Passes & Canyons Blog

Three times over two days recently I observed some interesting people on motorcycles.

I was up in the hills and had no intention of coming down on I-70 but a wrong turn left me doing exactly that. I was in no hurry and so I kept to the right lane, where I got passed by a couple guys in a bigger hurry than me. They were something to see.

These two guys were obviously traveling because their bikes–Harleys or something similar–were totally loaded with gear. But I’m not talking big bags on the sides and a big top bag. No, they had all their individual items bungeed on all over the back ends of their bikes. And they had a lot of gear.

They were barreling along the interstate and neither of them had a riding jacket on. Both were wearing sleeveless t-shirts, although they were wearing helmets. And on top of each helmet was a GoPro camera.

Yeah, they were an interesting sight.

Further along the way home on this same ride, I was coming east through town on Hampden and it was rush hour. Or crawl hour, more appropriately. I was aware of the traffic around me so it was with some surprise that I glanced in the mirror at one point to see there was another bike right behind me in my lane. Where did that guy come from?

I barely had time to wonder if perhaps he lane-split his way up behind me when the traffic came to a complete stop and he blasted on ahead, going up the middle. Question answered. Lane-splitting is not legal in Colorado but that obviously did not bother him.

Then the next day I was once again on Hampden, this time headed east near Kennedy Golf Course, when I came to a stop at a red light. In front in the left-hand lane was a guy on a sportbike. A big pick-up was in front of me, first in line, and to our right a small orange pick-up, with a riding lawnmower in the bed, pulled up first in line.

But this was no ordinary pick-up. This one had no hood because the engine stood up about a foot above where the hood would have been. And this guy was revving his engine, clearly planning to blast away as soon as the light changed.

The light did change and whether there had been some communication between them or what, both the bike and the orange pick-up rocketed away. Most likely, the biker decided it would be fun to shut down this orange guy, whose intentions were clear.

I quickly lost sight of them both because of the guy in front of me, but as we neared Havana, where the road curves hard to the left, I caught sight of the bike going about 70, screaming around the curve with no orange guy anywhere to be seen. I’d say the biker definitely shut down that orange guy. Just having fun, you know.

Biker Quote for Today

If you can park it and not turn around to admire it before walking away you bought the wrong one.

This could be interesting. It’s coming up really soon so this is pretty late but I’m passing it along. I did something similar some years ago, riding motorcycle lead for a bicycle race out in Deer Trail.

We still need many more motos for the Boulder Ironman Triathlon on June 10th. Please Please Please if you are available or know another moto who is interested please let me know. As of now, you need to be able to carry a passenger, I am checking to see if there are any positions that don’t require a passenger. If you have already said you are available I also sent an email with some signup info. If you have any questions please let me know. I’m currently travelling back to CO from CA over the next few days so might be a bit slow responding.

For those of you who have also responded about being available for other tris, I am working through the process and will notify you if you are needed for a particular event. I can definitively say that I will use anyone who can also do the 70.3 tri on Saturday 8/4/2018.

Date: Sunday 6/10/2018
Event: Ironman Boulder Triathlon
Location: Boulder Reservoir
ShowUp Time: 5:30a
Moto Reimbursement: $130
Info: http://ironman.com/triathlon/events/americas/ironman/boulder.aspx
# Motos: 19 – officials, pro spotters, media, sweep

Thanks,

DaleE@daleeva.com
303-499-5437

Biker Quote for Today

Sell your bike she said. Rode away I did.

If you’re a regular reader here you know that something has gone wrong. Ever since April 2006 I have posted regularly, with the exception of a short hiatus in December last year while my Mom was dying. Now it has been two weeks.

That photo to the right should give you a pretty good idea where I’ve been. It was shot in the cardiac ICU at Porter Adventist Hospital. I had quadruple bypass surgery with complete aorta replacement thrown in.

Needless to say, I’m a bit out of commission. I have three motorcycle-related posts already prepped that I’ll be putting up in the next week and a half. After that I’ll be taking another hiatus, although to the extent that I’m able, perhaps when something presents itself in my email, I will have an occasional post. Also, because the writer in me never shuts down, I may put up a couple posts here now and then that have nothing to do with motorcycles, but rather chronicle a motorcyclist’s battle back to the bike. (I kind of like that. That’s going to be my theme: The Battle Back to the Bike.)

I understand if you are here for motorcycles and are not particularly interested in some guy’s recovery from surgery. You don’t have to read them. Check back later and we’ll definitely be all motorcycles, all the time. For now I’m just going to do what I’m able to do.

This came in my email the other day.

