Passes & Canyons Blog

Ten minutes earlier this road was jam-packed with stop and go traffic. Now you can see the first car that filtered past the burning truck down the hill.

We got an early start out of Spanish Fork on the next to last day of this year’s OFMC trip and I figured we’d be climbing into the hills east of the extended Salt Lake City metropolitan area but in fact we plunged down a canyon. We were on US 89, which led in a short while to US 6.

Another surprise was that at the mouth of this canyon there were about 10 wind turbines. You normally think about those things being out in the open where they catch a lot of free-flowing wind. I figure it must be that the wind blows in across the salt flats and then hits these hills and gets channeled into this canyon.

So we went down and down and finally started climbing. Very pretty along this part. Then we started down again, a long way, and finally came out on the desert floor at Price. Now it’s going to get hot and boring. It did. We got lunch and gas at Green River and then just blasted the rest of the way to Grand Junction, our stop for the night. Not an eventful day.

Leaving Junction early in the morning we were figuring on getting down the hill on I-70 before the inevitable crush of traffic that happens every Sunday afternoon. Wrong. We started getting into heavy traffic at about Vail. But before I get into that, something else happened just west of Vail.

As I said, traffic was getting thick and we got behind someone going too slow in the right lane, so Bill and Dennis moved over to the left and when I had the chance I did, too. I looked back and was about 50 feet ahead of the guy coming up in that lane so, as I always do, I threw my left arm straight out to clearly signal my intent and simultaneously moved into the left lane. Totally normal move.

About five seconds later I heard the familiar sound of a car coming around me on the left . . . but I was in the left lane. I turned to look and there was the guy I had pulled in front of, now about even with my rear fender, going past me half way on the shoulder. I moved right to give him more room and threw up my hand in a “what the heck” sort of motion. He threw up his left hand in a sort of “oops, sorry” kind of motion. And we rolled on.

The way I figure it, he must have been looking at his phone and looked up only just in time to realize he was about to murder a motorcyclist.

Back to the story. I told the rest of this story here but there was a lot that I left out in that account. For one thing, I was not alone sitting there by the highway broken down. I could see, in the space of about a quarter mile, five other vehicles all pulled over with problems. I walked back and spoke with the two women in the car behind me, and they had also overheated. But for them it was normal. They had a bottle of coolant and once they could safely remove the radiator cap they poured some in and took off. The couple in front of me had overheated and had called for a tow. I didn’t walk up to the three vehicles ahead of them.

All this time the interstate was a parking lot. Three lanes full of traffic stopping and starting. Then about 500 feet down the hill there was a bang and a lot of smoke or steam or something and within a few minutes there was not a single vehicle on the road in front of me. I learned later from the tow truck driver who picked me up that there was a truck on fire back there.

Obviously, when this truck erupted in flames everyone behind him stopped. Then, after maybe five minutes cars started filtering past and one by one they would go speeding past me. And gradually there were more and more as they all got bolder.

What impressed me was how quickly the emergency folks handled the situation. It took a while for them to get to the scene but once they did they had the truck moved and whole road open again within 15 minutes. And then it was the same old parking lot again.

I did eventually get home that day, at 10 p.m., and that was finally the end of this year’s OFMC trip for me–though not yet the end of my hassles getting the bike home. But it could have been a lot worse. What if I had overheated out in the middle of the salt flats, in blazing heat with no shade? What if it had happened at any of the other times we were stuck in 100-degree-plus weather with no shade? At least when I broke down up on the mountain my actual concern was the oncoming rain storm. And I had rain gear.

Meanwhile, the Kawi is now in the shop for service and to find out if the overheating was due to a bad thermostat or heat sensor. Stay tuned.

Biker Quote for Today

If I were to die from riding a dirt bike my crash better look awesome.

Rest areas with shade are very, very welcome when the heat is this bad. This one was in Buhl, Idaho.

