Passes & Canyons Blog

Summer really will return eventually–where do you want to go then?

This 2016 has actually been a pretty disappointing year for me in terms of riding. I haven’t totaled my motorcycle miles for the year yet but I know when I do the number is going to be a lot lower than last year. And lower than what I had intended. A lot of it has to do with this thing they call a “job.” But that’s going to end at the end of January; I’ll be leaving the National Park Service for the fourth time. And this time if they call me to come back the answer is going to be “No.”

So what riding plans do I have for 2017? Good question.

Of course I’ll be doing a ride with the OFMC. That’s a given. We’ve been doing these summer trips for more than 25 years now.

And I want to take at least a couple trips just on my own. I like riding alone. I like going where and when I want and stopping when I want for as long or as short as I want. I don’t have any definite plans yet but I’m doing some thinking.

The really big question for me is what rides the Rocky Mountain Motorcycle Riders Club will have and which ones I’ll go on. At the November meeting the whole meeting was focused on next year’s rides and there were a lot of ideas thrown out for consideration. Being new to the group I’m not sure how this all works with the winnowing down of ideas and the decision-making that determines which ones actually happen. But there were quite a few that sounded pretty darn good to me.

Some of the proposals are pretty local; others are not at all local–we’re talking some serious rides. I’m interested in both, and I’m figuring some of these would be really good for Judy and me to do together. Here’s the list that was sent out.

• Bear Tooth Pass (3 Days)
• Wind River Canyon (TBD Days)
• Gateway Auto Museum (2 Days)
• Capulin Volcano (2 days)
• Guanella Pass (1 day)
• Gore Pass (1 Day)
• Chama, NM / Pagosa Springs / Gunnison (2 days)
• Saratoga, WY / Snowy Range (2 Days)
• Red River, NM (3 Days)
• Vermillion Cliffs, UT (3 Days)
• Pie Ride (1 Day)
• Ice Cream Ride (1 Day)
• Carousel Ride Burlington (1 Day)
• Yellowstone / Jackson (9 Days)
• Fall Colors / Ozarks (8 Days)
• Nova Scotia / New Brunswick / Newfoundland (35 Days)
• Roy’s Mystery Ride (1 Day)
• Texas Hill Country (TBD days)
• Louisiana / Cajun Ride (TBD days)
• Barber Vintage Motorsports Museum (TBD days)
• St. Francis Motorcycle Museum – First Annual Motorcycle Rally (1 day)

Anything there sound good to you? Maybe you ought to consider joining the group. Come on summer!

Biker Quote for Today

Friends will bail you out a jail. Biker friends can’t because they are sitting in the cell next to you.

After nine days on the road as one of nine guys on bikes I have to say that you do not want to use us as your riding safety model. In the early days, when there were just three of us, we worked out some simple safety procedures and it was easy to follow them.

As new guys have joined the group we simply have not done a good job of inculcating those concepts and the result is a hodge-podge group that doesn’t follow any one set of procedures. We’d be safer riders if we did.

For instance, one of the newer guys seem to target-fixate on the tail-light of the guy in front of him. He’ll move in to about 2-3 bike lengths behind and just sit there. If the guy in front moves left, he moves left. If he moves right, this other guy follows, always staying right behind, and way too close.

Some of us try to set up a staggered riding pattern but all it takes is one guy to make a mess of that. I was two back of one such guy at one point, and the guy between us was trying hard to maintain a staggered position. Move left and he goes right, move back right and he goes left, and then sit in the middle. No attention to lane position. I sat back and observed all this and knew exactly the frustration he was feeling when he finally goosed the throttle and pulled ahead of the wandering rider.

It’s not that we don’t talk about these things. It’s just that we don’t seem to ever have the conversations when the full contingent is present. For instance, one night on this trip we talked about how to pass through a town as a group. I said the leader needs to slow down when approaching a traffic signal, while those behind should speed up. This then allows the leader to make a determination of whether everyone will be able to make it through the green and to take appropriate action. Everyone present agreed, but we all knew the worst offender in this strategy was not present for the discussion.

Ditto the discussion about maintaining proper speed so we don’t build up a long line of impatient cars and trucks behind us, and making sure to leave spaces so they can pass one or a few rather than all nine of us at once.

