Riding In The Boonies
Monday, October 3rd, 2016
One of the Beemers.
Judy and I just got back from a 10-day road trip (nope, by car) and we spent a lot of time in the boonies. The car has the serious dirt to confirm it.
And you know what? A lot of these way-out-there spots we were in we saw people on motorcycles.
For instance, we were up at the Gates of Lodore, which is in Dinosaur National Monument, up at the far northeast corner of the monument almost to Wyoming. The road to get there is not paved.
That didn’t discourage four guys from Colorado Springs who came rolling into the campground our second day there.
Leading the way was a guy on a KLR 650. Judy made note as he went by that he must be really tall because his knees were sticking way out to the side. The other three were on various Beemers, one of them so loaded you might have thought the guy was going around the world. They were a couple adventure-type bikes and what I took to be a GS 850.
So of course I had to go over and talk with them.
Judy was right. The guy on the KLR must have been 6-foot-4 at least and sitting on the bike with his feet on the ground he looked like I would look sitting on a scooter.
He told me that in the beginning they all had KLRs but one by one the other guys went to Beemers. He stuck with the KLR because it was light and he had no problem going lots of places where the other guys didn’t want to go. So he’ll sometimes take off and meet up with them again later, much as I like to do when I ride with the OFMC on my V-Strom and they don’t want to take their Harleys (and Indian) off pavement.
These guys had left Colorado Springs two days before and had spent one night at one guy’s condo in Frisco. The second night two of them got a motel in Meeker while the other two camped at Maybell. I’m guessing the heavily loaded guy was one of the campers.
The group was headed to the Flaming Gorge and I had not realized there were roads going through on up to Dutch John. Sort of. The road out of Maybell, CO 318, is paved to the state line and then Browns Park Road is gravel. You have to follow that all the way up into Wyoming to WY 373 coming down from Rock Springs along the east side of Flaming Gorge. Then go south to Dutch John on what becomes U.S. 191 once it gets into Utah. Probably about 30 miles on gravel.
And then they’d head home after a couple days at the gorge. Life is good when you and your buddies have motorcycles.
Biker Quote for Today
Never let your free spirit get trapped in a cage.
