Passes & Canyons Blog

I get the feeling a lot of people have stopped to take pictures with this sign.

Despite the blazing heat when we got to Missoula the day before on this OFMC 2023 trip, morning came in cool. Nice. I put on one extra layer.

We had to backtrack a little, to the town of Lolo, and then turn up US 12 over Lolo Pass. There was almost no traffic on the road so we had a nice cruise. And the higher we got the cooler it got. It was darn chilly!

Passing by Lolo Hot Springs of course brought memories of the first time I was there, back in about 1978, with a lady friend who was going to school in Missoula. Back then it was just a hot springs in the woods, no development at all, and we were the only ones there. We just got naked and got in the water. Then we camped there overnight. Now it’s totally developed, you have to pay to get in, and I suspect swimsuits are required. Big sigh.

We got to the top of the pass and of course we had to stop for photos at that famous sign. That one in the picture above. Is there any sign anywhere more attractive to a motorcyclist?

And it was cold! We put on more layers. And then, it was a dirty job but we were up for it. We tackled those 99 winding miles. It’s primarily sweepers that you just cruise along through, swaying left and right and left and right, in a nice easy gait. Sweet ride.

At Kooskia we stopped for lunch and then turned south on ID 13 (we were in Idaho now) and then picked up US 95 at Grangeville. The next town south after Grangeville is White Bird and our plan was to ride the White Bird Grade, which has been described as the Stelvio Pass of Idaho. But I blew it.

I had looked this road up before we went and I had it in my mind that you came down to White Bird, got off US 95, and continued south on the grade. That was wrong. I first started wondering when we reached White Bird Summit. This was marked as an historical site and I should have just pulled off to see what the situation was, but I didn’t. We headed on down the newer road and off to our left I could see a two-lane road with lots of sweeping curves over there and I figured it out pretty quickly. Dang! We got down to White Bird and there clearly was no big incline anywhere close ahead. I blew it. Next time. At least the newer road is in fact a pretty darn nice one, too.

We did some up and down and then started climbing. We were running alongside a river and the river kept getting smaller till there was almost nothing left of it. At Meadows we left US 95 and were on ID 55, climbing over a line of hills and down to McCall. Here we came into a huge alpine park, kind of like North Park or South Park in Colorado. Mountains on all sides. Beautiful area. And really big lakes.

Who knew McCall was such a huge tourist destination? Dennis said later his GPS was showing him a bypass around this massive congestion but I was leading and we don’t have communicators. I just followed the highway right through town. That took a while. From McCall we made it on down to Cascade, our destination for the night, and our nicest accommodations of the trip, at the Alpine Lodge. I highly recommend this place.

Altogether a beautiful day’s ride.

Biker Quote for Today

The three most dangerous words to a biker are “HEY… WATCH THIS!”

My V-Strom when it first arrived and became mine.

Item of note: Suzuki is doing a demo days event this weekend, Friday and Saturday, August 11 and 12, at Fay Myers Motorcycle World.

That demo days thing is of more interest than usual for me because for the first time in a very long time I’m giving thought to buying a motorcycle. And for the first time ever I’m considering selling a motorcycle. Or two. For someone who still owns and rides every motorcycle he has ever owned, this is unusual.

This all has to do with where I see the future going. I know that at some point I’m going to decide to sell my 1999 Kawasaki Concours because it is just so big and heavy. But it’s a great highway bike.

I really like my 2006 Suzuki V-Strom 650, and it does well on the highway, but having just been out for 10 days on the Concours it really brought home to me just how much better the Kawi is as a highway bike. Plus, I bought the V-Strom to be more comfortable off the pavement–and it is–but the truth is that I don’t really go off the pavement all that often.

Lately I had been seeing mentions of this latest Suzuki V-Strom 800DE. It occurred to me that maybe I ought to sell both the V-Strom 650 and the Concours and buy one of these larger V-Stroms that presumably would fill the niches both of the other bikes fill.

