Passes & Canyons Blog

The Pass Bagger patches.

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.

Meet-Up is a good place to find groups of motorcyclists to ride with.

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.

The BMW Club of Colorado website.

I was pretty darn surprised awhile back to check my email and find an invitation to come speak to the BMW Motorcycle Club of Colorado at their monthly meeting. (They don’t all ride BMWs, thus the “Sort Of” in the title above.) Apparently Carl was familiar with this website and this blog and he felt that I would be able to make an interesting presentation. Would I come talk about my writing and my travels? OK, if you think so I’m willing to do it.

First I had to prepare. I wrote out an entire presentation, not that I intended to read it, but just to draw my thoughts together. Then I distilled it down to a list of words and phrases, figuring that would be all I would really need to keep track of where I was going. Finally, I put together a PowerPoint slide deck with photos and images to complement the oral presentation. If you read this blog you know I end each post with a “Biker Quote for Today” so I interspersed some of my favorite quotes among the images.

I would be taking my laptop, which has PowerPoint on it, but just to be sure I saved the deck as a .ppsx file, which is supposed to be a presentation format that can be played even if you don’t have PowerPoint. I copied the file onto the laptop and also onto a jump drive. Redundancy, you know.

So the presentation was to be at the February meeting but the weather was getting nasty that day. Also, I had a minor cold–nothing that would have stopped me from going but when Carl called to say let’s postpone till March I was not unhappy.

March 11 came and I was ready. I thought I was getting there in plenty of time but figured it made sense to get everything set up right away. That was a good plan.

We needed to hook my laptop up the flat-screen TV that so commonly now replaces the old projection screen. But the TV did not want to make nice with my laptop. After several people of increasing technical competence tried and failed to get them to talk, Carl pulled out an old tablet he had on hand and hooked it up. The TV liked his table, so we inserted the jump drive. Redundancy!

This was just at the point when the meeting was starting. So they had their usual business to attend to and then it came time for the speaker. (Oh yeah, that’s me.)

I double-clicked on the file and got a message saying the computer could not open this file because it did not have the right program. More tech-savvy folks jumped in to trouble-shoot and I figured I’d better start talking even minus my visual aids.

I don’t know if it was apparent to the folks in the crowd but it quickly came apparent to me that I needed my visual aids, so I was pretty relieved when someone else pulled out another laptop that had PowerPoint on it and presto, I was in business. Now instead of just talking about my articles published in Rider magazine I could show them. Instead of just talking about my bikes I could show them. And perhaps most importantly, I could show the slides of quotes. Truthfully, I had the impression those were the highlights of the presentation for quite a few of the group.

When it was over I hung around and several people came up to talk to me. I have to tell you, writing this blog is very much a leap of faith. I write stuff and put it out there but I have no idea who might be reading it, if anyone is reading it at all. So it always tickles me when, as happened here, people speak to me about this or that blog post I wrote that they read. Wow, people really do read my stuff!

Apparently, you do. Thanks. I do appreciate it.

Biker Quote for Today

You know you’re a biker if every time you hear a vehicle with headers you look for a Harley.