After that ride through Boise and then down to Jackpot all of us were happy to stay put for two nights and get off the bikes. It’s an OFMC standard to spend an extra day somewhere and play golf, and also to do some gambling. Jackpot, Nevada, offers both.

That day in Jackpot would have been a good day to ride. There was cloud cover all day, right up to the time we were walking back from the golf course at about 5. But it also made for a nice day out playing golf.

The next morning we headed out early, with similar cloud cover. Nice. But it didn’t last. By the time we reached Wells the sun was out and it was getting hot. We got on I-80 and cranked along till we got to Wendover and stopped there for lunch. If you’ve never come into Wendover from the west you’re missing an impressive sight. You come over a hill and there ahead of you is the vast flatness and bleakness of the salt flats. It really is an “Oh god!” moment.

Then we blasted across the flats. Hot, hot, and more hot. There are two eastbound rest areas and we stopped at the second and fortunately it had a building with air conditioning. Bad news for other people, it had a sign that as of the following day it would be closing, presumably for renovation considering that the grounds looked like they had just been thoroughly redone.

We didn’t want to go through Salt Lake so we turned off I-80 at Grantsville, down to Tooele and around the south end of Utah Lake and the ridge that separates the valleys. En route we passed right by what used to be called Miller Motorsports Park, now the Utah Motorsports Campus, and it was swarming. There were people and campers everywhere, with all these folks just out there in this blazing heat with no shade except of their own making. Not for me, thanks.

We came around the hills and angled back north, headed to Spanish Fork. Dennis, with his GPS, was leading and we got to Spanish Fork and the exit off I-15 and traffic was crazy. It turned out that to get to our motel we needed to cross two packed lanes of traffic to get into the left turn lane immediately. Dennis managed to shove his way into the left lane but there was no way to merge into the turn lane. So he went ahead and made the next left turn, to turn around and head back. He had gotten separated from Bill and me and as we sat in the left turn lane I saw Dennis do a U-turn and then a right heading back the other way. I looked at the traffic situation and at a moment I deemed safe I just did a U-turn right there, with Bill hurrying to follow me. Not exactly legal but it worked.

We pulled up behind Dennis as he sat waiting to take a right turn off this busy highway and we followed him, much to his surprise. He had no idea we were there and had planned to pull over where we could see him and know to turn there. But there we were right behind him. So we got to our motel and what a relief to get out of that heat. Later, at about 10 p.m., I took a walk and the temperature was still around 85. But hey, at 7:45 it had been 99. Way too much heat.

At least we managed not to have to ride through Salt Lake. That would have been worse than Boise.

Biker Quote for Today

You might be a Yuppie biker if you worry about what bikers are supposed to look like.

Construction delays are just an opportunity to stretch your legs and adjust your layers.

We got up early in Cascade, Idaho, that morning of this year’s OFMC trip. We had a long way to go and wanted to take advantage of the morning coolness. As we were getting ready we saw a group of 31 Harleys rumble in and stop for gas across the road, and about 20 minutes later another group of comparable size followed them. Heading to Sturgis?

They were heading north but we were heading south. One of the first things of interest we saw was a guy skinning a deer right beside the road. Road kill we assume and no reason to let it go to waste. Certainly not here in Idaho.

We continued to follow ID 55 across this huge alpine park when all of a sudden the road veered to the west and soon we were plunging down a steep, narrow gorge. And it just kept going. We had to be giving up a lot of altitude. Along the way we encountered a delay at a place we had been warned of by another biker we spoke to several days earlier in Arco, where they were widening this narrow road, and doing so by blasting. Not a very long delay, though.

We knew if we continued on this road it would take us straight into the heart of Boise, which was something we did not want. Checking the map we could see that if we took a left at Banks, over to Lowman, and then south again we could catch I-84 just on the east end of Boise. That was our plan. But we came to Banks and at the intersection was a sign saying the road was closed between Lowman and More’s Creek. We had no service way out here and no map showed More’s Creek so we didn’t know what to do. There were cars coming from the direction of Lowman, though, so as one came to the stop sign I waved to him. Yes, the road to Lowman is open but the road south–which is where More’s Creek is–was closed. We had no choice but to go through Boise. Dang.