On the recent OFMC trip I mentioned this thinking to Bill and Dennis and they both responded enthusiastically. Both of them are the type who like to trade up for something new now and then just because, and they have a hard time understanding my preference for keeping the same bikes year after year. Plus, as Dennis pointed out, this new bike would presumably have cruise control, which would be so much better than my current throttle locks.

So I started reading more on the 800DE but what I read made me less, not more, interested in it. One thing I read said it was the most dirt-ready of any V-Strom ever, and since I’ve found that I just don’t get off the pavement all that much that was kind of a negative. Plus, the seat height is considerably higher than on my current V-Strom, which is already high for my short legs.

Still interested in the idea of a single bike replacing these two, I turned my thoughts to other bikes that might fill that bill. I looked around and came up with a couple possible choices but then on Tuesday I needed to go to Fay Myers to get a battery for my Honda. I talked about how a guy at Batteries Plus tested the one I have and said it was fine, just needed to be charged, and how Roy came over and checked it out and said he disagreed with that guy. When I tried to start that bike Tuesday it barely responded and I concluded Roy was the correct one.

Of course while I was at Fay Myers I looked at bikes. I hadn’t really thought about a used bike but they had a Honda Africa Twin that had all the extras already on it and that got me to thinking about going the used route: lower cost, extras already in place.

I climbed on the new V-Strom 800DE and found I could not get it off the side stand because of the seat height. So that settles that one point. Then I noticed a new regular V-Strom right next to it and sat on it. I instantly liked this bike. Is there anywhere within reasonable distance, I asked, where I could take a test ride on this bike? Yes, right here, on Friday and Saturday, was the reply. Oh my gosh!

How would the 2023 V-Strom be different from the 2006, I asked. It would be lighter(!), perhaps a little more powerful, and have upgraded electronics (i.e., cruise control and more). This is sounding better and better.

So that’s where it sits. I will definitely be over at Fay Myers on Friday, looking to do some test riding. But I’ve also looked at Craigslist, Motorado, and Cycle Trader to see what is available used. And there are a lot of nice-looking used bikes out there, many with all the gear already on them. Who knows, I may soon do the unthinkable and do some motorcycle trading.

Biker Quote for Today

“Two of the most important things to me; my wife & my bike.” — Anonymous

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.

Getting loaded up for a tow to Georgetown.

This story just came to a close about 15 minutes ago, although the broader story is still ongoing.

Yesterday we were coming home from a 10-day ride, 2,400-mile through Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Nevada, and Utah and back to Colorado. We left Grand Junction about 8:45 a.m., taking I-70 all the way, and I was looking forward to being home about 1 p.m. Ha! I finally made it home last night at 10 p.m.

We figured leaving Junction when we did we would beat the really bad traffic down the mountain that you always get on Sunday. Ha! We started getting into heavy traffic at about Vail. Still, we kept moving at good speed. We stopped for gas and lunch at Frisco, then got back on the highway and traffic was no longer clipping along. Down to Silverthorne and starting up toward the Eisenhower Tunnel it was traffic like you expect to see on a Sunday at maybe 3 p.m., and it was only 11:30.

Laboriously, clutch-hand-killingly, we inched our way toward the tunnel. There are three traffic lanes going up and there is an emergency vehicle lane on the right and I was eyeing that really wanting to do it. If any other bike had come along up that lane I would have gotten right in behind them, but none did.

Suddenly, about half a mile from the tunnel, vapor started rising from my engine and I could smell coolant. Oh crap. I pulled my Kawasaki Concours over into the emergency lane and parked. Getting off the bike I could see coolant dripping onto the ground. Damn!

I belong to the American Motorcyclist Association and am signed up for their roadside assistance program so I immediately called. Yes, the bike is off the road and yes I’m in a safe spot. Fine, they’ll text me when a tow truck is dispatched for me. Fortunately, after all this ungodly hot weather it was cool up there, and in fact while I waited I added an extra layer to stay warm. Vastly better than baking out somewhere with no shade.

