Passes & Canyons Blog

Monday to Tuesday this week we had our first Motorcycle Travel Network (MTN) guests in several years, Gary and Gina. They were on their way home to Ontario, Canada, after riding down to the Grand Canyon. Seeing the Grand Canyon has long been one of Gary’s bucket list dreams so they decided the time was now to make that happen. Mission accomplished.

They were on their Gold Wing, pulling a trailer. Almost all their stops on this three-week trip were with either MTN members or members of another, similar travel club, called Evergreen Club. While MTN is targeted at motorcyclists, Evergreen is for anyone as long as you are 50 or older. For both groups you pay $15 for a single or $20 for a couple per night of your stay, to defray your hosts’ expenses. Then there is a yearly membership fee for both clubs.

Gary and Gina were having a great trip, though now that they were heading home it was kind of the horse heading back to the stable feeling. Also, they have had great weather the whole trip but now were anticipating running into some rain. When they left us they were headed to Ogalala, Nebraska, where they had booked one of the few motel stays of their trip.

One of the big things about MTN is that you automatically have your interest in motorcycles in common, so there is an immediate bond. Unlike other MTN guests we have hosted, however, we actually talked very little about motorcycles. And that was fine. It’s just that if you are uncertain about other topics you can always fall back on motorcycles. But we didn’t.

We make a practice, whenever we have MTN guests, to cook a nice dinner and invite our guests to join us. (Always good to issue the invitation before they arrive lest they make a point of getting dinner before arriving.) Apparently that is not the norm, and it is certainly not expected of the hosts, but for us the whole pleasure of hosting is to spend time with our guests. Another thing that is sort of expected is that the hosts will provide local expertise as the guests continue on their way. Gina had a route pretty well mapped out already but I was able to direct them to an alternate route that allowed them to avoid even the brief stint on the interstate that they were expecting to have to do.

Living in Canada as they do, Gary and Gina can’t ride year-round the way we can here in Colorado, so they have to make the most of the summer months. Gina is a dedicated gardener so the irony is not lost on her of how she works to raise all these vegetables and then leaves them there for someone else to harvest and enjoy. We do seem to have had an inordinate number of Canadians among our MTN visitors.

We have no idea now when our next guests will come, or when we will be the visitors again, but this is something we have done for many years now and we have always enjoyed it very much. You might want to check it out.

Biker Quote for Today

As in motorcycling, so in life: Look where you want to go.

My friend Nick, from Chicago, is keeping close tabs on my recovery from my June 29 crash and he also knows I intend to buy a new bike. He texted me the other day with the startling news that Honda intends to bring back the CB750 in 2026. I had to check this out.

Calling it the CB750 Four, this new bike is styled very much like the old CB750–like the one I rode for nearly 40 years before it got smashed on June 29. While I loved that bike I will admit I was not in love with the old tech. So the ability to get a very similar bike with the most modern tech available is extremely inviting to me.

I had already begun looking for a Yamaha Tracer because that is a bike I identified a couple years ago as something I would like to have. There are not many left on the dealers’ floors but when you can find one they go new for $12,600. All the bags and everything else are extra.

This new CB is supposed to be priced at $9,000, with bags extra. Of course, that’s before Trump’s tariffs kick in. I was talking with a sales guy at Vickery the other day and he said the only info he has as yet is that dirt bikes will go up in price about $1,500. He said he expects street bike prices to go up by double that. So who knows what the CB will actually cost.

Meanwhile, it gives you a pretty good incentive to either buy new from what is already in the country or else buy used. I would seriously consider picking up a new Tracer now but I hate buying a bike I have never ridden. Fortunately there will be a Yamaha demo days event in Cheyenne in early September. And considering that I’m currently constrained from riding as I recover from the crash, that may prove to be very good timing.

As for the CB750 Four, certainly I will want to climb on one and see how it feels but if there is one motorcycle I have extreme familiarity with it is this new one’s ancestor. If I swing my leg over the new one and it feels like the old one I really don’t think I’m going to need to ride it to make my decision.

Biker Quote for Today

Your motorcycle is a discovery; your bike is freedom. It doesn’t matter where you are when you’re on the bike; you’re taken away.

I don’t have the energy to do anything active so when I’m not sleeping–which I do a lot of–I have a lot of time to think. Right now I’m thinking I lead a charmed life.

In the past year and a half I’ve had two vehicles totaled, both entirely due to somebody else. Some people might look at that and say their life was cursed but I don’t see it that way.

In the first instance some guy with his face buried in his phone blew through a red light and hit me broadside, demolishing my car. I came out of that totally unscratched. Not the slightest injury.

In this second instance a drunk ran into me head-on, and this time I suffered severe injuries. But nothing that happened to me is anything from which I will not recover. It will take time, and it is painful, but I will recover completely and be as good as new.