Meanwhile, all of this was still just gorgeous riding so it was not as if we weren’t having a good time. We stopped for gas on the north side of Boise and as I was checking my phone for routes a woman at the next pump asked if I was lost. No, not lost, just trying to figure out how best to get around Boise. Is there a bypass? No, there’s no bypass, she told me, but here’s the best route through.

So we took off from there but where she had said to go right Dennis’s GPS said go left, so we went left. That took us pretty deep into town and we decided it was time for lunch. After lunch we needed to turn left out of the parking lot but traffic was horrible. Deciding to go right and then make a left and double back, Dennis took off. But Bill and I were blocked by traffic and by the time we could do anything we had totally lost Dennis. We flailed a bit and finally figured we would just ride on to the spot we had discussed getting gas next. (Dennis had not filled up when Bill and I did.)

We got headed back the other direction and soon saw a sign for I-84. OK, if we can get on the interstate right here this won’t be too bad. We got on and rode just a couple miles and this road–what I now see was I-184–just dumped us onto the city streets in downtown Boise. Not at all what we wanted. So we made it through that mess and then finally picked up the main road south of town and started blasting.

By now we were in phase two of this bifurcated day. All the green and cool were gone and now we were deep into the brown and hot. And if you weren’t going at least 80 mph you were practically going to get blown off the road by everyone else who was going that fast and more.

We got down to Glenns Ferry, where Dennis was to get gas, pulled off the highway into town, turned down the mail street, and found Dennis pumping gas. At least that worked out fine. Something about this town just cried out to me that it must have an ice cream parlor so I asked at the station and they said yes, and here’s how you get there. That was one very welcome break in this long, hot day.

From Glenns Ferry it was only 18 miles till we got off I-84 again, at Bliss, where we picked up US 30, which runs through the Snake River Valley for quite a ways. This got us off the interstate, through some pretty country, and enabled us to not have to go all the way to Twin Falls and then double back to the west to reach US 93 south to Jackpot, Nevada, our destination for the day.

We found a nice rest area in Buhl, Idaho, and took a break there and then hit 93 and turned south. Another 45 miles and we came over the hill and down into Jackpot. This crew was ready for a day off the bikes.

Biker Quote for Today

“On my tombstone they will carve, ‘It never got fast enough for me.’” — Hunter S. Thompson

A sign we saw in a restroom at Alpine Junction.

It was cool in the morning as we left Kemmerer and a very pleasant ride past Fossil Butte National Monument, north through Cokeville on US 30, on north into the Star Valley, and a stop for gas at Alpine Junction.

That’s a really nice road leading up to the Star Valley and it was freshly paved with almost no traffic. Sweet! Getting into the Star Valley it was startling to see how development has discovered this once undiscovered place. It’s down the road a bit from Jackson so I guess it was inevitable; maybe the question is why it took so long.

We split off from US 89 at Alpine Junction, riding past the enormous Palisades Reservoir and down to the little town of Irwin to stop for lunch. I was leading and as we came up on this place I couldn’t tell if it was a motel or restaurant, or both, or whether it was open. By the time I saw there was a restaurant and it was open I was past the turn for the parking lot so I motioned for Bill and Dennis to pull in and made a turn just ahead to come back. What happened next is hearsay for me because I was totally unaware of any of it.

They tell me that as I was preparing to come back–and I know I looked both ways–that I pulled right out in front of a guy coming the other direction. And then nearly stopped right in front of him as he braked and blew his horn. For me what happened was that I looked both ways and maybe I saw this guy but he seemed to be far enough away and/or not moving so fast that it was not an issue. Then, I had failed to downshift when I pulled off to turn around so as I started moving the bike faltered till I quickly downshifted. And then I pulled in at the restaurant.

