Passes & Canyons Blog

Barry from Alabama responded to that last post about hypothermia, asking about the weather in the fall when the aspens are turning color. Let’s talk about that.

The aspen trees in Colorado turn a brilliant gold in September, for the most part. It varies depending on elevation; the higher areas turn before the lower areas. As you can see in this photo, here there are some trees that have already shed their leaves, others are still golden, and yet, in the foreground, there are still green leaves.

September is a great time to be riding in Colorado, but you have to understand that the weather is unpredictable, especially in the high country. You can have the most gorgeous days imaginable or you can get caught in a snowstorm. It’s not at all uncommon to have both in the same day. An 11,000-foot pass is going to be cold even in July and August. You can get snowed on on top of Mount Evans any day of the year. Plus, at that time of year, even if the weather is sunny and warm during the day you have to count on it getting darn chilly as soon as the sun goes down. Therefore, it’s essential to be prepared.

Referring back to the hypothermia posting, you’ll want to be sure to bring any electrics you have: vest, heated grips, whatever. You’ll use them and be glad you have them. Dress in layers; you can always take something off but you can’t put it on if you don’t have it with you. If you’re getting cold, don’t be too macho to stop frequently and warm up.

Here’s an example of what you might encounter. Our OFMC group usually takes its trip in July or August but a few years ago we decided to go in September. We headed out of Denver the first day, up US 285, and then south on CO 126 and CO 67 toward Woodland Park. It turned cold and wet and we soon had our rain suits on. We got to Woodland Park and headed down US 24 toward Colorado Springs in sleet. From Colorado Springs we headed southwest down CO 115 to Penrose and then took US 50 on to Salida, where we stopped for the night. By the time we got to Penrose we had peeled off the rain suits and rode in warm sunshine the rest of the day. A typical day in Colorado.

I suppose I could ramble on, but what’s the point? You get the picture. I’ll address Barry’s other questions in the next couple posts.

Biker Quote for Today

Saddlebags can never hold everything you want, but they CAN hold everything you need.

Continuing something of a theme I’ve been developing this week, I want to talk now about hypothermia. As in getting really, really cold in an unsafe manner.

Hypothermia: An abnormally low body temperature, often caused by prolonged exposure to cold.

I wrote a on Monday about my day riding Motorcycle Lead for a bicycle race. The wind started blowing and the temperature dropped and it started to snow. By the time I got off the bike I started to shake and shiver uncontrollably. That was the beginning of hypothermia. Then on Wednesday I wrote about fairings and how they do so much to keep you warm. This was not planned but I might as well round out the discussion.

The first time I got a taste of hypothermia was on one of the earliest rides I did with my buddies John and Bill in our group that we call the Old Farts Motorcycle Club. We had been down in New Mexico and were headed back into Colorado when we got caught in a cloudburst. We didn’t have rain suits back then, we just got wet. At the time it didn’t seem like such a big deal. In Colorado it is common to have brief rain showers, and then the sun comes out and all is fine. We didn’t get drenched or anything, and we just kept riding.

Awhile later we reached Alamosa and, stopping at the first traffic light in town, agreed unanimously that we really wanted to find a coffee shop before we did anything else. We were cold.

We got to a coffee shop and ordered a pot of coffee and started shivering and shaking. A lot. A whole lot. Over the course of the next hour or so we probably drank eight pots of coffee but just kept shivering. Somewhere along the line we realized that this was hypothermia. We had gotten wet, but the wind dried us out when the rain stopped, but with the moisture it also extracted a dangerous amount of our body heat.

Hypothermia can be dangerous. It can cause you to become mentally confused, which can lead to dangerous or deadly mistakes when riding a motorcycle. It’s not a good thing.

So what should a motorcyclist do to avoid hypothermia, and what do you do if it happens anyway? First off, don’t drink coffee. Hot coffee may seem like just the ticket but you would do a lot better to drink hot cocoa or have a bowl of hot soup. Something with calories. Of course, if coffee is the only warm thing around, as was the case for me at the bicycle races, do what you’ve got to do. Wrapping up in a blanket or sleeping bag is a very good thing, too. If the hypothermia is serious you should not hesitate to call for emergency medical care.