I’ve always tended to think of head-on crashes as the worst kind but I no longer think this. That guy hit me head on and my motorcycle took the greatest brunt of the force. It gave its life to save mine. Imagine how different it would be if he had hit me broadside, as the other guy did. For certain my leg would be crushed and I might easily have been crippled for life. That’s if I didn’t lose the leg entirely. I’ve known two people who have lost legs in motorcycle crashes.

And then there’s the vehicles. I really liked my car, and it didn’t have a lot of miles on it so I was planning to drive it for a long time to come. But you know what? I like the car I got to replace it even more. I really, really like my current car. Now, it cost me all the insurance money plus $10,000 cash to get the new one and I’m not thrilled about that, but it’s only money. My health and well-being count more than the money.

With the bike, this was a really special bike. That CB750 was the first bike I ever owned and I have owned it and ridden it for 40 years. I loved that bike. But you know, it was an old bike and old technology. There were a few things I really honestly did not love about the bike. One was removing the seat, which took a wrench, finesse, and about five to ten minutes. Then the reverse to get it back on.

Another was the way it smoked. I thought a couple times I had resolved that issue but I had not. It still smoked like crazy when I started it up and I would stand there embarrassed hoping none of my neighbors was looking out their window at how I was turning all the air in the neighborhood blue.

I intended twice to just spend whatever money it took to fix this problem but when it finally came out that to do so would cost at least $3,500, and probably more, I decided to do what my mechanic had been saying all along: just live with it. And of course, now I’m so glad I did not spend that money.

Unlike with the car, I don’t want to just absorb all this loss. I do want some sort of recompense and with whatever money I can get for it I will buy a new bike and a lot of new, really good (read: really expensive) protective gear.

Of course, through all of this my wife has been there like a rock beside me, and that most of all is why I truly believe I lead a charmed life.

Biker Quote for Today

Graveyards are filled with people who “had the right-of-way!”

I was finally feeling able so I went to the impound lot yesterday to take a look at my Honda CB750 Custom. After Sunday’s crash I knew it would not be pretty.

As expected, the front end was totally mashed and twisted. I couldn’t tell that the frame was bent so with some money it might be rebuilt, I don’t know. The pipes on the left side were mangled.

I figure it’s totaled but if not, the lot has its own way of forcing you to that conclusion. That bike is probably taking up about 14 square feet of a multi-acre lot and for that space they are charging $135 a day. To get it out of impound even now would cost $675. They’re closing for four days for the 4th of July and I assume the cost keeps adding up on those days. That’s got to be some of the most valuable real estate on the planet.

The guys working at the lot were super helpful in removing my bags and the pigtails on the battery for my heated vest and trickle charger. That entailed lifting the tank to get one bag off and removing the seat to get to the battery. Seats didn’t used to just lift right off like they do today. It’s a major pain.

One of the guys asked me if I had a lawyer. I said no, though several of my friends have been telling me I need to. He said he got in a bad motorcycle crash some years ago and the guy he worked with was great. He dialed him up right there and handed me his phone. I’m sure he gets a finder’s fee.

So I talked with him but this was not a very good time to get into any kind of real discussion, so he agreed to call me later. He did and we talked. I told him that if the guy who hit me is some poor schlub who has no insurance and barely has two dimes to rub together that I’m not interested in going after him personally and loading him up with crushing debt for years to come. He agreed that that was not what he wanted either, that they would go after whatever insurance company could be found legitimately obligated, and then work for a settlement without going to court.

My wife is an attorney and she abhors litigation but agreed that if I wanted anything out of this I would need to get a lawyer. I would like to be made whole. That motorcycle, besides being something I loved, had some value. The helmet that saved me from severe injury was not inexpensive and will need to be replaced. And I just put a lot of money into that bike in the last year, getting it into top running order. It was running great.

And yeah, I am hurting. The pain shifts around. Sometimes it’s my thumb with its stitches. Other times my right knee hurts like hell. But pretty much my whole right side hurts. And just today now my whole left hand has turned purple.

So yeah, I guess I’ll be hiring a lawyer. Then I’ll just be able to leave it all in his hands and whatever comes out of it is what it is.

I’d much rather this had never happened.

Biker Quote for Today

“There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.” — Ernest Hemingway

Today is June 23 and I have not ridden either of my bikes yet this month. What the hey?

June has been extreme. We’ve had a lot of spring this year, and that means a lot of rain. Then, in between the rain storms, we have had blistering heat. Neither one makes you yearn to get out on the road. But today was going to be different.

Today is cool with rain forecast for the afternoon. Fine. I’m getting on the Honda to go for a ride in the morning. The Suzuki will take care of itself; I’m taking off tomorrow–regardless of the weather–with the RMMRC on an overnight trip up into the hills.