Bill and Dennis were beside themselves and I was totally oblivious. Oops.

After lunch we rode on to Idaho Falls, me leading, and all I knew for sure was that we wanted US 20 west and that meant going through town. I just followed the signs but our route was the epicenter of a major road construction project. And it was blazing hot. We crept through town until I was no longer seeing signs for US 20. Apparently I missed a turn in among all this chaos. I pulled into a gas station/convenience store and we went inside. After all that heat it took me 10 minutes in the cool to begin to feel like a human being again.

Dennis has GPS so we decided he would lead us out of town and to US 20. We took some country lanes and wandered a bit, all in the right direction, and then finally regained US 20. Then it was a scorching hot ride to Arco, our destination for the day.

The next day we were headed for Missoula, Montana. We took US 93 up to Challis and then north through Salmon. We gained some altitude so it was a little cooler but not as much as I had expected. But a nice road. One spectacular canyon coming down into Salmon. We had lunch and moved on.

The next town of any size was Darby and that was where we had the same experience as coming up the Star Valley. The entire 50 miles or so from Darby to Missoula is like the Colorado Front Range was 40 years ago: open spaces quickly turning into one unbroken city. The highway was four lanes and packed. In 10 years they’ll probably be expanding to six lanes and it won’t be enough.

Missoula itself astonished me. That town must be four times the size it was the last time I was there, less than 10 years ago, and it must be more than 10 times as large as it was the first time I was there, about 50 years ago. It was just mind-boggling. At least we didn’t have to go far into town to get to our motel but once there, to get across the road to the McDonald’s or other fast-food places meant either walk a tenth of a mile to the nearest traffic signal or risk your life crossing directly. Crazy.

Oh, and it was 104 degrees coming into Missoula.

Biker Quote for Today

Sometimes I look back on my life and I’m seriously impressed I am still alive.

Taking a break at the Flaming Gorge.

The OFMC, at this point consisting of Bill, Dennis, and me, took off on our yearly trip two Fridays ago, planning a longer trip than usual and thus an extra day to do the extra miles.

We headed out from Golden up Clear Creek Canyon, got on I-70 near Idaho Springs, and continued west on the slab. I was on my Kawasaki Concours, Bill on his Harley, and Dennis on his BMW. An uneventful ride to Vail, where we stopped for lunch at McDonald’s. That raised a question: Why does a place like that send a guy to clean the bathrooms during the lunch rush? Wouldn’t his efforts be more useful on the line at that point, and you know of all those customers there have to be quite a few wishing to use the restroom. Do these people ever think about these things?

Glenwood Canyon seemed especially beautiful in this very green summer. At Rifle we got gas, then turned north to Meeker. We got behind a truck and at a clear spot with no oncoming traffic I figured Bill would pass but there was a double yellow line and he didn’t. Then there was a dense stream of oncoming traffic and I was sure we were coming to construction. We did, but got there just as the tail end of the line started moving, so we didn’t have to stop. It was quite a few miles of gravel and dirt, and slow going.

We got to Meeker and typically for Bill, he rolled right past the motel. Dennis and I did not. My mantra on these trips is “never let Bill lead” but on a straight shot like this he could hardly go wrong . . . until he did.

Bill has friends who now live in Meeker and they said there were “doin’s” in the town park, come on down for free food and music. So we did. Bill and Dagney seemed quite nice and agreed to ride with us the next day to breakfast in Rangeley. They showed up the next morning on their Harleys and we had a really nice early morning cruise.

The place we went for breakfast turned out to have one cook and one waitress/cashier/drink preparer and the place was packed. It was 45 minutes before she was able to bring us water and ask for our orders. Everyone knows at this point how hard it is to get people to hire. We finally rolled out of there about 11 a.m.

