Passes & Canyons Blog

I got an email from Anthony asking for some suggestions on a three-day ride across Colorado from Durango into Wyoming. Here’s what I mapped out for him.

From Durango I think it’s a no-brainer to head north on US 550 over Red Mountain Pass to Ouray. That’s one of the nicest stretches of road in all of Colorado. On to Ridgway and then, just a short distance north of Ridgway you could get off on County Road 10 for some gravel roads. Follow it till it meets up with County Road 8, and then CR 860 over to CR 858 up by Silver Jack Reservoir. You’ll go close to Court House Mountain, which is impressive. You’re headed for Owl Creek Pass, so I think there are signs. Then head north on CR 858 all the way to where you hit US 50 at Pleasant Valley. Take US 50 on into Gunnison for the night.

Next day I’d ride north out of Gunnison to Crested Butte and then take the Kebler Pass road (also gravel, but very good gravel) over to CO 133 at Kebler Corner. Take a right and go over McClure Pass and down to Carbondale, then another right on CO 82 to Aspen and on over Independence Pass. Just past Twin Peaks you’ll hit US 24, which you can take on into Leadville for the night.

Next day take US 24 over Tennessee Pass down to Minturn and I-70. Jump briefly on I-70 west to Wolcott and then go north on CO 131, which will take you all the way up to Steamboat Springs, for your third night. The next day, to get into Wyoming, I’d suggest going out by the Steamboat airport and taking CR 129 (some paved, some gravel) all the way up into Wyoming, hitting WY 70 up near Savery. Unless you’re intending to head west it’s then a good ride northeast on WY 70 over to Encampment and Riverside.

From Durango to where you would meet up with WY 70 this looks like about 500 miles spread over three days. That might not sound like a lot but mountain miles are a lot slower than flatland miles. Plus, you’ll want to stop and take it all in probably a bunch of times. I mean, why be in a hurry?

There would be a number of possible alternatives in case this sort of route doesn’t quite jibe with what you’re looking for. If so, feel free to ask me about them and I’ll be glad to give you my thoughts.

Have a great trip.

Biker Quote for Today

You might be a Yuppie biker if you need a biker lingo book.

The BMW Motorcycle Club of Colorado is a good place to go to meet folks to ride with, but their website is also a good resource even if you don’t want to join the club.

In particular, I’m looking at their Pass Bagger page. The Pass Bagger “quest,” as they call it, encourages members to earn patches for riding greater and greater numbers of passes in Colorado. First off, who knew there were so many?

There are three categories: paved passes, unpaved passes, and gaps and summits. If you click on the links to the lists you’ll see about 80 paved passes. OK, some of these have got to be just high spots that technically are passes but you would never realize it. And in some cases it’s a little confusing considering that, for instance, they list three Ute Passes. I’m not sure if this is all one pass or three separate ones. Each is listed in a different county. Doing a little digging it seems there really are three.

As for unpaved passes, there are probably something like 130 of them.

Where it really gets interesting is the gaps and summits. A sampling of these include Cat Creek Gap in Archuleta County, Limestone Gap in Moffat County, and Battle Mountain Summit in Eagle County. I have no idea what any of these are. That’s a pretty good reason to go find out, wouldn’t you say?

All of these also include the longitude and latitude so you can plug it into your GPS, as well as the elevation and the level of difficulty. A few are designated as favorites.

So I’d say that’s a pretty good resource. Of course the club has a whole lot of other rides and events to participate in. Yeah, I know I mentioned these guys in my post just a couple weeks ago about riding clubs in Colorado but I felt they have so much going on it was worth it to bring the club up again. And despite the BMW in the name they welcome all makes.

Biker Quote for Today

Why motorcycles are better than women: You only need to get a new chain or belt for your Motorcycle when the old one is worn.

I’ve been doing this blog for more than 10 years and over that time I have received very few comments, and I’ve never understood why. Some people who I actually know in person will occasionally send me emails with comments but I’ve always wondered why they don’t just post responses on the blog. That’s what happens on most blogs I’ve seen.

