Passes & Canyons Blog

The OFMC on the road last year.

OK, I know I intended to tell about the road to Silt here but that’s going to have to wait. It’s time for the annual OFMC trip.

We leave on Friday. That’s tomorrow as this is published. There will be nine this year, at least at times. Everyone is leaving at different times, and in some cases different days.

Most of us are heading up on Friday to Poudre Canyon, where we’ll be staying at a lodge in the canyon. The next day we’ll ride several passes to get to Dillon, where Johnathon will be joining us after his band plays a gig there.

We’ll head up through Kremmling and over Gore Pass and ultimately to Meeker. Next day our destination will be Powder Horn ski area. I don’t even know where Powder Horn is.

From there we head to Crested Butte, then to Pagosa Springs, and then into New Mexico to Eagle Nest. This will be our only night out of Colorado.

After that it’s back into Colorado, to Canon City, and on Saturday some will head home while others stay out one last night at Cripple Creek.

What we’re doing here is trying to vary things a bit. We’ve been riding all around Colorado for so many years that it’s hard to go some place new. If you leave Denver and ride a reasonable time that puts you in a fairly consistent arc of possible destinations. So let’s try this: Make the first day a really short one. Then your next day’s arc hits some very different places. Then pick out some place we’ve never stayed before and that’s that day’s destination.

For instance, we’ve never stayed at Hot Sulphur Springs. We’re not staying there this time either, but some day we will. We’ll just make a point to. And as I said previously, I’m adding Vega State Park to the list of future destinations. As for this year, we’ve never stayed in Pagosa before. We’ve never stayed in Canon City, we’ve never stayed in Dillon, and we’ve sure never stayed at Powder Horn.

So it should be fun. I’ll tell you all about it.

Biker Quote for Today

People tell me I have a motorcycle problem. I tell them, I may have problems, but motorcycles are the solution.

The view going the other way.

Off onto some new gravel again this weekend. This time taking Pitkin County Road 265 from where is comes off CO 133 on the southern side of McClure Pass.

I’ve been over McClure many times and on occasion have noticed this road heading west, with the sign saying Collbran. I figured it was time to see what was out there.

Right away the road runs up a wide ranching valley, with what looked like a mix of working ranches and some rich-folk “ranches” that are more retreats than anyone’s way of making a living. The gravel in through here was pretty good, well-maintained. That changed pretty abruptly when the ranches ended; the road got a lot rougher. Still, it’s the sort of thing a dual-sport bike is built for so no reason to hesitate. And it was somewhere along through here where, looking back, we had that great view of that mountain in the photo above.

The road began to climb and at times it was hard to be sure which gravel road to take. They all looked inviting but if you stopped and read the small print on the signs you could tell which was which. We went up through forests and could see a lot of the mountains around us and while none of it was the kind of scenery that leaves you awestruck, it was all pretty darn beautiful. This is backcountry Colorado that you’ll never see if you stick to the pavement.

Passing into Delta County the road becomes 74.4 Road, the funny way they number things out in the western part of the state, and comes down another ranching valley before meeting up with Highway 330E. North from here takes you to Silt or New Castle, depending on which turns you make, while left leads soon to pavement and on to a turn-off–paved–to Vega State Park. That was where we headed, to camp for the night.

No, we’d never heard of Vega State Park before but it’s a very pretty place. The park itself has campgrounds and cabins for rent and there is also a private lodge on the lake that has cabins. I’m definitely going to be pushing for the OFMC to make a night’s stop here on one of our summer rides. If you come from the Collbran side it’s all paved. I’m the only one of the group who likes doing gravel so pavement is important.

So as I say, there was nothing spectacular here but there was sure nothing that was ugly either. This is beautiful country. And I’ll tell you about the road to Silt the next time.

Biker Quote for Today

Why do I ride? Because this is out there and it never ends . . . and about 50 other reasons.

You don't have to be Valentino Rossi to enjoy getting out on the track and racing.

The following is a guest post from Simone.

