Passes & Canyons Blog

Lunch time in Quemado.

Leaving Silver City on Day Four of the RMMRC‘s recent New Mexico trip we enjoyed the benefits of taking a different route than planned the day before. In addition to enjoying the fabulous US 191, which we would have missed entirely, we now rode north on US 180, the route we would have been backtracking on if we had not taken US 191. So now it was a new road, not a repeat.

And make no mistake, US 180 is a very nice road, going through some really nice terrain. The day before, when the decision was made to take 191 I was displeased because I knew what a nice road we were missing, while not suspecting what a great road we had in store.

We headed north, through Buckhorn, Alma, to Rancho Grande Estates, where we turned east on NM 12, to Apache Creek, where we turned north on NM 32, to Quemado. The last time I had been on this road was in 2018 when the OFMC was on what I dubbed “the Chipseal Tour.” At that time this entire 38-mile stretch was being chip-sealed and that was really about all we paid attention to. This time it was just smooth road and I got to enjoy the road and the country. And like the run up US 180, it was a nice road to ride.

We got to Quemado and figured it was time for lunch and gas. One question we’d had earlier was whether we might like to go a little further east on US 60 to a place called Pie Town. The main thing going on in that town is that they sell pie. How inviting is that? The problem would have been that it is another 20 or so miles out of our way, which would have made it a nearly 40-mile side trip, just for lunch. Did we want to do that? Plus, the sky was looking pretty threatening. We had decided we would put off any decision until we got to Quemado.

So we got to Quemado and pulled into the parking lot of a restaurant, which turned out to be closed. Was there another restaurant in town? We weren’t sure. We had noticed a road running northwest out of Pie Town that connected to our route a bit to the north–was that road paved?

Our deliberations were interrupted by a woman who drove over to us and got out. Were we looking for a restaurant? There is a really nice one just up the street past the gas station. And by the way, she owns them both and due to a labor shortage they each close on different days of the week. We asked her about the road out of Pie Town and she said it definitely is not paved and it is a dirt road you really, really do not want to get caught on if it rains–which is what the sky was seriously threatening. We ate at her second place up the street.

After lunch we headed out in a hurry but there was no need for speed–the clouds were going the other way and we stayed completely dry. We took NM 36 north to where it connected with NM 117, which runs northeast through El Malpais National Monument. No surprise that this is a very pretty area, too, and if I had been in the lead we would have stopped at Ventana Arch, a big arch very near the road with a parking area. But I wasn’t and we didn’t.

We reached I-40 four miles east of Grants, our stop for the night. We got gas right there and then had the option of blasting four miles on the interstate to town or taking a four-mile stretch of old Route 66 to town. Most of us chose Route 66. Bad, bad choice.

I didn’t see what happened with the guys ahead of me but just before we got onto that stretch of road I noticed a pilot car parked next to the road. Some construction going on? Immediately ahead it was obvious from the very clear difference in appearance that some work had been done on the road. In another second I knew what the work had been, it was chip seal. And apparently, earlier that day, when the crew got to their stopping point they had just dumped all their remaining gravel right there.

I hit about four inches of completely loose gravel and fish-tailed wildly, struggling to keep the bike up. Charley, behind me, tells me he saw me fish-tailing and at least had some time to prepare but nevertheless found himself fish-tailing wildly, too. After that first part the gravel wasn’t so deep but we had four miles of the stuff to ride through to get to Grants. It was a slow, unsteady ride. I was just glad I was on the V-Strom and not the Concours.

Within minutes of reaching the motel the skies did finally open up. After dodging rain all day we were off the bikes when it finally hit. Nice.

Biker Quote for Today

“Damn, buying that motorcycle was a bad investment,” said no one ever.

The OFMC gets out of the rain in New Mexico last year.

The RMMRC is leaving in a few days on this New Mexico ride and at last week’s meeting someone asked me which bike I’ll be riding. Gosh, I hadn’t even thought about that. I guess I ought to.

The Honda CB750 was out right away because its tires are too thin and would not be enough for a 1,500-mile trip. That left the Concours and the V-Strom.