We picked up US 40 at Dinosaur and went west to Vernal, Utah. Hot as blazes. It got a bit cooler as we gained elevation heading north toward the Flaming Gorge. That’s always a nice ride. Got a late lunch at Mountainview, Wyoming, passed under I-80, and rode another 45 minutes to Kemmerer, our stop for the night.

We learned from our waitress at dinner that there was a bluegrass festival going on in town that whole weekend, including right at that moment, but we were at a place just south of town and none of us was inclined to ride into town. Too bad, it would have been fun. Instead we spent a long time talking with a guy from Texas who had ridden his Harley-Davidson Pan America up to the Arctic Circle in Canada, then did a circuit through Alaska, and was now headed back home. Some people are more hard-core than us.

Biker Quote for Today

You know you’re a biker when you can identify bugs by taste.

How lucky Tom was to have a sag wagon along on this trip.

It was only a terrific stroke of luck for Tom that when his motorcycle died in Arizona on one of the loneliest, most out-of-the-way roads around that Dave was right behind with his Ford F-250 pick-up and a trailer. Dave had planned on doing the ride but then had surgery the week before and couldn’t ride. On the morning of our departure, on the spur of the moment, he decided to heck with it, he was going even if that meant he had to drive. And as long as he was driving the F-250 he figured he might as well bring along his trailer, just in case someone needed it. And Tom did.

How much would a tow truck have cost to get him anywhere the bike could be worked on, and then how long might he have to stay in that town until parts arrived? We’re talking a significant chunk of cash here. As it turned out, the problem was just in the switch that keeps you from riding off with your side-stand down, so not expensive to fix at all. But Tom had the leisure of handling the problem back at home and the only cost, besides not getting to do the rest of the trip on his bike, was paying Dave for gas.

Not surprisingly, this whole situation has ignited a discussion within the RMMRC. Perhaps it would be nice to have a sag wagon along on all our long trips. After all, it was just last year that Dave was the one with a problem–bad stator on his Beemer–that resulted in him staying in Minnesota while the rest of us rode on home. Then he had to deal with this away-from-home dealer rather than the local shop he knows and where they know him.

Of course the real issue here could simply be, who among us wants to make the trip but not ride? Somebody would have to drive the truck. Well, the RMMRC has another long trip coming up soon, out to the Columbia River and the Cascades. And Tom has volunteered to be the driver. If, he adds, everyone else pays for his gas.

It would be like insurance. Everyone pays a little, hoping truthfully to get nothing in return, but really happy to have the coverage if you do need it.

This pay-for-the-gas provision has generated some discussion. Initially some people were immediately willing to pay it; some others were hesitant. On its own the cost would not be negligible–except compared to a huge towing bill. An F-250 gets about 15 miles per gallon. Let’s figure $3.50 per gallon, and a 3,200-mile trip, like this Columbia River thing. That would be about 213 gallons, with a total cost of about $745. Let’s say there are 10 guys going; that would be about $75 each for insurance. You see where this is heading?

Suppose eight guys are willing to pay but two are not. If one of them does break down then what? We’re not going to abandon them. Maybe at that point they have to make the choice to pay the entire gas cost or else figure out some other way out of their predicament. I mean, at that point if one of the guys who paid for the insurance broke down he would not have his sag wagon available that he was paying for. That totally doesn’t work.

If you just decided, as a group, that anyone going had to join in on the insurance are you going to drive people away? Nobody wants to do that.

And even if everyone is paying, what are you going to do if more than one person breaks down?

To get some perspective, let’s look at what would happen without a sag wagon. Just last year, coincidentally not 50 miles from where Tom had his problem, Bill had a problem. He hit a big rock in the road and bent his wheel, causing the tire to lose air with no possibility of reinflating. Amazingly, the tire did not go flat until we reached our day’s destination.