If you can’t get enough speed on your motorcycle, than competition motorcycle racing could be for you. Live through professional riders! Luckily enough, there are a bunch of different racing styles and types to choose. From motocross to endurance to hare scrambles and more, there is bound to be something to fit your racing preference. Additionally, there exist a variety of rider associations that present yearly racing series and other events geared to the adventure-seekers and spectators just like you. Below are some of the featured annual competitions and races that, if you want to live through a motorcycle racer, you’ve simply got to check out! Maybe you’ll even try out yourself. But whatever you do, make sure to do your homework and stay in your appropriate racing class.

US Grand Prix National Championship Series – This sportbike racing competition is unique because it’s really two racing series in one. Comprised of the 125 Grand Prix National and 250 Grand Prix National Championships features extended length grand prix racing with timed qualifying. Riders in the USGPRU series compete for regional championships in the Eastern and Western regions across North America and the points earned there are carried over to the US National Championship. Additionally, this series splits its riders up so older racers (over 30) can compete against each other while the young-guns are left to compete with each other.

The East Coast Enduro Association has been a proud sponsor of endure and hare scrambles for upwards of forty-five years. Featuring courses in the beautiful mountains of Pennsylvania, the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, and the surrounding areas, riders compete in different series to earn points towards the championship. Enduro racing is said to be one of the ‘easiest’ kinds of racing to start with because it takes place on dirt and doesn’t necessarily reach the same top speeds as sportbike racing.

The Race of Champions, brought to you by the American Sportbike Racing Association (ASRA) allows riders to compete on the famous Daytona International Speedway in a Team Challenge or separately in a winner-take-all championship sprint series. Open to any rider over the age of 16, this race is a great fall-time fixture in the lives of many sportbike racers for nearly thirty years.

Next comes the Action Sports Grand Prix Series at the Action Sports Moto Park in Ohio. This series is different because not only does it include off-highway motorcycle racing, it also includes ATV racing series and harescrambles. In order to be awarded the #1 plate, riders must earn the greatest amount of points in each class. These series points from the 8 AMA-sanctioned Grand Prix events will determine each class champion. In addition to holding the 8 events there are also 2 motocross practice days worked into the schedule.

We’re just scratching the surface of all the different types and series of motorcycle racing. Check out these events and start your own research of great competitions. And maybe get out there and compete in your first race as well!

Author bio: Simone is a writer for Competition Accessories, a leading online retailer of motorcycle apparel and more. Simone takes pride in her gear and loves taking twilight rides and discovering new locations.

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Biker Quote for Today

A biker without full-face protection should only ride as fast as the slowest hornet. — MediaWeasel

The new bike in an exotic place, even if it is close to home.

I hate how this business of working 40 hours a week interferes with my riding time. I may have been broke most of the time while I was a full-time freelance but at least I got to ride plenty.

This weekend was looking like more of same. Saturday went by with every hour claimed and I was determined to get out on the V-Strom on Sunday. But Sunday came and every hour seemed to be claimed as well and I was getting pretty disheartened. And I said no.

I decided that no matter what else didn’t get done, I would ride. And I got on and off I went.

It wasn’t any kind of big deal ride. I had wanted to head up into the mountains and take some gravel road I’d never been on on a bike before, but I didn’t have that much time. Instead I just cruised west through town, doing what I could to dodge raindrops. I actually put my rain jacket on at one point but was pulling it off again five minutes later. Hot!

Made my way out to Golden and then turned south. At Morrison I decided to run over to Red Rocks and get some pictures. I wanted to be able to say “see what cool places I’ve been on my new bike.” Sure, Red Rocks is not exotic, unless you’ve never been there. Chances are someone will read this who has never been there and will look at that picture above and think, “Wow, that’s not exotic? What kind of incredible place do you live in?”

But I have an ambition now. On Adventure Riders they have a “Wee-Strom” thread (that’s for the 650cc V-Strom as opposed to the 1000cc V-Strom) with the title, “Let’s see your Vstrom OFFROAD!” On this thread a lot of guys have posted a lot of terrific shots of their bikes in some fabulous places. I want to add a bunch of my own photos to this thread. I just have to go shoot them first.