I figured what I really ought to do is take both of them out for runs and see which seems to be most ready, or else figure out what each of them might need.

I checked the tires on the V-Strom and the air was good. Check. Tires are good. Check. My top bag has suffered some damage in a couple times dropping the bike but I pulled out a strap that secures it well so no worries there. Check.

How is the oil? I just got the oil changed in my car the day before because I realized I had pretty much forgotten about paying it any attention. And I couldn’t remember the last time I changed the oil in the V.

I checked, which first meant figuring out how. That’s how bad an owner I am. So there’s a sight glass and you’re supposed to hold it level and check the level in the sight glass. Well, I didn’t see anything in the sight glass. I figured it would be good to take it for a ride over to Vickery to get some oil. That way I would also get a chance to see how it’s running.

It ran great. One thing I like about this bike is that it always runs great. I’ve had my troubles periodically with the Concours and the CB but the V-Strom, as they say, is bullet-proof.

I got home, put in some oil, checked the sight glass, put in some more, and it looked fine. So this bike is ready to go. I guess I’ll be riding the V-Strom. But now I really ought to check the air and oil in the Concours, just because they need to be checked. And if I do that before I leave, and I take it for a ride, maybe I’ll change my mind about which bike to ride. After all, the Concours is a really fine highway bike . . .

Biker Quote for Today

You know you’re a biker when you hate the fact that you were in front of your computer long enough to read this and not on your scoot.

The obligatory ride photo, down near Daniels Park.

February has been very compliant this year, offering us good riding days right away. Of course I took advantage.

Friday of last week was looking to be the best day so I got out on the Concours. There were plenty of other bikes out, too. People know a good thing when they see it.

Nothing eventful happened on that ride but I did notice that unlike its opposite number and its predecessor, my new left-hand mirror vibrates as if I were on a Harley. That’s never been the case before. Did I just not wrench the nuts down tight enough? Getting to them is way too complicated for me to just go in and see, so I guess I’ll be living with this for the foreseeable future.

It was a beautiful day and Saturday promised to be very nice, too, so I left the other two bikes for Saturday. But Saturday proved to be no way near as nice.

I took off first on the V-Strom. The temperature was about five degrees cooler than the day before but more importantly, there was a breeze, and it was a cold breeze. I immediately turned on the electric vest, which I had worn the day before but never turned on. That helped a lot.

Unlike the day before, there were not a lot of other bikes out; I only saw a couple. I did notice, though, going over Cherry Creek Dam, that there were ice fishermen all over the lake. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen ice fishermen out there before. I guess that is a testament to how much colder this winter has been than recent years past.

I kind of had a longer ride in mind but it wasn’t long before I was getting more than a little chilly. I altered my route and got in a good ride but a shorter one than planned. By the time I got home my hands were seriously cold and all of me was uncomfortable. Fine, I have warmer gear.

After lunch I headed out on the CB750, this time having added long underwear and my riding pants with liner, and my heated gloves. Absolute night and day. I took a much longer ride and could not have been more comfortable.

The other really nice thing, which I didn’t even think about for a while, was that whereas the Honda had seemed to run poorly the last time I rode it, now it ran absolutely beautifully. Not one thing wrong. I have no idea what that business was about last month but I’m quite pleased it didn’t turn out to be something I would have to contend with.

This time I headed west and then turned south down US 85 through Sedalia. Not surprisingly, I saw a lot more bikes out this time. You will never ride down by Sedalia on a decent day and not see lots of bikes, and this day was no exception. I turned north on the Daniels Park Road, stopped and took the obligatory ride photo, and worked my way on home. Now the weather can do its worst, I’ve ridden all three bikes in February.

Biker Quote for Today

I love the sensation of being out in the open air, far away from all the distractions of modern life. I will usually disappear for a couple of hours, and that time on my bike is quite sacred, as it’s when I do all my serious thinking.

Running up alongside the Mississippi River on one of my 2022 trips.

Every year after the first of January I look at my mileage for the year just ended. I did pretty well in 2022; rode the motorcycles more and put exactly 12 more miles on my car than I did in 2021.