DENVER CASTING SEARCH
EXPERIENCED MOTORCYCLISTS WANTED
FOR PHOTOGRAPHY CAMPAIGN
DATES: Multiple dates for each rider between April 10th & May 24th.
PAY: $500 dollars per riding day.
USAGE: Unlimited, all media.
RIDER TEST: Must be available March 31st &/or April 1st for riding test.
Rider test is in Denver, requires 1 hour of unpaid time.
TO SUBMIT: Email the following ASAP to CastingDirectorLA@gmail.com
• Submit a one minute of horizontal cell phone video of you
talking about yourself, your occupation, your motorcycle
riding experience, any x-country you have ridden, how often
you ride, tell us about the bike you own.
• Submit two freshly shot photos of yourself –
one close up of your face & one head-to-toe shot.
• Submit your name, location (city), height, weight,
cell phone number and email address.
RIDERS MUST BE FULLY LICENSED FOR A MINIMUM OF 2 YEARS
ACCEPTING SUBMISSIONS JANUARY 31 – FEBRUARY 23, 2018

That’s all pretty self-explanatory. If you’re interested you need to submit your letter of interest by February 23. Could be fun. Could be long, hard days. But what the heck, it’s something different and if you actually get selected the pay looks pretty good. You can bet I’ll send my submission. Why wouldn’t I?

Biker Quote for Today

Motorcycles: Helping guys pick up chicks since 1907.

I never miss a post. I have a schedule and I stick with it. But not today.

I’ve been dealing with a hard drive crash and what a mess that is.

Should be back on schedule on Monday. The weather is nice; go ride.

OK, Examiner finally did it. After eight years, first as the Denver Motorcycle Examiner and then as the National Motorcycle Examiner, I have written about riding motorcycles for Examiner.com but that association has ended. They’ve ticked me off for the last time.

Just so you’ll know, Examiner.com is a crowd-sourced website for news and features and whatever else you might want to write on just about any topic. Headquartered in Denver, in the very beginning they went looking for writers and they found me. I don’t even remember any more but I was approximately the 179th writer, or “Examiner,” they signed up. There have since been tens of thousands of Examiners that have come and gone, and “gone” applies to the vast majority of that number.

It was slow in the beginning, and the pay was chickenfeed, but things grew and the money started getting to be pretty darn good. Good enough that when I left a regular job at First Data Corporation I told Judy I was not going to look for another one, I was going to be the National Motorcycle Examiner full-time.

After awhile they started “adjusting” the pay scheme. Frequently. And every time they made an adjustment it meant exactly one thing: the writers were going to make less money. But I stuck with it. I developed other freelance markets and they became my primary income so the Examiner income was just supplemental to that, and every dollar was welcome.

Then they really made me angry. They wanted to improve the quality of the writing on their site, and I’ll be the first to say it needed improving. Far too many of the Examiners were people who had no clue about spelling, grammar, punctuation, or how to craft a sentence to make sense. So they set up reviewers to look at your work and grade you on how good you did. The problem was, the people they hired were not exactly English majors; they were just whatever low-paid people they could bring on who they gave a list of so-called grammatical rules to judge by. Many of the people who needed to improve resented getting low grades and they left. I would consider that a good thing. But they also used their rules to grade my writing and they were totally off base.

It is said that a beginner needs to learn the rules of whatever trade they’re engaging in. A master knows the rules but then deliberately breaks them for a very specific purpose. That’s what makes them a master. Pardon my immodesty but I consider myself a master. I have earned my living as a writer for more 40 years and I’ve done very nicely, thank you. To have some kid tell me my work was unacceptable because I violated some of these so-called rules was too much for me. I cut back to the absolute minimum they require for you to continue to get paid for the page-views your stuff gets. Like about once a month, versus the three times a week I had been putting up.

That little bout of quality control soon faded but now, more than two years later, they have brought it back with a vengeance, and this time your piece gets reviewed before it gets published. And sometimes even after. Having been around so long, the technology they used when the site was new has changed and my early stuff is in technology that is not compatible with what is currently used. So they recently unpublished the first six months or so of my stuff. I have been selectively going through and republishing articles that have continued relevance, and labeling them as such.

Imagine my surprise to find that one of these “redo” pieces I recently put up again has been unpublished. And while the note on why left matters totally unclear, it appears part of the reason was that “it had already been unpublished” so what scam are you trying to pull putting something back up that has been deemed unfit?

Last straw. There is no National Motorcycle Examiner any more. I’m through with those fools. But for those of you who are interested, I did put up one final “Only a biker knows” piece with one more batch of 20 biker quotes. They have all come from this blog but the one immediately below will never join the others on Examiner.

Meanwhile, I just checked and they have not allowed that last 20 quotes to be published because:

Newsworthy
This article is not newsworthy. (Duh! I never claimed it was.)
Note from the reviewer:
This article is too fragmented. Please refrain from using more than 3 one-sentence paragraphs whenever possible. (OK, it’s a bulleted list. What do you expect?)

Can you see why I’m through with Examiner?

Biker Quote for Today

Merely rolling a bike out in anticipation of a ride feels liberating. — Clement Salvadori

Boy, that one blew up and over in a hurry.

The word hit the street: FBI Admits All Registered Motorcycle Owners Are On Classified Gang List.