Anyway, I headed back home, having been out for two hours. It wasn’t much but I did ride the dang bike! I guess the first serious miles I’m going to get on it will be on the OFMC summer trip which is coming up very soon. None of the guys have seen the new bike yet. Time to do something about that.

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Biker Quote for Today

Everyday is a good day for a ride! But Sunday is perfect!

At least when you ride in a group they're a lot more likely to be aware of you.

The following post is sponsored by CentralContracts.com.

I rode my Concours to work on Wednesday, and figuring that on the day before the holiday the traffic was likely to be light, I went up I-25 to 6th Avenue (the northern route).

Normally when I ride I don’t like taking that route because of all the stop and go you can run into on the highway, and that’s just murder on your clutch wrist. I prefer to go across on Hampden, which turns into freeway past Santa Fe, and then north on Kipling and then some winding through the neighborhoods to my destination (the southern route). It’s actually a mile or so shorter on that route, too, but it’s a little slower than the northern route.

Of course the other reason I avoid I-25 most of the time is that it is simply inevitable that someone in that jammed traffic will decide to pull into my lane, never bothering to turn their head to check and see if perhaps I’m there. I know better than to hang in someone’s blind spot normally, but when you’re on a packed superhighway there’s just no way to avoid it again and again the whole time.

So it was no surprise when this woman started coming my way. I laid on the horn–fortunately the Connie has a loud one–and I had to laugh seeing her swing sharply back into her own lane. Hopefully feeling quite chastised.

That never seems to happen when I’m in my car, but on the bike it is inevitable. Bikes just get hidden too easily in the blind spot. And people trust their mirrors too much.

For the rest of the ride, though, and for the ride home there were no other incidents. As a motorcyclist you have to pay extremely careful attention all the time in heavy traffic like that and you learn to read people and what they’re probably going to do. At the very least, you hypothesize that they’re going to do something and while they don’t always do it, when they do you’re ready.

And one thing I noticed this day was that there were several drivers who I firmly believed were intending to come my way but just before they made their move they saw me. They did what every driver ought to do. They were good drivers. You can’t avoid noticing the bad ones–they’re flagrantly putting your life in danger. But it’s easy not to notice the good ones. On this day I noticed the good ones.

In other words, they’re not all idiots out there. It just seems like it some times.

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Life is a highway . . .

This custom bike has the side stand right about where you would expect it to be.

I just have to remark about something I saw this weekend. Maybe this is totally common and I’ve just never seen it. Maybe not. Maybe you know.

We were up in Cheyenne on Saturday where my nephew and his new wife were having a party for friends and relatives. They got married in an extremely small, private affair so this was their wedding party.

We were out in back and across the alley a guy rolled up on a custom bike. Sorry, I didn’t have time to get a photo. Anyway, he needed to get off the bike to open his garage door so once he was stopped he reached back with his hand and flipped the side stand down. I was like, what!?

He got the door up, remounted, and then reached back by hand and flipped the side stand up and rolled into the garage. What?

OK, I mean, considering the location of the side stand it would be pretty hard to reach it with your foot. And sitting so low and leaned back it was totally reachable with his hand. But I’ve never seen a bike with the side stand way the heck back there. Is this common for custom bikes?

I went digging through my pictures of custom bikes and came up with the one above, as an example. As you can see, this one has the side stand right by the foot peg. Normal. Move that thing back behind the belt, practically hanging off that rear fender, and that’s where this bike I saw had its stand.

Not a big deal, but worth a remark, I thought. Like I said, maybe it’s common on those sorts of bikes, and maybe I’ve just never paid attention. But it sure got my attention on Saturday.

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Biker Quote for Today

You don’t have to go fast, you just have to go.

Streamlined motorcycles at last year's Vintage Motorcycle Days. That raggedy-looking green bike is Vic Valdes, who made his streamlining out of discarded political posters.

