Another Cool Then Hot Day, And Then A Blast To Home
Ten minutes earlier this road was jam-packed with stop and go traffic. Now you can see the first car that filtered past the burning truck down the hill.
We got an early start out of Spanish Fork on the next to last day of this year’s OFMC trip and I figured we’d be climbing into the hills east of the extended Salt Lake City metropolitan area but in fact we plunged down a canyon. We were on US 89, which led in a short while to US 6.
Another surprise was that at the mouth of this canyon there were about 10 wind turbines. You normally think about those things being out in the open where they catch a lot of free-flowing wind. I figure it must be that the wind blows in across the salt flats and then hits these hills and gets channeled into this canyon.
So we went down and down and finally started climbing. Very pretty along this part. Then we started down again, a long way, and finally came out on the desert floor at Price. Now it’s going to get hot and boring. It did. We got lunch and gas at Green River and then just blasted the rest of the way to Grand Junction, our stop for the night. Not an eventful day.
Leaving Junction early in the morning we were figuring on getting down the hill on I-70 before the inevitable crush of traffic that happens every Sunday afternoon. Wrong. We started getting into heavy traffic at about Vail. But before I get into that, something else happened just west of Vail.
As I said, traffic was getting thick and we got behind someone going too slow in the right lane, so Bill and Dennis moved over to the left and when I had the chance I did, too. I looked back and was about 50 feet ahead of the guy coming up in that lane so, as I always do, I threw my left arm straight out to clearly signal my intent and simultaneously moved into the left lane. Totally normal move.
About five seconds later I heard the familiar sound of a car coming around me on the left . . . but I was in the left lane. I turned to look and there was the guy I had pulled in front of, now about even with my rear fender, going past me half way on the shoulder. I moved right to give him more room and threw up my hand in a “what the heck” sort of motion. He threw up his left hand in a sort of “oops, sorry” kind of motion. And we rolled on.
The way I figure it, he must have been looking at his phone and looked up only just in time to realize he was about to murder a motorcyclist.
Back to the story. I told the rest of this story here but there was a lot that I left out in that account. For one thing, I was not alone sitting there by the highway broken down. I could see, in the space of about a quarter mile, five other vehicles all pulled over with problems. I walked back and spoke with the two women in the car behind me, and they had also overheated. But for them it was normal. They had a bottle of coolant and once they could safely remove the radiator cap they poured some in and took off. The couple in front of me had overheated and had called for a tow. I didn’t walk up to the three vehicles ahead of them.
All this time the interstate was a parking lot. Three lanes full of traffic stopping and starting. Then about 500 feet down the hill there was a bang and a lot of smoke or steam or something and within a few minutes there was not a single vehicle on the road in front of me. I learned later from the tow truck driver who picked me up that there was a truck on fire back there.
Obviously, when this truck erupted in flames everyone behind him stopped. Then, after maybe five minutes cars started filtering past and one by one they would go speeding past me. And gradually there were more and more as they all got bolder.
What impressed me was how quickly the emergency folks handled the situation. It took a while for them to get to the scene but once they did they had the truck moved and whole road open again within 15 minutes. And then it was the same old parking lot again.
I did eventually get home that day, at 10 p.m., and that was finally the end of this year’s OFMC trip for me–though not yet the end of my hassles getting the bike home. But it could have been a lot worse. What if I had overheated out in the middle of the salt flats, in blazing heat with no shade? What if it had happened at any of the other times we were stuck in 100-degree-plus weather with no shade? At least when I broke down up on the mountain my actual concern was the oncoming rain storm. And I had rain gear.
Meanwhile, the Kawi is now in the shop for service and to find out if the overheating was due to a bad thermostat or heat sensor. Stay tuned.
Biker Quote for Today
If I were to die from riding a dirt bike my crash better look awesome.
