Passes & Canyons Blog

This is another resurrection of a post on Examiner.com that has been removed due to upgraded, incompatible technology.

We took a particularly nice ride last Saturday, and while I wouldn’t expect anyone else to take the exact same ride, I want to offer it here so you can consider pieces of it whenever it might work for you.

We started out from Cripple Creek, where we had ridden to the previous day. Most people just take the main road in to Cripple Creek from the north, Colorado 67 from Divide and then county road 61. What you may not realize is that there is another road that heads northwest out of the town, toward either Guffey or Parkdale. This is county road 1 and we took it as far as the intersection of county roads 12 (to Guffey) and 11. We took 11. This brought us out on Colorado 9 a little north of where that road hits U.S. 50 at Parkdale.

At U.S. 50 we headed west just a short distance to where you see the turn-off to the south access to the Royal Gorge. This was a left turn onto county road 3. This little road winds and climbs through some beautiful country. It’s a tiny, narrow little strip of asphalt and there is almost no traffic on it at all, and it comes out on the south side of the Royal Gorge Bridge. Now, to continue without backtracking you’ll have to pay the entrance fee to the Royal Gorge, which is $23 per person, but if you’ve never been there you really ought to go see it once, and there’s no better route than this one. And heck, if you ask for a motorcycle discount you might get one. We did.

So we crossed the bridge and got back on U.S. 50 headed for Canon City. Just before reaching the town we took the turn-off to go up and over Skyline Drive, which is this gorgeous little one-lane, one-way road along the crest of the hogback on the west end of town. No charge and a fabulous ride. Coming down at the other end you drop right into town.

Next we headed east to Florence on Colorado 115 and turned south at Florence on Colorado 67. Colorado 67 feeds into Colorado 96 and when we hit the junction of Colorado 165 we headed south on it to Bishop Castle. This one-man project stands probably 150 feet high and has towers and a smoke-breathing dragon, as well as all sorts of climbing and exploration possibilities. It’s totally unique and you really have to see it to comprehend it. It will blow your mind.

We backtracked on Colorado 165, rejoined Colorado 96, rejoined U.S. 50 at Cotopaxi, and rode on it to Salida for the night. As the crow flies we probably hadn’t gone 50 miles but it was a full day of riding, we saw some terrific sights, and we rode some terrific roads. How could it get any better than that?

Biker Quote for Today

The best path through life is the open road.

I no longer write for Examiner.com, but I did for about eight years. During that time they went through numerous tech upgrades, with the result finally that all the work I did for the first nine months or so was no longer compatible with their latest software. So all that very early stuff was removed and is no longer available. I consider that a shame because some of that was very good (my own not so humble opinion).

So I decided the thing to do would be to put some of the best stuff up here on this blog, and here’s the first. I will make note that one thing has changed radically in the interim, which is that the price of gasoline has plummeted. It’s a good indicator of how the future may not be at all like we currently envision it.

I Have Seen The Future And It Seems To Work Just Fine

The middle-aged woman, wearing three-inch heels and a black cocktail dress, paused next to the little scooter. Popping open the storage compartment, she stashed the black shawl she was wearing and put on the denim jacket she took from the compartment. Pulling on a helmet, she shut the compartment, and shakily, on her high heels, rocked the scooter off its center stand. Finally, she unfurled the scooter’s protective skirt and draped it over her in order to ward off dirt or water and to maintain her modesty. Then she drove away.

Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas any more. Heck we’re not even in the U.S. My wife and I witnessed this vignette last week in Paris. Clearly they do things differently over there.

Welcome to the land of $11 gasoline. While we moan about $4 gas, the Europeans paid that much and more for years. Now we pay $4 and they pay $11. Scooters are king on the Continent and you really know that’s true when you see this sort of scene.

Of course, it’s not as if I didn’t know about this, but our recent two weeks in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands brought home a number of points I didn’t realize.

For one, you really see the most bikes of all sorts in Paris, at least of the places we spent time. In Toulouse there are many, many scooters, too, but a really phenomenal number of bicycles. In Bruges, Belgium, bicycles constitute an even greater majority. At the train station in Bruges they had racks and racks and racks of bicycles, thousands of them, apparently parked there by their owners who were taking the train in to Brussels or Ghent to work.

In Rotterdam, the city center was destroyed during World War II and has been rebuilt with wide streets. Consequently, there were nowhere near as many bikes, motorcycles, or scooters. Still, rather than sharing the streets with cars and trucks, bikes and scooters have a separate lane of their own on both sides of the street.

The key in all these cities, however, is public transportation and two-wheeled transportation. The Europeans saw the need for fuel-efficient transportation long ago. Now that we’re feeling the bite in gas costs we’re finally seeing the light, too. I have seen the future and it appears to work just fine.

Biker Quote for Today

The only thing better than a motorcycle is a woman riding one.