Passes & Canyons Blog

We’ve all seen these guys who do amazing things on their motorcycles–trials riding, street stunting, whatever–but I bet you have wondered, as I have, how they learn to do these things. The answer, of course, is practice.

But when practice means falling down repeatedly on a motorcycle that can get to be painful and expensive. But how else are you going to learn?

Well, Jerry is the king of sending motorcycle videos and here is one he sent me recently, titled “50 Motorcycle Crashes in 2 Minutes.” Some of these folks were indeed practicing, but most were out riding and showing off. Which means their embarrassment was especially public.

Prepare to grimace.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/news/50-motorcycle-crashes-in-2-minutes/vi-AA1JOAcn?ocid=socialshare

Biker Quote for Today

“There’s a fine line between fishing and standing on the shore looking like an idiot.” — Steven Wright

I didn’t deliberately decide to post twice in a row about motorcycle websites but I take things as they come, so here we are.

In my email this morning I had two messages, one from RIDE BYND and the other from Ride Apart.

I’m familiar with RIDE BYND (pronounced “Ride Beyond”) because of these VANHA magazines I found in the waiting area at Fay Myers when I was having one of my bikes worked on. I wanted to check VANHA out and found that the magazine no longer is printed but they have a site called RIDE BYND. I signed up for their notifications and have by now received about four of these monthly notices. I had never clicked through to actually see what they were doing there so today I decided it was time.

Rather than a print magazine, what RIDE BYND appears to offer is videos, although their home page is divided between “Latest Episodes” and “Latest Videos.” The episodes are often long, more than an hour, and those I checked out focus mainly on individuals doing cool stuff on motorcycles. The videos are generally short, often just showing some cool footage of riding.

Here’s how they describe themselves.

RIDE BYND is more than just a podcast about motorcycles — it’s a celebration of the passion, creativity, and untold stories of the people who ride them. Hosted by the co-founder of VAHNA, Ben Giese dives into deep conversations with athletes, artists, adventurers, industry icons, and trailblazers from all walks of life—exploring the experiences that shape their journeys, both on and off the bike. The motorcycle is our connection. The stories are what take us BYND.

As for Ride Apart, I don’t know how I came to be on their mailing list, but I’ve been getting their emails for a while. It seems to be a general motorcycle-oriented site offering news, reviews, features, makes, models, with photos and videos.

The article that caught my eye this morning was headlined, “If You’re Against Motorcycle Helmet Laws, You’re an Idiot.” Considering my own recent remarks about helmets and helmet laws, I had to check this out.

The article is written by Jonathon Klein and, to extract just a bit, his main argument is, “But here’s the real truth, humans are inherently stupid animals, and we do all manner of dumb things all the freakin’ time. We can’t leave our phones in a cupholder for a second while driving a potentially idiotic 10,000-pound electric Hummer, for Pete’s sake. Why should we then be entrusted with our own safety? And that’s sorta where I’m at in terms of helmet laws, as I’m very much for them. Not because I like a nanny state or big government, I really don’t. But because I’d rather not see my fellow motorcyclists die a horribly painful death because they were too freakin’ stupid to just wear a full face helmet while out on the road. I mean, the data says it all, they increase your chances of survival in an accident.”

OK. Not a lot of new thought or information added to this long-running dispute.

Another example of what they publish is an article titled, “Despite What Amazon Says, You Shouldn’t Follow a Motorcycle So Freakin’ Closely.” This tells about what is purported to be a page from an Amazon.com delivery driver training manual that says to leave a four-foot distance between your delivery van and a motorcycle ahead of you. OK, yeah, I’ll read to see what that’s all about.

So they have kept up a steady progression of articles I have found interesting enough to click through on. Maybe you would do so as well. Check it out if you’re interested.

Biker Quote for Today

If you go fast enough on your bike you can fast forward your life to the very end.