So what happens? I geared up, rolled the Honda out, swung my leg over, and hit the start button. And the motor turned but didn’t quite catch. I kept trying, and it kept trying, but eventually it wore down. This bike is going nowhere until it has more juice in the battery.

I put the charge unit to work, which is where it is now, and will try to get it going in about an hour.

The thing is, I thought about exactly this yesterday but didn’t do anything about it. I had the thought that because it had been a while since I’ve run this bike, maybe the battery would be low. I could have tried starting it yesterday, or I could have just put the charger on figuring there was no downside to that. But I didn’t. And now here I sit.

And it’s not like I can give it three or four hours if need be and then ride. I have a standing engagement on Mondays at 2:30 p.m. I intended to be on the road before 10 a.m. and then be back in plenty of time. I can still do that if it starts an hour from now. If not . . .

Oh, and I checked my records. I just bought this battery in August 2023, so it should still be good. That should not be the problem. Apparently it just sat too long. Dang.

Update:
Now 11:10 a.m. and I had a thought. It occurred to me that the mileage on the tripmeter was right at the point where I need to go to Reserve. Maybe it would have caught if it had been getting gas. So I flipped to Reserve before pushing the start button. The motor turned over strongly but still did not catch, like it needed gas but the line was dry. It takes a moment in this kind of case to get gas flowing again, so I’m hoping the next time I try it will catch. We’ll see.

Biker Quote for Today

If I was interested in dying, I wouldn’t dress up like a neon green clown before every ride.

I’ve written any number of times about the smoking that my 1980 Honda CB750 Custom does when I fire it up. So I decided it was time once again to take it in and pay what I knew would be a large price to get it worked on and actually fixed. Aside from everything else, it embarrasses me enormously to think one of my neighbors might be looking out their window when I’m generating this huge cloud of blue smoke. This is serious air pollution.

I had taken it in a year ago to get the work done but for some mysterious reason the bike would never smoke for the guys at the shop. And they said they couldn’t work on it in good faith if they couldn’t see what the problem actually was.

So they did a thorough tune-up and gave me the bike back in really good running order and it didn’t smoke. How weird. It has smoked for years. And it didn’t smoke for me, either, so somehow the problem had gone away and I didn’t have to pay for it. But then about six months later it started smoking again and I started thinking about taking it somewhere else and telling them just do the work. You have my direction to do so. But I also shot a video. That’s what you’ll see up above.

It shows me firing it up and there is no mistaking the clouds of blue smoke that come pumping out. I showed this video to Jerry at One Down Four Up, where I took it this time. He might not see it with his own eyes but he saw it on the video.

So they looked it over. They also found that there was only about half as much oil in it as they should be so they did an oil change, and in the process found that a spring and a ring that is part of the oil filter housing was missing, presumably forgotten by the last place when they put it back together. Once they had done that they fired it up and guess what: It didn’t smoke.

Jerry suggested I just keep a better eye on the oil and keep it topped up. I asked nevertheless for a quote so I would know how much actually fixing it would cost me. I was ready to spend the money.

It turned out the price he quoted me was a lot higher than the already absurdly high figure I had in mind. OK, maybe I won’t go that route after all. But I did have them put a new front tire on. Heck, why not? I just saved a couple thousand dollars.

But this got me wondering. Is there some connection between being low on oil and burning oil? I asked Google that question. The answer I got back was “Yes.” Ooooh, really? What it said was that if there is not a proper amount of oil the motor is not cooled as effectively as it is intended to be, and so it gets hotter and ends up burning oil it would not have burned otherwise.

That didn’t totally make sense to me. Where is it going to get this oil it’s going to burn? Of course I knew the head gaskets leak–that’s what I was going to pay to have fixed.

I told Jerry about this and he suggested that perhaps as the engine gets hot the metal expands and that creates the opening for the oil to seep into the cylinders, where it gets burned. This is speculation.

The bottom line, however, seems to be that my chronic neglect is at fault here. I have said many times that I’m a bad bike owner. I don’t give my bikes the kind of care they should have and because they’re so well built they just keep running anyway. But apparently I’ve been running chronically low on oil for years. When I took it in the first place they put in enough oil and it didn’t smoke. It didn’t smoke for me until six months later when I had let it run low again. Then the next place filled it with oil and it didn’t smoke.

Does this make it through your thick skull, Ken? Check the oil regularly and top it off whenever it’s low. Better yet, change the oil regularly. This is not rocket science. And if I grow neglectful again, at least when I start noticing smoke again take that as a serious clue to deal with the oil. I think I’ve learned my lesson. I think. I hope so.

Biker Quote for Today

To my motorcycle: Thank you for putting up with me, being there for me, and loving me in your own special way.