Two-Up Motorcycle Camping Take Two
The Kawi at our campsite.
Judy and I went camping on the Kawasaki yesterday in the rain. Are we hard core? How hard core is that?
Fortunately, Colorado weather being what it is, we only caught a few raindrops, although as we approached Golden the entire town was smothered in dense, grey rainclouds. But we skirted west of town on still-rain-wet roads and turned up the Golden Gate Canyon road and never did need to stop to gear up.
We weren’t going far. If you take the Golden Gate Canyon road (County Road 70) west to the Peak to Peak Highway and then go left about 50 yards you’ll find Cold Springs Campground, which is a Forest Service campground. We weren’t looking for anything fantastic, we just wanted to go camping somewhere and try out the new, more compact camping gear we have gotten since our first two-up motorcycle camping experiment last year.
As it turned out, the gear is great but the campground is pretty darn nice, too. Much better than we anticipated. First the gear.
We got new Thermarest inflatable mattress pads and they take up less than one-third of the space of our old ones. That made a huge difference all by itself. It meant, for instance, that we had space to carry food, which we did not have the last time.
It also gave us room for a JetBoil, an extremely compact one-burner camp stove. This little giant boils water in two minutes, even at higher altitudes, so we could cook. Hot meals! Hot dog!
Food, of course, can be one of the bulkiest things you can carry. For dinner we took a Backpacker’s Pantry freeze-dried entree, Katmandu Curry. Freeze-dried entrees have come a long way since I first ate a few back in about 1973. It comes in a sturdy, foil-like package and all you do is heat water and pour it in. Give it a stir and then let it do its thing for about 20 minutes. We poured it into these super thin, take-up-almost-no-space-at-all bowls we got from REI, and that and part of a loaf of sour dough bread made a good, amazingly filling dinner.
For breakfast we had brought bananas and some Starbucks instant coffee that is way better than what instant coffee ever used to be like. Plus we had some granola and took a zip-lock bag of dry milk. We mixed water with the dry milk and poured it over our granola and Judy used some in her coffee. As Judy noted, we’d probably gag trying to drink the milk straight but the longer it soaked into the granola the better it tasted. Oh yeah, coffee was drunk out of a collapsible cup and out of the JetBoil container.
So the stuff we got worked well and did its job of freeing up space. Now we want to try going for two nights. We figure if we’re on the Kawi there is still space to bungee a bag of clothes with the tent, on the back. Don’t really know yet how all this works on the V-Strom.
Then there’s the campground. First off, it’s a gravel road but it’s really, really good, which is to say, even the Concours didn’t mind, and the Concours hates gravel.
We walked around and at the western extent of the campground there was a trail leading on so we took that and ended up connecting with an old road, so we followed the road. And there were old campsites along this road. We deduced that the campground originally ran all the way down a mile or more to where the road once again hits the Peak to Peak. And there are abandoned campsites all the way to that intersection. Closed at both ends (as we found out), there is no traffic and it was a very nice walk. Then once we got back to where we had first followed the trail we saw a sign pointing to a trail up a hillside saying only “Vista.”
The spiderweb of intermixed trails going up this rocky outcrop all eventually led us to the top and from there we could see half of Gilpin County laid out before us (or at least it seemed that way). And while it was an easy climb on the one side, on the other side the cliffs drop off straight down at least 70 feet. Very dramatic, but probably very few people even know these cliffs are there because the trees below reach just about up to the top of the outcrop and completely hide them. But it was very cool. Our stroll around the campground ended up lasting probably three hours as we explored all this. And then there were trails leading up the hill behind our campsite that we did not explore on this visit. We’re going to have to go back.
So yeah, two-up motorcycle camping works. And you don’t even have to go far from home.
Biker Quote for Today
The road is eternal, the wind is constant — what else comes with a guarantee like that?
Tags: Cold Springs Campground
October 22nd, 2017 at 10:24 pm
I’m brand new to camping on motorcycles. My husband has done it a few times. How big of a motorcycle do you need to camp in the mountains and do you need to have it tuned up differently than when you ride in Illinois?
October 26th, 2017 at 10:52 am
The bike doesn’t need to be all that big, in fact, a smaller one can be better on the rougher roads. For tuning it depends. If you have fuel injection it will take care of itself. If carbureted you might need to adjust tuning, although when I take my Denver-tuned bike up high it does fine. Might not be so if you’re coming from sea level.