While I sat there a few bikes passed in among the rest of the traffic but three bikes individually cruised by in the emergency vehicle lane. I knew I should have done that.

Nearly two hours later I hadn’t even received a text and a tow truck driver pulled up and asked if I wanted a ride. Probably, I told him, but let me check with my service provider. The lady at AMA roadside assistance said yes, do it, especially since it was now starting to rain and there was lightning all around. File for reimbursement later.

This guy was a total character. He was an “emergency vehicle” so he used that status to his advantage to the hilt. He took routes you and I don’t even know exist. When he needed to get back into regular traffic he informed the cars on the road that he was coming–he did not ask.

We talked about where to go. I had figured it just made the most sense to haul the bike all the way to my house. He told me that would cost more than $1,000. For $350 he could take me to Georgetown, to the visitor center right there by the exit. Fine, let’s do that. Then as we cruised along he suggested that for a tip he could take me on to the Evergreen Walmart. Why would I want to go there? That’s way out of the way. No, he said, it’s right off the interstate. It’s at the Chief Hosa exit. How much for a tip? $100. I don’t think fast on my feet and just said no, Georgetown will be fine. Wrong choice!

At Georgetown I again called AMA and put in a new service request. This time I got a text almost instantly that Scorpion Towing, out of Idaho Springs, had the order and would be there in 90-120 minutes. A not unexpected time frame.

At the stroke of 120 minutes I got a text from AMA asking if he had arrived or otherwise contacted me. I said no. I immediately got a call from an agent who said she would reassign the order. After sitting on hold for a long time she came back on and said she was having trouble finding someone to do the tow and we would hang up and I would receive a text when a provider was assigned.

At the stroke of three hours I got another text asking me if I was still waiting. I said yes. Call the tow company or call us back, was the directive. I called the tow company but all I got was a message saying “if you’re calling about arrival time just wait and we’ll let you know when someone is on their way.” Oh, that’s encouraging.

Another hour passed and I called AMA again. Now the woman (a different person each time I called) told me it was time to take a different approach. Quite simply, she said, they were not going to be able to get anyone out to me today. But they could schedule a pick-up for 8 a.m. the next morning. OK, I said, I’ll call my wife in Denver to come get me in Georgetown. As long as the fork was not locked and the bike could be put in neutral I would not have to be there. Fine. I called Judy, she drove up, and finally at 10 p.m. I was home. But the bike was still in Georgetown.

In the morning I tried calling AMA but they were stacked up so I didn’t wait. The visitor center opens at 9 a.m. so at 9:05 I called and asked if there was still a burgundy motorcycle in their lot. Recall, the pick-up was scheduled for 8 a.m. Yes, the woman told me, the bike was still there.

I called AMA again and this time got right through. The guy I spoke with checked the ticket and found that it had a pick-up set for 8 a.m. on Tuesday, tomorrow. Oops. He corrected that and then set about finding a tow company. After being on hold a very long time he came back on the line and told me they simply could not find anyone to help me out. Every tow company he contacted declined either because of the distance or because it was a motorcycle. I was on my own.

I had no idea what to do but then I thought of Joel, my mechanic. I called him and told him, Joel, I desperately need your help. His truck that he uses for towing is in North Dakota with his wife at the moment but maybe he could get his neighbor’s truck and his own trailer and do it. He’d let me know. A little later he called and it was a go. Whew!

Finally, about 45 minutes ago now, the Kawi was delivered. At this point I didn’t care what Joel asked in payment, I would have given him the moon. But he actually asked a very modest–by towing standards–amount and I gladly paid it.

And by the way, he told me, it’s probably not a coolant line rupture, just overheating and overflow. He said if a line breaks it dumps all the coolant immediately. My description of watching it drip tells him it was just overheating, despite the liquid cooling system. You’ve still got to have airflow through that radiator. If it had been him, he said, he would not have hesitated to take the emergency vehicle lane.