First the car, because that’s my primary basis of comparison. I drove my car all of 2,506 miles. I wasn’t far off that with the Concours and well beyond it on the V-Strom. Nowhere close with the Honda, though.

The Honda only got ridden 729 in 2022. That’s down from 1,086 the year before. Which is a bit surprising to me considering that I thought I was trying to make a deliberate point of riding it regularly. Oh well, I’ll do better in 2023. And I’m also going to put some money into some work this good old bike is in need of.

The Concours had a better year than the CB750: 2,354 miles. That is up from 2,002 miles in 2021 and, as I said, almost as much as the car. Just 152 miles shy of the car. The Kawi got to go on the OFMC trip so it got a lot of miles off that one.

The champion this time around was the V-Strom. I rode that bike 3,866 miles in 2022. It got to go on the RMMRC Great River Road Ride and that was a good long jaunt. I hadn’t planned it that way. I was going to ride the Concours but had to make a last minute change when I discovered the valve stem on one of its tires was totally rotted away. It’s good to have more than one motorcycle.

Altogether that adds up 6,949 miles on motorcycles in 2022, versus 2,506 in my car. I may not put really big miles on any of my vehicles the way a lot of people do but by gosh, I do most of my getting around on the bikes. I kind of like it that way.

Biker Quote for Today

I love being on my bike, but I don’t consider that a sport: it’s too pleasant.

The Concours ran well on this trip and has continued to run well–finally!

I had forgotten to mention one thing about our recent OFMC trip: all of a sudden my Concours decided to run well again.

I had been having a series of problems with this bike. I didn’t know how long this had been going on till just now when I looked back on times I’ve written about these problems. The first mention I encountered was from December 28, 2020. Almost two years. Dang.

At that time I told how I had rolled the bike out for a ride, fired it up and let it warm up, and then took off, only to have it die about 10 feet out of the driveway. It seemed to be acting the way it had in the past when I had inadvertently left the gas petcock on Prime rather then in the On or Reserve positions. Why this thing even has Prime I don’t understand. So I did what had worked in the past, I changed the oil. After that it ran fine and I thought I had solved the problem.

Not so easy. The next few times I rode it it wouldn’t run well at first and I would ride around the neighborhood before just to see before going further from home. It would die coming to a stop so I’d rev it a bit as I stopped.

I did some searching and found information suggesting maybe the air filter was clogged with oil, so I replaced the oil filter. No improvement so I checked on the Concours Owners Group forum and came up with the possibility of hydrolock. But as far as I could tell that was not the issue either so finally I resigned myself to calling in Joel, my mechanic, and paying the price.

But then I met a guy who suggested clearing the fuel line using carb cleaner. I did that and it helped a lot. Maybe I wouldn’t need to pay Joel after all. The immediate improvement was great and I hoped it would just get better and better. But it didn’t. Eventually I did have Joel clean the carburetors. By now it was April of 2021.

Come July of 2021 I went on the OFMC trip on the Concours after Joel had cleaned the carbs and the bike ran well but not perfectly. And at times it seemed like the throttle would stick and the engine would race like crazy at a stop and there was nothing I could do. Arrgh!

After that trip I had Joel work on it some more and it finally was good enough and I figured I’d just have to live with revving it a bit until it got fully warmed up, and accepting that it had a delayed response to twisting the throttle. Not great but livable. And that’s where matters rested as of October 2021 and all through 2022.

Until the day before this year’s OFMC trip. I was getting ready to leave and figured I should take the bike for a spin just to make sure it was operating well before I took off and miraculously it didn’t run OK, it ran great! It ran the best it had run in two years. No long warm-up needed, no delayed throttle response, none of that.

And then the next day and on the whole trip and every time I’ve ridden it since then it has run like a new bike again. The impression I get is that for a long time there was some blockage in the fuel line and all of a sudden, finally, it got cleared out all on its own. I’m so happy! It’s just night and day how much better it runs. FINALLY!!

Biker Quote for Today

The best invention after the wheel was putting two of them together.

This is my original speedometer/odometer after it broke. The numbers quit turning, too.

