Two Peaks, One Day–Want To Go?

August 17th, 2015
Concours On Mount Evans 2011

The Concours on Mount Evans in 2011 when I did the piece for Accelerate.

I emailed the OFMC asking if anyone wanted to accompany me on this ride I’m planning but got little response. Only Friggs was interested but even he would only have been in for half. I ride alone a lot but this time I’m thinking I’d enjoy company. Want to go for a ride?

What I’m thinking is what I call the “Tale of Two Mountains” ride. Go up to the top of Mount Evans and then back down and south to Pikes Peak, then up to the top there. Two peaks in one day. I think it sounds like fun.

My thinking also includes trying to sell an article about it to some magazine, though I’m not sure who just yet. I sold an article about just Mount Evans to Kawasaki’s Accelerate magazine three years ago so I don’t think they’ll be interested. And Rider magazine had a piece by someone else just recently about riding up Pikes Peak, so I don’t think there will be interest there either. But I have some other publications in mind that I want to explore.

So here’s the deal. If you’re interested in joining me, send me an email at that address in the upper right corner. Let me know what day(s) of the week work for you and whether that would be this week, next week, whatever. My preference would be to go on a weekday because there will be fewer people but I understand that some people have day jobs. When I see who, if anyone, expresses an interest, I’ll try to get something solid.

And by the way, if anyone has solid information about the Mount Evans road being open, please let me know. This article says the opening of the road has been delayed this year but it was supposed to finally open in late July. Well, it’s mid August now so I assume it’s open but haven’t been able to find anything definitive. Thanks.

Biker Quote for Today

A mother is neither cocky, nor proud, because she knows the school principal may call at any minute to report that her child had just driven a motorcycle through the gymnasium.

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Posted in Colorado motorcycle rides | 3 Comments »

Danger On The Road Ahead

August 13th, 2015
cows on road

This is nothing like the herd we ran into on the OFMC trip a few years ago.

I’m going to share a secret: When I don’t have any thoughts on something to write about I fall back on a few tried and true topics. This is one of those times. It’s time for the latest in strange things bikers have hit, courtesy of the Adventure Riders forum.

We all know there are hazards on the road out there. Here are some that other folks have actually encountered.

  • Wile E. Coyote. Riding an HP2 I had just bought in Denton Texas. Just outside Midland Texas on I-20. There was a ton of traffic and it was gusty as hell. :eek1 I tucked in behind an 18 wheeler and then a dickweed got right on my ass. I got closer to the semi but the wind buffeting was making it rough at 65-70 mph we were running. I eased over into the center of the lane where it was much smoother and started to back off the semi. Just as I did the semi trailer seemed to do a slight swerve and it caught my attention. Just then a coyote came rolling down the dead center of the lane like a rolling pin. The truck rolled him and all I had the time to do was grab a breath and relax. I felt a slight thump as I rolled right over him mid-section. I heard the ass behind me lock them up but didn’t look to see what happened. I was just ecstatic that I didn’t go down and was alive. I laughed till I was crying. Strange days in West Texas!
  • Around 3am, while driving in left lane of an interstate and in a very dark rural area, a male jumped up from tall grass in the center median. He was shirtless, in jeans and had very long hair. He ran into my lane while swinging a sock over his head, with a heavy object inside. He missed me and I missed him by inches, swerving sharply right to avoid him- scared the hell out of me as I tried to maintain control with left and right sliding.
  • Went to pick up my wife’s then new CM400A, and we stopped for dinner. parked next to the car, and took off my helmet. Bike was still idling. Put my helmet ont he mirror, and it started going forward. I was dumstruck on what to do other than hobble along with it and finally cut the engine, after i hopped the curb and hit the door.
  • Years ago on a long ride up to the Yukon in very heavy rain I’m sure I was passed by a forty ton goldfish. I found somewhere to sleep soon after that.
  • Just recently had the contents of the rear axle on a semi spat at me, almost took me out for keeps.
  • I came around a tight dirt corner and had just enough time to see him before I ran him over. Stretched out six foot long bull snake, but they look like rattlers from a dirt bike. He arched a horseshoe like in a cartoon. Scared the crap outa me.
  • My face…….. After learning why rebound valving is important and slowwwwwwwwwwly sliding over front fender as 1984 CR125 plodded merrily along in 5th gear.
  • It was a flying armadillo. While riding through LA (lower Arkansas) one night late, the Ford Explorer in front of me swerved towards the shoulder. Well, an armadillo LAUNCHED from his R rear wheel straight towards me. I was riding up pretty high on a 1100GS. It came directly over the windscreen and I was just able to duck or it would have easily taken me off the bike. I was pushing on to Texarkana but after that I stopped at the next motel.
  • Me… About 1/2 mile in to the start of a desert race along with about 400 others. I killed my bike on the start and was near the back of the pack, wound out on my 1989 CR500 trying to make up for lost time (I had the hole-shot the year before). Too late I saw a big rock and nailed it straight on. Flew over the bars and bounced – several times. Ended up sitting upright facing forward. A split second later the lights went out. My bike hit me square in the back. I woke up looking at the sky wondering when the feeling would come back. Luckily only a concussion.