I was in the waiting area of couches, chairs, and refreshments at Fay Myers while they were putting my new front tire on the V-Strom and changing the oil and I noticed this magazine there on the table. VAHNA it was called, and they had a bunch of issues. I had never heard of this so I picked one up to look at.

It’s a motorcycle magazine, one I had never heard of, and what a nice magazine. Super high-quality reproduction on heavy paper and perfect binding. (“Perfect binding is a bookbinding method where pages are glued together along the spine, and then a cover is wrapped around the glued spine, resulting in a softcover book with clean, trimmed edges”–per the AI search results.)

Opening it up I was amazed. More photos than writing, it was full-page-spreads and double-page spreads of fabulous photos of motorcycles, mostly out off-road. It was gorgeous. But the writing was really good, too. Heck, I pulled out my phone and shot pictures of several pages as a quick and easy way to save the writing that I could see would be great to use in the quotes I end this blog with each time.

I also noted why Fay Myers has all these issues sitting there: toward the back of each issue was a full-page Fay Myers ad.

So I was really interested. What the heck is this magazine? When I got home I sat down at the computer and searched. First of all I looked for the meaning of VAHNA. I expected it would be an acronym for some motorcycle trade organization. Nope. Here’s the AI explanation: In the context of Indian mythology, “vahna” refers to a creature or vehicle that serves as a mount for a god. It’s a Hindi word derived from Sanskrit “vaha,” meaning “to carry.”

OK, so that’s cool. What a great name for a motorcycle magazine. We do ride the mounts of gods. We all know this.

But still, what is this magazine?

It turns out that VAHNA is more than a magazine. They make films and host a film festival. They’ll be launching a podcast this summer. They had a film festival tour that came to Denver for two days in January but I never heard about it. Darn. I’m going to get myself on their email list.

And the magazine? I did some searching before I found their site and a lot of people were saying the magazine was no longer being published. But as far as I can tell they are wrong. Or maybe it has gone online only. Not sure. But the site has articles posted as recently as March 5, 2025.

You should definitely check this out. I’d suggest doing so on a desktop computer just so you can fully appreciate the photography–a cellphone screen just won’t do it justice.

So you can file this under “gosh Ken, thanks for telling me about this.”

Biker Quote for Today

Feet on the pegs, head in the clouds.

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.

The folks who put together the Backcountry Discovery Routes have had a lot of fun, I’m sure, putting together backcountry routes through 10 states in the last 10 years. Butler Maps offers maps of these routes and they have sent me several of them. I’ve never ridden any of these routes but that’s not from lack of desire to do so.

Every year they put together a film of the development of that year’s route and now, at 10 years, they have put together a 10-year retrospective film. While that film will not be available for viewing until June 1, there is a trailer available now. Yeah, it looks like fun.

So, I don’t have a link right now but they say the full film will be available for free viewing as of June 1 on YouTube, Vimeo, and Amazon Prime. I’m sure a simple search will get you to it. Particularly if you search for “Ride BDR: A 10-Year Retrospective Film.”

I had hopes when they were mapping out the Colorado BDR that I might get to be part of the group but that didn’t happen. I have a somewhat distant connection to these folks and that connection seems to get weaker each year, but back then I had hopes. Didn’t happen. I’m sure they had plenty of people who wanted to go but they had to be selective.

So come June 1 we can all go see what we’ve been missing.

Biker Quote for Today

Why motorcycles are better than women: You can ride a motorcycle any time of the month.

Lane splitting, in the U.S., is generally not legal and many riders outside of California–where it is legal–consider it insanity. In other countries, however, it is common and accepted and practiced in ways that will never be tolerated even in California.

So just for your amusement–or horror–here is a video Jerry Pokorny sent along that was shot from a helmet cam that will have you on the edge of your seat. This thing is intense. (No gore, just OMG!)

Biker Quote for Today

At the end of the day, it’s still a show about guys who ride extremely fast motorcycles for a living. — Doug Liman