It’s that time of year when I always look at the odometers on my bikes to see if I can turn over just one more 1,000-mile mark by the end of the year. This year looks like it’s going to be easy.

With the V-Strom I just turned over 42,000 miles. It’s at 42,058 at the moment. No way I’m putting another 942 miles on that bike before the end of December.

With the Concours it’s not quite so cut and dried but still pretty obvious. The odo now sits at 76,309. Theoretically, if I had only one bike and I really got out on it a lot I could reach 77,000 by year’s end, but that’s not the case. I’ve got two other bikes that need to be ridden at least once each month. So no, I’ll just consider that turning over 76,000 hits the mark. If I turned over 76 in May there would be no excuse for not reaching 77, but doing so in October is good enough for this year.

Then we come to the Honda CB750. This is the bike I’ll be choosing on most of my rides for the next seven weeks. This bike is currently sitting at 36,730. That’s only 270 miles from 37,000. That’s doable. In fact, just two more rides like the one we did this past weekend are all it will take. (I do want to make a clarification here for anyone who is new here. This 1980 Honda CB750 Custom does not have only 36,730 on it in all these 42 years. The original speedometer/odometer set broke at about 84,000 and I replaced it with a salvage yard instrument cluster with about 29,000 on it.)

I track the mileage each year on all four of my vehicles, with my eye particularly on the motorcycle miles vs. the car miles. For about the past 10 years I have always put many more miles on my bikes than on my car. That’s the way I like it. I’ll do it again this year, no question. Heck, I’ll probably end the year with more miles on the Suzuki all by itself than on the car. Did I ever tell you I love my motorcycles?

Biker Quote for Today

Why didn’t the motorcycles get in the carpool? Because they didn’t have trunks.

This isn’t a recent picture but it’s a mass of the critters that were bombarding us on this ride.

The tumbleweeds were out in full force Sunday when eight RMMRC riders headed out to Patty Ann’s in Kiowa for a lunch ride. The weather has been great but the forecasts are for cold very soon and high winds immediately. They weren’t kidding.

As we headed east on a variety of roads the wind was blasting out of the south and tumbleweeds were blowing across the road like a mass migration. I felt like I was riding rather skillfully as I managed to get to Kiowa without hitting a single one but when we left a big one nailed me right away. OK, some skill, a bit of luck, too.

The wind was killer. I was on the V-Strom, which is my smallest and lightest bike, and we were getting pushed all around. With all its body work my Concours is like a sail but at least it weighs a lot more and so it is more stable. At times this wind had me leaning so far to my right that it felt like the wind might just blow my wheels out from underneath me. But it didn’t.

What it really reminded me of was heading out from Patty Ann’s the first morning of the Great River Road trip we did this summer. Heading southeast out of Limon that day on US 287 we hit such powerful winds that I rode for about 50 miles with the only thing visible in my left mirror being my chest; that was how far I was leaned over.

It also reminded me of a technique I discovered one day riding out this same road, CO86. On that day the wind was out of the north, not that that matters. What mattered was that I was struggling to keep that bike going where I wanted it to go and at one point, for whatever reason, I left go of the grip with my left hand. Suddenly controlling the bike was a lot easier.

The nearest I can figure is that when I was holding on with two hands my hands were working in opposition to each other. It certainly wasn’t a conscious effort but it was a strain and a struggle; once I let go with one hand, control was easy. I wasn’t fighting against myself. I’ve tried this many times since that day and it works every time.

An interesting aside: having figured this out I thought it was worth sharing so I sent a letter to one of the motorcycle magazines so they could pass it along to their readers. I never heard anything and they never printed my letter so I have to suspect they thought I was talking crazy but I’m not. It really works. Try it for yourself and you’ll see.

We headed out after lunch but original plans to take a roundabout route home got dumped because the wind was just blowing so hard and it was obvious the front over the mountains was coming our way. Everyone decided they just wanted to head home. So we did. But it was good to get out for one more ride before the bad weather arrives.

Biker Quote for Today

I thought of that while riding my motorcycle.