It’s better to avoid hypothermia in the first place. The first line of defense is the proper gear. Carry a good rain suit and don’t delay too long in putting it on. Use your electric vest if you have one. Heated grips would be good. I swear by the fairing on my Concours, and the windshield on the CB750. Wear plenty of layers. Stop frequently and get warm in a convenience store/gas station, cafe, or rest stop. Wear synthetics or wools that don’t hold the moisture in direct contact with you skin. Avoid alcohol if you’re going out somewhere where you’re likely to get cold.

Mostly it’s just common sense: stay warm in whatever way you can. Don’t be an idiot. It’s better to arrive late, or call off the ride, than never arrive again.

Biker Quote for Today

Never be afraid to slow down.

What do you do when the name of your motorcycle club no longer really fits, but you’ve got the coolest logo around and you are not about to jettison that? I mean, check this out:

Old Farts Motorcycle Club was always tongue in cheek, and in the beginning we were nowhere near old. Heck, I was still in my 30s. The original three of us are all quite a bit older now, and we’ve been joined by several other guys our age, but we’ve also been joined by sons and their friends. They’ve only borne the OFMC title grudgingly.

On this year’s trip the discussion began in earnest. We had some good proposals. For the sons it was proposed that OFMC could mean “Our Fathers’ Motorcycle Club.” For the friends it could be “Our Friends’ Motorcycle Club.” And finally, to cover everyone, it could be “Our Fuckin’ Motorcycle Club.”

So there was no decision one way or the other. More than anything, I guess the idea is going to be that the name is “OFMC,” and you can let those initials represent whatever you want. Everyone is happy and we still have our killer logo. Is this a great country or what?!

The Old Farts Motorcycle Club headed southwest this year, to the land of blazing heat. Descending into Laughlin, NV, we could feel the heat rising until it felt, in the most literal sense possible, like a sauna. Probably about 110 degrees.

We rode about 1,600 miles this time, and learned a number of interesting, useful things. For one, you can’t get a cold brew anywhere on the Navajo reservation. We pulled into Tuba City, AZ, hot and dusty and ready for a swimming pool and/or a cold beer and found that neither was available. No pool was actually surprising considering we were at the Quality Inn. The redeeming factor was that the people working at the Quality Inn were absolutely the nicest, more friendly, most helpful folks you’ll ever meet. Plus, it was a gorgeous evening to sit out on the lawn and enjoy the perfect, cool night.

There were nine of us this year and that’s really too many. That many guys can’t just roll into town and expect to find room at the inn. And having reservations for the whole trip removes the spontaneity that has so often led to the best part of our trips.

So what do you do? You can’t tell three or four guys they’re disinvited next year. No, the only approach I can see that makes sense is to take more trips and you just assume that some guys will be on one trip but not another. With any luck, this will be a situation where too much of a good thing is resolved by having even more of a good thing.

It’s hard to believe, but we’re leaving on our annual bike trip in less than three weeks, June 15. This is kind of early for us, but we’re going south, to Arizona and New Mexico and Nevada, so it will be warm. There will be nine of us this year in this Old Farts Motorcycle Club excursion.

We’re going to ride the Unaweep Highway, which several of us have been on, but other haven’t, and it’s a good one. Then we’ll head on down through the Monument Valley and on to Fraser, AZ. In case you’ve never been to Fraser, let me tell you about it. It’s an old mining town not far from Sedona, and it sits up on the side of a mountain so steep that the road zig-zags back and forth through town. The front of a building faces the street in one direction and the same street passes by on the back side of the building. There’s no such thing as a cross-street.

From there we’ll head on to Laughlin, NV, where we’ve been a couple times before. It’s a lot like Las Vegas was before it got huge, and it’s on a river just down from a dam and reservoir. Nice place. Then we’ll work our way on home again, spending a couple days in places in Colorado that we’ve passed through but never stopped at.

Less than three weeks! Hot dang!

Every one of us who ride motorcycles hits or gets hit by things. Bugs are an obvious one, and if you ride without a helmet at times you’ve certainly been smacked in the face more than 101 times. Sometimes, as unlikely as it seems when you consider just how perfect conditions have to be, you’ll even end up with a bee or wasp getting scooped right up your sleeve. That’s one time when you stop and get off in a real hurry!