You know the deal: be careful out there. You never know what might be around that next curve.

Biker Quote for Today

If you think riding gets the adrenalin pumping, try getting a wasp in your helmet.

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Posted in Motorcycle Safety | No Comments »

Demise Of The National Motorcycle Examiner

August 10th, 2015
National Motorcycle Examiner

No more National Motorcycle Examiner.

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

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Posted in Miscellaneous | 1 Comment »

Morgan 3 Wheeler Is Oddest Encounter On OFMC Trip

August 6th, 2015
A Morgan 3 Wheeler

A Morgan 3 Wheeler.

There’s a lot of talk these days about what really is or is not a motorcycle. Most of this talk centers around the proliferation of three-wheeled “bikes” that many riders would argue are not motorcycles at all. In addition to the conversions, where someone has taken an actual two-wheeled motorcycle and added a third wheel, these primarily include the Can-Am Spyder and the very new Polaris Slingshot.

Of course the big issue is really in what safety organizations classify as motorcycles because the data they collect are used to establish various legal requirements and if three-wheeler stats influence overall motorcycle stats that does a disservice to everyone. They really need a new vehicle classification and that seems to be in the works, though how soon we’ll see something like that in use is anyone’s guess.

With that too-long lead-in, I want to mention a three-wheeler that I don’t think anyone would call a motorcycle (though I could be wrong about that, state classifications being what they are). This is the Morgan 3 Wheeler.

If you’re like me, you’ve never even heard of this vehicle. But at the place we stayed two nights in Gunnison on this last OFMC trip there were three guys also staying there, one on a Harley, one on one of the new Honda Valkyries, and one in (key word: in) a Morgan 3 Wheeler. They were using Gunnison as their base and taking day rides. And man, was that Morgan an interesting hybrid.

For starters, that is a motorcycle engine sitting right up front. It’s a 1989cc S&S v-twin. Beyond that, though, it looks like an old style Indy race car from the 1930s, except it only has one wheel in the rear. It’s very light and has a lot of power and is supposed to be a lot of fun to drive. But it is emphatically not a motorcycle.

Speaking of the Slingshot, by the way, we saw a couple of those on this trip as well. Because you sit in them, very much like a dune buggy, I would have a hard time considering them motorcycles either. But we did note that, because it’s just body, chassis, and engine, there is no storage space, so those folks had their bags bungeed on the back just like we do on motorcycles.

I welcome this proliferation of new designs. Now it’s up to the regulators to move into the current century and figure out a legitimate way to classify them.

Biker Quote for Today

Nothing like trikes and even less like three-wheeled automobiles, sidecars accentuate the balance and ineffable grace of a single-tracker in approximately the manner and degree that crutches improve the performance of steeplechasers. — Jack Lewis

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Posted in custom motorcycles | 1 Comment »

A Lot Of Attention For The New Indian

August 3rd, 2015

Anyone who travels on their motorcycle knows you inevitably end up meeting and talking with a lot of people, primarily about motorcycles. This last OFMC trip was no different with the exception that an awful lot of that talk focused on just one bike: the new Indian Roadmaster that Dennis was riding.