Now, early on I got a lot of comments, but they were about 99.5% spam. So I set up a spam-blocking plug-in on the site and that took care of things. But then I hardly got any comments at all.

Well, at some point I figured out the biggest reason was that anytime anyone tried to post a reply the system failed to carry through. The blog is run on WordPress so I went to an online meeting of a WordPress Meet-Up and asked if anyone there had any ideas. They all looked at the site right then as we were meeting and the only suggestion anyone could offer was to check to see if the plug-ins were causing a conflict. They said I should deactivate all of them and then reactivate them one by one and test each time to see if the system was working. If you activate a plug-in and suddenly things stop working then that’s your problem, probably.

I never got serious about this, but deactivated a couple that I figured were not essential, but no change. But just now I decided to try again. I was running one spam-blocker and it was showing that it needed to be updated. I clicked to update but that took me to a page where it said this domain name was available. What?

So I googled the name and found comments about the company shutting down and the plug-in causing systems to fail. Holy crap! So I deactivated that plug-in and tried to post a comment. It went through. And significantly, in the bare minute or so that that took me, I also received a spam comment. Just that quickly!

OK, I definitely need a spam-blocker so I reactivated another one I had installed but had been deactivated, Akismet. I don’t remember why I deactivated this one, quite some time ago, but maybe it was because they quit offering a free install and I was being cheap. Now they have a “pay what you want” option for non-commercial blogs so I chose that and agreed to pay a dollar a month. And boom, now I have a spam-blocker and it looks like you can finally offer comments again.

Anyone who wants to give it a try, please do. I’m going to be really pleased if this turns out to have solved this issue. Thanks.

Update April 11: Yeah, it looks like it’s working now. So is the spam-blocker. I’m now seeing hundreds of spam comments showing up in the spam folder every few days. If I had to dig through those looking for that stray actual comment it just wouldn’t be worth it.

Biker Quote for Today

My girlfriend, Ruth, fell off the back of my motorcycle. I rode on, ruthlessly.

OK, I guess it’s definite. I’m going with the RMMRC on the Great River Road Ride in May.

The river in question is the Mississippi River. The Great River Road is a series of roads that follow the river from New Orleans up to the headwaters in Minnesota. Judy and I took a portion of the road when we were in New Orleans two years ago and found that end of it totally boring. All you did was ride alongside the levee for mile after mile and you’d never even see the river. So forget that.

What we will do is blast in two days hard riding over to meet the Mississippi at St. Charles, MO. Presumably the upstream portion of this route will be much nicer than the downstream portion.

From St. Charles we’ll make stops at Davenport, IA; Red Wing, MN; South Haven, MN; Detroit Lakes, MN; and then Yankton, SD, and McCook, NE, on the way back. The stop in South Haven will be with the sister of one of the riders and we’ll stay two nights so as to have a day off the bikes and relax. Total mileage will be about 2,800. Nine days.

Although it’s not an excessively large group–about nine so far–Charlie, who set it up, has taken the approach of each person riding individually and then all gathering in one place in the evening. Basically, Charlie doesn’t like riding in large groups and I’m with him. So a list is being compiled of a variety of points of interest along the way and the idea is that each person plots out his or her day to make the stops that interest them.

I’m sure many people will be riding together; it’s not like we’ll each and every one of us go in a different direction each day. But I like this idea. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been riding with the OFMC, and even with the RMMRC, when I have wanted to stop somewhere but didn’t because I didn’t want to hold up the whole group. This kind of arrangement suits me just fine.

If this kind of ride interests you I’d suggest you consider coming along. All you have to do is go to the Meet-Up site and join the RMMRC ($12/year) and then you’re in a group that does a lot of riding. As an example, if you’re really into distance riding to exotic places, there’s another ride being planned this summer up to Yellowknife in Canada’s Northwest Territory. That’s a serious ride.

I’m pretty sure I’m not going on that ride but I definitely am going up the river. Oh boy.

Biker Quote for Today

100 reasons not to date a biker: 3. We always have helmet hair.

Arizona has joined the ranks of the few states where lane-splitting is legal–sort of.

The state legislature has passed, and the governor has signed, a bill legalizing lane-splitting under very specific conditions. The new law will go into effect in three months.