I spoke with Craig Vetter last week, working on an article that I hope I’m not too late getting to Rider magazine. Vetter, as you probably know, is the designer of the Windjammer fairing and a lot of other things, and these days he’s really focused on fuel efficiency.

Vetter has worked out the design for what he calls The Last Vetter Fairing, which is body work that creates a streamlined motorcycle with upright seating and room to carry four bags of groceries.

He told me that in a recent test ride, with two identical motorcycles, one streamlined, the one that was streamlined got double the gas mileage of the stock bike. But he also talked about the power you need to push a bike down the road at 70 mph, and that comes out somewhere in the 20-25 horsepower range.

And here’s the kicker. If you’ve got too much power you’re not going to see any major miles per gallon increase with streamlining, he said, because all that power eats up too much gas.

“What you would notice is you could go probably 200 miles an hour. But where is it legal to go 200 miles an hour?”

I get the point but it still kind of tickles my fancy to think of my Concours going that fast. “I hit 189 miles an hour but the dang thing only gave me 68 miles to the gallon! What a gas hog!”

So anyway, it was a really good conversation and I couldn’t begin to use all the interesting stuff in that one short article for Rider so all the extra will make for some good blog posts here. Stay tuned.

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Biker Quote for Today

I wanna ride this road!

The road winding through the area scorched by the Hayman Fire.

The whole point of getting a dual-sport bike was to explore parts of Colorado where the road is not paved. We did that this weekend.

The plan was to go down the road to Tarryall Reservoir and then loop back up to Bailey on a series of roads. We didn’t follow the agenda.

First off, we got off U.S. 285 about a mile and a half east of Jefferson, rather than at Jefferson as planned. That put us on Park County Road 56, Lost Park Road, rather than Park CR 77, which is Tarryall Road. That was fine because CR 56 was gravel whereas, as we learned, CR 77 has been paved all the way to Tarryall Reservoir. We ended going up through some beautiful country that we had never seen before, and that’s the whole point.

We met up with Tarryall Road a little north of the reservoir and cruised past and the pavement ended. But only for now. Turns out that the entire way from Jefferson down to Lake George, on U.S. 24 just west of Florrisant, is in the process of being paved. And what a nice route! Once they finish this will be a must-ride street bike route. It’s not very often that an entire new paved road becomes available. This will be a good one.

We didn’t go all the way to Lake George, however. I had been reading in Steve Farson’s terrific book, The Complete Guide to Motorcycling Colorado, about Matukat, a series of roads that runs from Bailey down past Wellington Lake and down through the heart of the area burned by the Hayman Fire a few years ago. This road meets up with Tarryall Road a few miles north of Lake George and we turned onto it, heading back north again.

As Steve describes it in the book, “From the roads you ride to the sights you see, this route delivers big time.”

Part of the route is wooded; much of it shows the charred landscape of the fire, although things are starting to green up again. It will be many years before the forest comes back the way it used to be but that provides an opportunity. We couldn’t help but think about how different the view is with so many of the trees gone. There were many places where we could see forever and the whole landscape was visible. If there had been tall trees lining the road we would have been happy to find the occasional unobstructed view so we could see the area around us. In fact, it makes me think about going back and shooting a bunch of photos from specific spots and then doing so again every 5 years for the next 30 years or so. And then what an interesting exhibition I could put on!

So we diverged from the agenda again along here. There are a number of intersecting roads and they’re not all well marked, so we missed our turn that would have taken us up by Wellington Lake and out at Bailey. Instead, we came out onto CO 126 down near Deckers and followed it up through Pine to catch U.S. 285 at Pine Junction.

Oh well, that just leaves us with a piece of road we still have to get to. Next time! And next time we’ll reverse course and head south from Bailey. And then probably find some different road going somewhere else. I mean, we’ve already seen Tarryall Road now. Although I will be back there on my Concours or my CB750 when that road is finished.

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Biker Quote for Today

One day, I will take it easy. Today won’t be that day.