Dennis and his Indian Roadmaster

  Dennis and his Indian Roadmaster.

Some people–like me–buy a motorcycle and hang onto it. If you buy a new one you’re adding to the stable, not replacing bikes. Others–like Dennis–get new bikes every year or two and never have more than one bike at a time. A couple years ago Dennis got a new Harley and I figured this was a bike he would keep for longer than most. Wrong.

Awhile back we all got an email with a photo attached: Dennis with his new Indian.

Dennis had recently received a small inheritance and he decided to go whole hog and get this bike. What sold him on it was the seat height. He’s pretty short so it has been amusing to see him on his tip-toes on his old Gold Wing and the last two Harleys he has had. The seat height on the Indian is only 26 inches. How totally amazing to see him straddling the bike with his feet planted flat on the ground, and even a little bend in his knees. Yes, he’s very happy with it.

This trip was the first time any of us got to see this new bike. And everywhere we went, this was the bike people were asking us about. It was almost comical. Inevitably, someone would be surveying the bunch of bikes, commenting on how nice they all looked, and then they would focus in on one particular bike. The same one every time.

“How does that Indian ride?” would be the question, or something like that.

“Hey Dennis, someone’s asking about your bike,” became a common call.

And Dennis was always more than pleased to tell them all about it.

He does figure that this is the bike he will hold onto for a long time. Indians are too expensive for him to just be buying a new one every couple years. And where else will he find a big cruiser like this with a seat that low?

I really think Harley and the others are missing the boat. If Indian can make a bike with a 26-inch seat height, why can’t others? There are plenty of other short guys out there, and a world full of women even shorter. Maybe this will finally get some wheels turning in some corporate minds.

Biker Quote for Today

Owning a motorcycle is not a matter of life or death. It’s much more important than that.

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Tar Snakes By The Score

July 30th, 2015
The OFMC at Glen Canyon

The OFMC at Glen Canyon.

There was one point on this recent OFMC trip where I think everyone would agree the riding was more than memorable.

We had just come through the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area and were somewhere in the vicinity of Natural Bridges National Monument and we came upon a series of tight turns. This is normally something we who ride find delightful: tucking in, leaning first this way and then that and then back this way, maybe even scraping some hard parts if you’re on that type of bike. But in these very same turns we also encountered something we were not thrilled about: tar snakes.

Not just a few; they were like a spider web, going everywhere in every direction. Totally impossible to avoid. And right there on these tight turns where we were already leaned over, with not a lot of traction to spare.

Holy crap! Nothing to do but ride it through.

Of course that’s a lot easier to say than to do when you feel your front tire sliding out from under you only to then feel your rear tire going, while the front has stabilized. But stabilized only for a second because as soon as you’re past one there are three more in your path. And sometimes your front and back tires are sliding at the same time.

So we got through a series of turns like that and breathed a sigh of relief but just a minute later here was another series of turns with just as many snakes as the last time. Yow!

Of course, it was a hot day, so they were soft and oozing. There was not a single one of us who had encountered tar snakes that bad ever before. No one went down and no one got hurt but every one of us had a memorable experience that came up in conversation more than once in the next couple days.

Here’s a bit of advice I found on how to deal with them: Once on the tar snakes and leaned over go loose on the bars and don’t chop the throttle. Look for pavement areas that look to have less tar and try to alter your line/lean to get the front tire there. If possible cross the tar snakes at 90° or at angles never ride along the length of a tar snake.

Thanks to dirtrider for that bit of advice. And yes, that seems to be the consensus, don’t over-react, stay loose and ride it through.

Then of course, later in the day we ran into about 10 miles of new chip seal. Brand new chip seal. Not our favorite day of the trip.

Biker Quote for Today

Tar Snakes. Their bite is painful. Their laughter is silent. — RedWings

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Posted in motorcycle problems | No Comments »

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