What the law allows is actually more along the lines of what is referred to as filtering. In full-on lane-splitting, such as in California, motorcycles can pass between cars while traffic is moving. Filtering generally refers to bikes moving to the front of the pack when traffic is stopped at a traffic light.

That’s actually what Arizona will allow. Traffic has to be at a dead stop at a red light. And bikes can only move between them to get to the front at a speed of less than 15 mph.

The key here is that statistics have shown that one of the most dangerous places a bike can be is between cars at a stop. If someone slams into the bike from behind, or into a car further back, setting in motion a chain reaction, the biker can be caught between the cars in front and in back of him/her, to catastrophic effect.

Filtering ahead gets you out of the trap. Someone could still run into the car two vehicles back but there would not be a car in front of you to get crushed against. (Though you could get shoved out into the intersection, into the cross traffic. I’d be willing to take that chance.)

I had the chance to do some filtering in California a few years ago and it worked really well. Out there the drivers are used to it so many of them deliberately leave space ahead of them at a light. A couple other riders and I were behind the first car at the light and there was room in front so after a couple hand signals to suggest we do it we nodded in agreement and pulled around. Others followed us. The light turned green and we sped off, with acceleration much greater than the typical car. We didn’t slow them down and we were quickly out in front with no traffic to be any kind of threat.

This seems like the sensible, safe sort of practice that even bikers who consider lane-splitting to be crazy can get behind. Kudos to Arizona for being sensible.

Biker Quote for Today

The forecast for Sunday had called for highs in the 70s so we were all a bit surprised to find the temperature in the low 40s as we geared up and headed out. Nevertheless, a big group, about 18 or 19 of us, gathered in Morrison for an RMMRC ride up to Lyons for lunch at Smokin’ Dave’s BBQ.

The gas station was a busy place. There were two other motorcycle groups meeting up there as well as a scooter group and a group of Mini Cooper owners. Presumably the gas station gets a fair amount of business from all this because the bunch of us took up nearly every parking place available.

The plan was to take side roads to avoid Boulder itself and then to come back via the Peak-to-Peak Highway. Presumably it was going to be a warm day.

In what was a nearly unimaginable feat, we made it all the way up to Lyons without getting broken into smaller bunches. We started out running up to Golden on C-470 and took CO 93 north over Rocky Flats. Coming down toward Boulder there was low-lying smoke all around thanks to the grass fire burning up near NCAR. But we didn’t really even smell smoke, at least I didn’t.

We skirted around Boulder to the east on Cherryvale Road and worked our way north to Niwot, then turned west on Niwot Road to where it meets up with 93 just south of Lyons. It was only at this point that we got a bit separated, and that was due to a few cars getting intermingled with us. We weren’t really separated, they just joined the group.

I was wearing my electric vest and darn glad of it, but my hands were pretty cold. We got to Smokin’ Dave’s and other people commented about how their hands were numb. Where’s that 70 degrees we’d been promised?

Lunch was good. I’m getting to like Smokin’ Dave’s more and more. And during lunch we discussed the question, do we really want to go higher, to the Peak-to-Peak when it’s this cool down lower. The general feeling seemed against it, plus, the South St. Vrain road that is the most direct way to the Peak-to-Peak continues to be closed. But a check on the weather showed that it was apparently warmer up in Ward than down where we were. Maybe the smoke was blocking the warming sun and the Peak-to-Peak is above the smoke.

Whatever the case, as we were getting ready to leave it was decided to run back down 93 and take Left Hand Canyon up to Ward and the Peak-to-Peak.

This was where I decided to go my own way. We’d been out for a pretty good while and I was more interested in just heading home so I stayed on 93. Going through Boulder with a large group would have been crazy but just a lone rider had no problem. Back down 93 to Morrison and then east on US 285 and home. A good day’s ride.

And then later in the day it really did warm up. Finally.

Biker Quote for Today

We know you’re a poser if you spit out the bug that just flew in your mouth.