Holy smoke, there’s some serious idiocy going on here if that’s true. And for those not detail-oriented, it seemed to be true because the story seemed to have been published by the Washington Post. Presumably an FBI spokesman named Darrin Cornia told a reporter that, “the FBI has been collecting and compiling Department of Motor Vehicles and Drivers License Division records for the purpose of adding those that own motorcycles to a classified gang list since 1994.”

O-o-o-o-o-o K-k-k-k-k-k.

Here’s where we get to the attention to detail part. This supposed Washington Post story was actually published on a spoof website with the url of “washingtonpost.com.co.” Notice that little “.co” after the “.com”? That’s your giveaway. Totally fake.

And it hit Snopes.com right away. If you’re not familiar with Snopes.com you should be. It is the number one place to go to check out whether outrageous stories are true. Snopes very quickly reported that it was false and that “The National Report, where the story originated, is a ‘satire’ site whose disclaimer states that ‘all news articles contained within National Report are fiction, and presumably fake news. Any resemblance to the truth is purely coincidental.'”

That didn’t stop a lot of people from having fun with the whole thing. Jerry Pokorny passed this along: My affiliation is the “Sons of Arthritis.” What’s yours? Gang sign is bent fingers (age related).

So sorry to disappoint many of you. I guess you’ll have to go out and form your own OFMC. Not us, we’ve got the OFMC. We’re a bunch of stud bikers. You know we are, we’ve been telling people that for more than 25 years.

Yeah, we bad.

Biker Quote for Today

A bike is like sex: It’s better to have it.

I was diddling around on Sunday and googled “motorcycle humor.” Do you have any idea how many sites there are out there with biker jokes?

It seems the all-time champion in the most-told category is the one about the heart surgeon and the mechanic. You know (don’t you?), the one where the surgeon gets the last word in saying his work is like replacing the engine while working through the tailpipe with the engine running.

That one gets told everywhere.

So if case you’re interested, here are a few more, with links to the sites where I found them.

This is from BlackDogDualsport.com.
Stranded On An Island: A man is stranded on a desert island, all alone for ten years. One day, he sees a speck in the horizon. He thinks to himself, “It’s not a ship.” The speck gets a little closer and he thinks, “It’s not a boat.” The speck gets even closer and he thinks, “It’s not a raft.” Then, out of the surf comes this gorgeous blonde woman, wearing a wet suit and scuba gear.

She comes up to the guy and she says, “How long has it been since you’ve had a cigarette?”

“Ten years!” he says.

She reaches over, unzips a waterproof pocket on her left sleeve and pulls out a pack of fresh cigarettes.

He takes one, lights it, takes a long drag and says, “Man, oh man! Is that good!”

Then she asks, “How long has it been since you’ve had a drink of whiskey?”

He replies, “Ten years!”

She reaches over, unzips her waterproof pocket on the right, pulls out a flask and gives it to him.

He takes a long swig and says, “Wow, that’s fantastic!”

Then she starts unzipping this long zipper that runs down the front of her wet suit and she says to him, “And how long has it been since you’ve had some REAL fun?”

And the man replies, “My God! Don’t tell me you’ve got a motorcycle in there!”
_____________________________
Here’s one from motoroads.com
Once upon a time there was a frog who lived in a lake all by himself. He had been given special powers by a local witch. One day he finally ventured out of the lake to get his first glimpse of the world outside. The first thing he saw was a bear chasing a rabbit and so he called out to them and asked them to stop. Then he said to them: “I am a magical frog and since you are the first two animals I have ever seen, I am going to grant you both three wishes. You will each take turns using them and you have to use them now.” The bear (being greedy) went first. I would like for every bear in this forest to be female except for me.” A magical sound and it was done. Then the rabbit. “I would like a helmet.” This confused both the frog and the bear, but after a magical sound there was a helmet. It was the bear’s turn again. “I would like for every bear in the neighboring forest to be female.” A magical sound and it was done. The rabbit went again. “I would like a motorcycle.” Both the frog and the bear wondered why the rabbit didn’t just ask for a lot of money with which he could buy himself a motorcycle, but after a magical sound there was a motorcycle. The bear took his last wish. “I would like for all the bears in the world to be female except for me.” A magical sound and it was done. The rabbit then put on his helmet, started up the motorcycle, and said “I wish the bear was gay” and took off like a bat out of hell.
___________________________________________
Next there’s this one from jokebuddha.com
An engineering student is walking on campus one day, when another engineer student rides up on a shiny new motorcycle.
“Where did you get such a functional bike?” asked the first.
The second engineer replied: “Well, I was walking along yesterday minding my own business when a beautiful woman rode up on this bike. She threw the bike to the ground, took off all her clothes, spread her arms wide and said: “Take what you want.”
The second engineer nodded approvingly: “Good choice; the clothes probably wouldn’t have fit.”
____________________________________________
There are a lot more. Here are some more links.

From Vtwin.com

Even Pinterest gets into it.

Here’s Motorcycle Specifications.

It’s endless. Just search.

Biker Quote for Today

On a motorcycle no one ever asks “are we there yet?”