, I rode it twice, from Grant to Georgetown and then back to Grant. I was shooting the ride the whole way with my GoPro camera and a road looks different going one way than it does going the other way.

Now, of course, I need to build the page. And it will really be a matter of building two pages, because there are four campgrounds along this road and I’ll also do a “Campgrounds along the Guanella Pass Road” page with information about those campgrounds. And then there’s the whole ripple effect of all the other pages that will need revisions to include these new pieces.

So, it was a beautiful day and I loved getting up in the hills and having a good ride. I was interested to see how the fall color was going but there really wasn’t much to see. I saw some stands of aspen that were still green, but the ones I saw that were turning were very pale. I didn’t see any at all that were the brilliant yellow that makes this time of year so beautiful.

I know the weather has an impact on how brilliant the colors are and maybe this year we’re just not going to have all that much color. That will be a disappointment if that’s the case. And I know the Georgetown side of Guanella Pass can be spectacular. I guess we’ll see.

I’ll let you know when the new Guanella Pass page is up on the website.

Biker Quote for Today

Yesterday is history, tomorrow is mystery. Ride and live today.