Some people just simply have friends with motorcycles and they get together and ride. But not everyone. I know when I got my first bike, my CB750, John had already bought his Virago. A little while later Bill bought his Shadow. And we went out riding together. The OFMC was born and more friends and relatives joined and soon we had a big group. Easy.

As time has gone by, however, the OFMC has gotten a lot smaller and those few who are left really don’t care to go riding as much as I want to. So I looked around. I was an ABATE of Colorado member but I never got to where I would have called any of them “friends,” rather, simply acquaintances. And the majority of ABATE rides are poker runs and such, which I’m not much into.

Eventually I found the Rocky Mountain Motorcycle Riders Club (RMMRC) and that has filled the bill. This is a good-sized group that does a lot of rides and I’ve gotten on much more actually friend-like terms with a bunch of these folks than I ever have at ABATE.

But there are a number of other groups, too, and often it could be the physical location that leads you to join one group or another. The RMMRC usually has its meetings here in southeast Denver where I live so it’s convenient. I know the BMW Motorcycle Club of Colorado is very active and they are open to all bikes, regardless of the name. They meet way out west, if that’s more convenient for you.

The British Motorcycle Association of Colorado is out of Colorado Springs, although it appears they do have affiliated chapters in Denver and the Fort Collins/Loveland area. They also are welcoming to other bikes but do ask that you have an affinity for the older British bikes.

There are also a number of groups that have formed through Meet-Up, including the Highlands Ranch Motorcycle Riders. As the name implies, they are centered out of Highlands Ranch.

Also the Front Range Dual Sport Riders, of which I am technically a member but have never attended one of their events. I don’t think they have meetings so it’s just a matter of getting together at a starting point to do a ride.

And now the latest one that Meet-Up informed me of, Colorado Inclusive Meetup 20s-40s. OK, this one is interesting. First off, as the name implies, they state up front that they are looking for people in their 20s through 40s. As in, I’m too old, sorry. And I get the impression that it may be pitched to gays, which is what the “inclusive” part of the name is about. OK, I’m not gay but that wouldn’t stop me from riding with you guys if I wasn’t too old.

And lastly, they have this sentence at the end of their Who We Are page: Who the group isn’t for: honestly, trump supporters.

I found that especially amusing, especially since the first time I looked at their page that statement was a bit more blunt and off-color. I like a little honesty like that. This group definitely does not seem to lean toward Harley-Davidson and as we all know, the guys and gals on the Harleys tend to skew heavily toward Trump. So if you’re getting a group together why not be clear up front what sort of crowd you’re looking for?

Obviously there are other groups, too–you just need to look for them. I know that since I hooked up with the RMMRC I’ve had a really good time doing a whole lot of rides and meeting and getting acquainted with a whole new bunch of people. If you’re looking for someone to ride with, they’re out there.

Biker Quote for Today

You know you’re a biker if you fainted when you met Willie G.

I don’t often post links to videos here but when I do it seems they almost always come to me from Jerry Pokorny. How Jerry finds these I don’t know. Maybe he spends a large part of his life going down the rabbit holes of YouTube.

Whatever. Anyway, this thing is a movie shot pretty crudely in about 1970 about a group of guys on small (300cc?) bikes taking off from Denver and riding down to the Panama Canal. They’re not all adept at handling a motorcycle, at least not in the beginning. Helmets and eye protection are strictly optional, as is clothing at times. Who needs roads–let’s go cross-country.

The thing that’s so crazy about it is that this is how things were back in that time. It’s a world so foreign to us now that it’s a shock to realize this is how it used to be.

Now, it’s on YouTube and it’s broken into six 14-minute segments, plus the final 5-minute finale, so it will take a little of your time but it’s worth it. Enjoy.

Biker Quote for Today

A newlywed man was in the garage working on his motorcycle. His new wife came out of the house and watched him work for a few minutes before saying, “Now that we are married, you should probably sell that motorcycle.”
The man’s face went pale and he looked as if he might throw up.
“Are you okay? Whats the matter?” begged his wife.
He managed to get control of himself. “For a minute there, you sounded like my ex-wife.”
“Your ex-wife?” the woman exclaimed. “You never told me that you were married before!”
“I wasn’t,” he said.