So the simple test, Joel said, is just to fill the coolant tank with water and run the bike up to operating temperature. If it was just a matter of overheating it will be fine and nothing will come out. If liquid still comes out it really is a problem. But if it doesn’t, no problem. Just refill it with coolant.

Man, what a hassle. And if Joel is right, I could have just ridden on home after letting the bike cool off for a while. So now I need to run a test.

Biker Quote for Today

The path to enlightenment is not always straight and narrow.

Despite what the guy at the shop told me, Roy thinks the battery is the problem.

After that ride that wasn’t I got home OK but I still needed to figure out why my bike didn’t want to start. I figured–and hoped–it was just the battery.

I removed the seat on the CB750 and pulled the battery and then took it over to Batteries Plus and asked them to test it. I had forgotten it is a gel-pack battery and it had a sticker on it that said “7-18” which I took to be July 2018. So that’s five years, but I would expect a gel-pack might last longer. I googled that question and found that six years is considered typical. Fine, I’m not going to quibble.

At Batteries Plus the guy first did a simple meter test, and that was fine, so he did a load test. When a guy at a battery shop tells you your battery is good you kind of tend to believe him. They’re there to sell batteries and if he tells you he doesn’t need to sell you a battery I’m generally going to believe him. And what he told me was that the battery was fine, though it could stand to be charged.

So that’s good news that I don’t have to buy a new battery but it’s bad news because not I have to figure out what the real problem is. And I am now a skilled mechanic. But I know that Roy knows a lot more about these things than I do so I called him. He said he could come over the next morning and in the meantime I put it on the trickle charger overnight.

Come morning I put the battery back in the bike and hit the starter. It roared to life instantly. OK. Now I’m thinking alternator. We’ll see what Roy thinks after he does some testing.

Roy arrived and we got to it. The battery definitely had a charge, no question about that. But was the alternator feeding it power? The meter said yes it was. Roy had me start it, stop it, let the lights burn while the motor was off–all this stuff, testing this and that.

In the end he arrived at the same place he had been when he got started. Despite what the guy at the shop told me, he believes it is the battery. It might not be all the way dead yet but he figures a five-year-old battery is probably the problem.

Where this leaves me is that I will go on riding the bike with this battery and I’ll be observing. I’ll keep it on the trickle charger but after taking it out I’ll see if it is slower to start, indicating that the battery is draining. And maybe sometime soon it will be bad enough that I’ll pull it again and take it to the shop again and they’ll tell me it needs to be replaced. I don’t know what else to do.

Biker Quote for Today

No plans. No maps. No GPS. No rules. Just ride.

Is this where the problem is?

The RMMRC was doing a lunch ride last week and I figured I’d go. The bike to take this day was the Honda CB750. It seemed a little hesitant starting but I didn’t think a lot about that. But I did take note.

We were gathering as we so often do at the Phillips 66 station in Morrison so I headed out that way. Oh my god, what traffic! Bandimere Speedway is immediately north of this station and it turns out they were having some blow-out farewell event. Which is to say, after all these years, Bandimere is shutting down and presumably is moving somewhere else. There was a long line of cars coming off the highway from southbound and that line snaked around and made the right turn onto Rooney Road, which runs up to Bandimere. Normally I would turn onto Rooney and then do a quick left into the station. This time, fortunately, I could go past Rooney and turn into the station’s other exit.

I needed gas so I pulled up to the pump. After filling I wanted to pull over where the other guys were gathered but this time the bike very nearly did not start. Not the hesitation of at home; this time it was extremely iffy. But it did start and I pulled over.

I needed to hit the restroom so I parked and ran and did that and when I got back they were all firing up and getting ready to ride. I turned the key, pushed the starter, and nothing happened. Not for a second or two anyway, but then it fired and caught immediately. I leaned over to Roy and told him I was not sure about my bike, it seemed there was a battery problem. He said he thought I’d be fine, and if need be he had cables to jump-start me. So reluctantly I decided to cruise on.