The view from our bunkhouse. This is a very nice place.

Sure enough, by morning Bill’s tire with the newly installed inner tube was flat. What the heck?

Preparing to hook up the little pump Bruce noticed that he could tighten the core in the valve stem in that tube just a tiny bit. Was that enough that it had leaked? Bill wasn’t going to test that by just riding on. We were in Farmington and there is a Harley dealer there, so with enough air to easily go five miles that was where we headed.

Long story short, Bill ended up paying about $2,000 for a new tire and wheel. Ouch. But now we could ride on confident that there should be no further problems.

We headed northeast on NM516 to Aztec and then took US 550 north. We really didn’t want to take 550 all the way up to US 160 and then go east on 160 because that’s a busy highway and we had been on it many times. Was there an alternative?

We looked at the map and saw that just a little ways into Colorado there was a road, CR110, that went east to Ignacio. And best of all, we had never been on this road. Great. Now we just had to find it. It’s not very well marked. We did find it, though, and it was a really nice road winding through some hills and some rolling ranch land. Time for lunch in Ignacio.

From Ignacio we took CO151 as it loops south and then north again, finally joining US 160 a little west of Pagosa Springs. Leaving Pagosa behind us we headed up Wolf Creek Pass. Dennis was leading, followed by Bill, then me, then Bruce.

One thing you have to understand about Bill is that he very much likes to set his cruise control and just let it go. Sometimes this means he’ll pull up on you and very slowly slip by. Other times it means he drops further and further back. This time he was dropping back. Meanwhile, I kind of wanted to run on up this very nice pass. So after a bit I blasted on past him.

But Dennis really wasn’t running up the pass either. And I felt like running. So I blew past him and really cranked it up. Pretty soon I saw that Bruce had also passed both of them and was enjoying a hot ride up, too. Fun. Eventually they both picked up speed and closed the gap a bit.

We came on down to South Fork and made the left turn off US 160 onto CO149 that runs through Creede and up over Slumgullion and Spring Creek Passes, to Lake City. But we weren’t going that far today, we were just headed to a campground and cabins between South Fork and Creede, Blue Creek Lodge and RV Park.

We were looking forward to our night here because I had received a call during the week telling me they had moved us from a smaller cabin to a full bunkhouse where we would each have our own room with private bath and a common area for meals and anything else. No extra charge. Cool. What we did not count on was that the road through the RV park was gravel and our bunkhouse was as far up this loose gravel as it is possible to go. I was on my Concours, which hates gravel, and Bill and Dennis are none too comfortable on gravel any time. Bruce, with his long legs as outriggers, is fine with that stuff.

The route winding through the RV park was also not really clear so I took a wrong turn at one point and we had to double back. Making the sharp right turn this necessitated I came just a hair’s breadth from dropping the bike. It was close, and then, fighting to keep it up, I had gotten too close to a cabin and had to roll back. That was less than fun on this loose stuff as well.

Dennis and Bruce and I finally made it to the top. Bill decided he would park at a lower level and just carry his stuff up to the cabin. It was clear that neither Dennis or I would be riding back down that road until we were leaving. But the lodge’s restaurant is not in operation so we had to do something to get dinner. So Bruce and Bill went back down and headed toward Creede to find some food to bring back. Meanwhile Dennis and I shuttled our bikes around to make it as easy as possible to get out the next morning.

We also noticed that heading down Bruce had stood up on his pegs. Dennis wondered aloud about that and I explained to him that standing on the pegs lowers you center of gravity from the seat to the pegs. We both figured maybe we’d try that in the morning.

Meanwhile, it was darn chilly and we had all turned the heat on in our rooms but nothing seemed to be happening. So we cranked them all the way up. Still nothing.

They guys got back with food, we ate and then had a good time sitting around shooting the bull. Then we headed to bed but the day wasn’t over. Each one of us, during the night, woke up to find that our heaters really do work and our rooms were broiling. I also went to the common area and turned that heater down so it wouldn’t be an oven in the morning. Now sleep.

Biker Quote for Today

Food, oxygen, love, sex, and motorcycles. Am I forgetting something?