After exploring several options what he finally ended up doing was getting a tow to the next town, where a shop put in a tube that we figured had solved the problem. That tow cost about $150 and delayed our next day’s start till 3 p.m. on our longest day of the trip. But we handled it and we rode on. (Although by the time we got to Farmington the tube had lost air and the next morning Bill paid $2,000 for a new tire and wheel at the local Harley shop. At home he figures he would have gotten the wheel and tire for half that.)

As a different example, in 2018 on an OFMC trip we had a major disruption when Dennis unknowingly put diesel fuel in his Indian. Obviously we didn’t have a sag wagon so we replicated one. That is, Dennis made phone calls and then we rode him over to the nearest town where there was a U-Haul shop, he rented a truck and we went back to his bike, we loaded his bike on, and we altered our course to go to the nearest Indian dealer. It wasn’t cheap, especially since it was a one-way rental on the U-Haul. But we made it work. And it cost Dennis a pile of money.

In short, there is no obvious best answer. Perhaps the thing that will keep this from becoming too much of a dilemma is what I mentioned before: Who wants to get stuck driving the truck? Tom is willing on this next trip but then what? Who? Certainly not me–I came to ride!

Biker Quote for Today

A dirt bike is like your buddy. A road bike is your lover.

We still use paper maps but back then that was the only option.

The OFMC did really well in terms of avoiding mechanical issues on the road for a very long time. We only sort of, semi avoided it, however, on our seventh trip, in 1995. Bill had his problem before we left.

John and I were at John’s waiting for Bill to get there when the phone rang. It was Bill, with a dead bike a few miles away. We rode down there and found him in a shopping center parking lot. Thinking that maybe if we could get it running all would be fine (fat chance!) we pushed and pushed and pushed him till we were about to keep over. But miraculously, at some point, we did get it started. At this point Bill figured it would not be wise to head out of town so he went straight to his dealer’s place while we waited at John’s.

Maybe an hour later Bill called to tell us the issue was his stator, which had died, and the dealer did not have one in stock and at best it would be a couple days to get one in. We hated to leave without him but we all clearly understood that if someone couldn’t ride the others were not going to let that ruin their trip. John and I left, headed north.

We got as far as Wheatland, Wyoming, that evening and checked into a scuzz-bag motel. Got a quick fast-food dinner and headed to the nearest bar for a few beers. Along with the live band for entertainment that evening we got a pick-up offer from a local woman whose lack of beauty was matched by her obesity and drunkenness. “You guys want to come home with me?” No. Really, really no. Thanks for the invitation.

The next day we headed on to Deadwood, South Dakota. A gambling stop is always a mandatory part of our itinerary. Of course we lost money; Bill is usually the only one who wins. In the morning, before we started out, John called his wife Cheryl to see if she had heard anything from Bill. This was before cell phones.

Yes Bill had called. No, he had not gotten his bike fixed but he bought a trickle-charger and figured if he removed the fuse for his lights and rode only in the day-time he could keep the bike running, and then charge it overnight. He also had a long extension cord. He would meet us that evening in Thermopolis, Wyoming.

Great! Bill’s gonna make it!

Of course this was before we started planning everything out beforehand, so there was no plan as to where to meet Bill in Thermopolis. So we got a motel on the mail drag and parked our bikes right out front by the curb to make them totally visible. And what do you know, about 20 minutes later here came Bill. He immediately plugged in the charger.

From Thermopolis we rode on first to Pinedale, then Bozeman, Montana, and then to Salmon, Idaho. The night in Bozeman was the Fourth of July so we had a great spot from our motel on a hill to watch the fireworks. Did you know that Bozeman is so far north that they don’t even start the fireworks show until about 10:30 p.m.? And it’s not really dark yet then.

On the way to Salmon we stopped in a couple little ghost towns, Virginia City and Wisdom, where a bartender looked very disapprovingly at my bandana. He told me I had it tied all wrong, and then proceeded to show me how to do it right. I couldn’t follow his instructions so to this day I don’t know how to tie my bandana “right” but that’s OK, I don’t ride without a helmet anymore anyway.