But what about other objects in the air? I encountered the question recently on a motorcycle forum that I frequent and figured I’d share here what I posted there.

Just last year, my friend Bill and I were coming down into Kremmling over Rabbit Ears Pass and a bird dove in close to his front wheel. Well, when we got to Kremmling and stopped for gas we found the bird stuck in right at the pivot on his kick stand. Extending the stand pinched it in and made it impossibe to remove so I had to hold the bike while he removed the oozing mess. This was not even the first time Bill has hit a bird. I’ve never done that.

Another time we were heading north from Laughlin, NV, and I was in the lead. We were pulling up on a semi and about the time I got close enough to think about passing one of his tires exploded. Big chunks and little pieces were flying everywhere but no one got hit by any. Very loud bang! Very scary to see big chunks of tread in the air.

Here’s another. John and Bill and I are the original three of our group, the OFMC, who first started riding. John and I were in Denver, heading over to Bill’s to start out on one of our very first week-long summer trips. On the way we were passing a golf course when a golfer hit his ball off the course in our direction. I was behind and I watched while it bounced off John’s rear wheel, right back onto the course. He didn’t even know it happened.

I couldn’t help but wonder as we were riding through the Black Hills and the roads were lined with bikes going both directions and hardly a car in sight, in the Black Hills, during the Sturgis rally, do car drivers wave at each other?

It’s beyond pointless to say I’ve never seen so many motorcycles in my life. That was a given. What did surprise me was the number of women riding their own. If a group of 10 bikes went by it was almost a certainty that one or even two or three would be women. You don’t see those numbers anywhere else that I’ve ever been.

What people who have never been to the rally may also not understand is that the rally is not just in Sturgis. It is actually a regional rally. All the other towns are packed with bikes, like Deadwood, Keystone, Custer, Spearfish, and of course Rapid City. And then there are the numerous campgrounds outside of Sturgis where a sizeable admission fee buys you not just a campsite but nightly concerts by top name bands. Sturgis itself is just one spot that probably everyone drops in on at least once but where only a very small number actually stay.

I had been a bit uncertain about going to the rally because I was envisioning just three days of solid partying in Sturgis but that wasn’t the case at all. We did spend the better part of one day in Sturgis doing the drinking, shopping, and people watching thing, but the rest of the time we spent riding the fabulous roads of the Black Hills. Which really suggests that making the Black Hills a destination for an extended stay when the rally is not making things crowded and expensive is an appealing vacation possibility.

Those are some initial thoughts about the rally. I’ll have more on the trip later.

Tomorrow is the day. The Old Farts Motorcycle Club is going to the Sturgis rally this year and we leave tomorrow. There will be eight of us going this year. This includes the three stalwarts, John, Bill, and Ken; four who have joined us over the years, Friggs, Dennis, Johnathon, and Jason; and one newbie, Brett.

We’ll be heading out Friday afternoon and riding to Guernsey, WY, where we’ll spend the first night. Saturday it’s on to stake claim to our accommodations in Rapid City, where we’ll spend three nights. During that time we’ll be running over to Sturgis, up to Deadwood, and generally cruising the terrific roads of the Black Hills.

Next we’ll head west, with a stop for the night in Gillette. Then on to Saratoga to our favorite lodging there, the Sage and Sand Motel. After one night in Saratoga Johnathon, Jason, and Brett will head back to Denver while the rest of us take a loop trip through the Snowy Range and spend a second night in Saratoga.

Leaving Saratoga we’ll cruise the short distance to Craig, CO, where we have a tee-time set for a bit of golf. No, we don’t carry our clubs with us, that’s what rentals are for. Then on home the next day.

We don’t normally plan out our summer trip with reservations all along the way but this year, traveling in the vicinity of the rally during actual rally week we figured it would be wise. We didn’t used to make any plans, other than the destination for our first day. Then we’d just follow our noses and see where we ended up. Those days are gone, though–that’s part of what the OF part of OFMC is all about.

Look for details on this trip in about 10 days. Sturgis, here we come.