We rode into Morrison just enough to get on Mount Vernon Avenue, which runs around the east end of town and heads up past Red Rocks. We went on up to and then under I-70 and made a left turn onto old U.S. 40, which runs alongside I-70 heading up Mount Vernon Canyon. For some odd reason there was a ton of traffic here and we had to wait a couple times before we could get through the light and make our turn. And some idiot woman coming the other way thought that she ought to go ahead and make her right turn onto U.S. 40 even though we were clearly using the space but I made it entirely plain to her that I was not yielding.

These were all red flags and I didn’t like how this day was shaping up. Plus, now that we were above the interstate on the side of the hill we could see that it was a parking lot. Good thing we’re not on that road.

Mixed in with us up ahead was a guy in a 1968 Impala and we hadn’t gone very far when he did a quick u-turn and held his finger up waving it in a circle as he went past going the other direction. I didn’t have to wonder why for more than a second or two because I then saw that our road was also a parking lot just ahead. OK, that’s it. I’m taking the hint and going home. I waved to Roy and Charley, behind me, and turned back.

I figured stop-and-go like that is never fun, it’s murder on your clutch wrist, and with a bike that probably won’t start again if I make a small error in hand and foot coordination one of the many times I would need to move forward–going uphill–this just was not something I was going to do. I hoped I would have no problem getting home but as long as I kept the bike running I should be fine. And I was.

At home I flipped open my Samsung tablet and immediately saw an item about a crash on I-70 up by Floyd Hill backing up west-bound traffic. Yep.

So I saw Roy two days later and he told me I made the right choice. They soon turned around and just headed over to a place in Golden to have a somewhat early lunch. Then they all went home. This was a ride that was just not going to happen.

Of course, then I was still going to need to figure out what’s wrong with my bike.

Biker Quote for Today

When writing the story of your life, never let anyone else hold the pen.

The EagleRider tour stopped at Marin Headlands on the last day of the ride.

I got a reminder on this recent RMMRC New Mexico ride of the differences in how Europeans ride vs. Americans. Alberto, who I guess I haven’t mentioned before, is Italian. He connected with the RMMRC for this trip because someone posted the ride on the BMW riders club‘s events listing. Welcome Alberto.

I rode with a bunch or Europeans way back in 2010 on a media tour hosted by EagleRider. There were French, Italians, Brits, Canadians, and even a few of us from the U.S. And it turns out that accepted protocol varies from one country to another.

Alberto reminded me of all this by the way he rode so close behind the leader whenever he was riding second. That is to say, he didn’t ride so close when he was further back. My interpretation was that when he had people in front of him riding at a decent gap he fell into the same pattern, but when the only one in front of him was the leader he was always right behind the leader.

For most people in this country–certainly for me–that’s a no-no. I don’t want somebody crowding me like that.

But here’s the thing: For the most part, those guys are much better riders than 90 percent of American riders. Their training and licensing rules are vastly stricter than what we have here. In short, they ride close together because they know the other people around them, in cars and on motorcycles, are highly trained and skilled and they can all do this together safely. Say that about Americans and you’ll get laughed out of the room.

I remember on that EagleRider tour being really annoyed by how these guys would be right on my butt, and some of the others were also not pleased. But for them it was perfectly normal. I mean, I consider myself a pretty darn good rider but I would not be at all comfortable going 130 on the Autobahn. That’s what these guys do–safely.

Could we have stricter training and licensing regulations–and safer roads? Probably not a chance. Over there driving is defined as a privilege, one you have to earn. Over here it is deemed a right and don’t you dare try to impinge on my rights. And yes, that includes my right to talk on my cell phone while I’m driving in heavy traffic. (Not!)

But even if you really are that skilled, I’d appreciate it if you would give me a bit more space. It’s just what my comfort level desires.

Biker Quote for Today

Riding a motorcycle is like an art–something you do because you feel something inside.