Each of these nights Bill dutifully plugged his bike in to charge and each day it ran OK. Just hoping we don’t have any surprises.

The next night in Kemmerer, Wyoming, we learned another good lesson: some motels have rooms with more than two beds. With three of us we had always taken turns being the one who slept on the floor. This was back when we used to always carry tents and sleeping bags so that was an option, and that’s what we did. We sure didn’t have the money to pay for a second room. Well, this place in Kemmerer had four beds so from that time on we always asked.

The next day, our final night out, we planned to stop in Saratoga but our usual place, the Sand and Sage, had no rooms. They suggested we ride on to Encampment or Riverside, just down the road. We did and got a little cabin that had beds for us all and it was just sweet. About as rustic as you can get but that suited us just fine. We liked it so much we came back in later years.

And Bill never had a problem. Let’s hear it for ingenuity.

Biker Quote for Today

Why motorcycles are better than women: If your Motorcycle goes flat, you can fix it.

Having a beer beside the road, but in this case it was when we knew we were stopping for more than an hour, and we only had one.

Years ago, in the early days of the OFMC, we were young and dumb in a lot of ways. We seldom wore helmets and in the beginning we had almost zero actual gear. We also would stop at bars and have a few beers and it was de rigueur for us to stop a couple times every day to smoke some pot. You know, we were immortal and when you’re immortal you do these things.

So one day as we were heading across southern Idaho we stopped at Craters of the Moon National Monument and took a hike down into some lava tubes. We went way back in deep and turned off our flashlights to see if we could see anything at all in the total darkness. Give your eyes a few minutes to adjust, then see if you can see your hand in front of your face. No. Not at all. It really is that dark.

Having settled that, John pulled out his pipe and lit up. Just as there is no light down there, there is very little air movement, so I’ve always assumed that when the next visitors came down that tube, long after we were gone, they would smell what we had been up to. Hey, we’re just young guys having fun.

We got back to our bikes with a good buzz on and you might have thought that would have been sufficient but when we got to Arco shortly after there was a bar in the middle of town that was calling our names. We stopped.

It was a typical small-town bar, with a handful of locals enjoying a beer on a hot afternoon. We sat at the bar, returned the greetings from the locals, and ordered beers. Somewhere along the way I noticed this thing hanging from the ceiling. This was one of those bars that has a lot of old implements and stuff to add decor and this thing looked like a pair or big ice tongs except that the ends, rather than being pointed like ice tongs, were rounded. There was also a cord attached to this thing but I didn’t think much about that.

What is this, I wondered. It was just above me, within easy reach, so I reached for it and pulled on it. A bell attached to the other end of the cord rang out and the locals went silent. And they were all looking at me. Oops.

It turns out, as they were all too happy to explain to me, the rules in the bar were that anyone who rang that bell had to buy the house a round. (The object, by the way, was for leading a cow around by the nose. Cow nose tongs. Thus the rounded rather than pointed ends.)

Oh gosh, this is going to cost some money. And you have to understand this was back when I was a poor young guy and didn’t exactly have tons of money to throw around. Bill and John and I quickly conferenced and in the meantime the locals were saying that they would excuse us from the rule this time but we agreed that no, by golly, we would honor the tradition. So another round of beers went out, including to us. The locals thought we were a good bunch of guys.

Came time to head out and we did, with more than a little bit of a buzz. We were headed on to Idaho Falls and we were in a good mood. And it was fun to ride really fast. Inebriation will do that to you.

Fortunately all ended well and we just had a good story to tell. Would we dream of doing something like that today? Of course not! But we did it then, and we always enjoy telling the story. How boring would your life be if you didn’t ever have stories to tell. I know my life has not been boring.

Biker Quote for Today

100 reasons not to date a biker: 58. Beer is the base of our food pyramid.