I admit it, I’m as guilty as the next guy in terms of not insisting that we have a full discussion with everyone present. Instead, I just tend to take up position in the rear where I can ride my own ride without needing to be concerned with what the folks ahead of me are doing. And I make damn sure not to be directly ahead of the tailgater. Every year before this trip I tell myself I’ll try to organize the meeting to hash this all out, and every year it doesn’t happen. Maybe I’ll actually do it next year. Somebody kick me in the butt, OK?

Recent from the National Motorcycle Examiner
The biker wave: When to say ‘too much’

Biker Quote for Today

You might ride fast, but never ride in a hurry.

The OFMC is off on its annual summer trip and there are nine of us again. For my money, that’s really too many but I’m happy to say it’s really been OK this year. It has actually been a really good time.

We’re doing something of a grand tour this year, which is to say that we’ve gone into Grand Teton National Park instead of just passing by it. We’ve gone into Yellowstone and actually stopped at places such as Old Faithful, rather than passing by or not even going to that part of the park. And of course we came over the Beartooth today, which is always a good ride.

It’s a good year to be making a grand tour. Yellowstone is famous for the incredible congestion that is caused by tens of thousands of tourists, stopping en masse every time a wild critter shows its face. You can’t avoid that entirely but apparently the recession has cut tourism quite a bit, so the traffic was definitely bearable.

On the other hand, your economic stimulation dollars are hard at work in the national parks, and we got stuck in construction delays again and again. So, six of one, half dozen of the other. But a great place to ride.

Coming over the Beartooth was terrific, despite the gravel spots and the delays. Being from Colorado, we are jaded with elk and buffalo and those sorts of animals but even we stopped to see bears at a couple spots. Coming down from the Beartooth there was one just off the road, up the hill, and he was flipping over rocks to find food underneath. One rock he kicked aside tumbled down the hill right into the road in front of me. Not a danger, as I was stopped at the time, but very interesting nevertheless.

And then there was the very interesting scene we encountered in Yellowstone. Somebody pulling a trailer with a big Harley on it ran off the road and crunched everything. The Harley was lying upside down in the shrubbery and the car was bent upward at both ends. Air bags probably kept the occupants from being too badly hurt but the car, bike, and trailer were all totaled. And they were really weird to see in that condition.

So anyway, a couple more days and we’ll be back home. It’s a great summer to be out on the road on a motorcycle.

Recent from National Motorcycle Examiner
The joy of riding without a helmet

Biker Quote for Today

Confused and Prone to Wander

Man, have I got a lot of work ahead of me. If you have gone through the Passes and Canyons, Motorcycle Touring in Colorado website thoroughly you know that even three years in it is still weak in information on some roads. The simple fact is that although I’ve been all over this state numerous times, there were some places I had not been back to since I started the website. Therefore, although I could show a map and talk a little about the route, I did not have the photos and other information I routinely collect and post.

Well, that’s about to change. The OFMC trip last week could not have been better tailored to meet my needs if I had planned the route myself with that in mind–which I did not do. I had made a list some time ago of 27 places I needed to get to. On this trip I hit 15 of those spots. It’s going to take time to work through it all but in the next few weeks you can expect to see improvements on a lot of pages, including:

• Colorado 92 from Hotchkiss to the Blue Mesa Reservoir
• Colorado 65 across Grand Mesa
• McClure Pass
• Monarch Pass
• Red Mountain Pass
• Slumgullion and Spring Creek Passes
• Wolf Creek Pass

And more. Here’s a map showing our route. What a great ride we had.

Biker Quote for Today

The ride IS the destination.

What do you do when the name of your motorcycle club no longer really fits, but you’ve got the coolest logo around and you are not about to jettison that? I mean, check this out:

Old Farts Motorcycle Club was always tongue in cheek, and in the beginning we were nowhere near old. Heck, I was still in my 30s. The original three of us are all quite a bit older now, and we’ve been joined by several other guys our age, but we’ve also been joined by sons and their friends. They’ve only borne the OFMC title grudgingly.

On this year’s trip the discussion began in earnest. We had some good proposals. For the sons it was proposed that OFMC could mean “Our Fathers’ Motorcycle Club.” For the friends it could be “Our Friends’ Motorcycle Club.” And finally, to cover everyone, it could be “Our Fuckin’ Motorcycle Club.”

So there was no decision one way or the other. More than anything, I guess the idea is going to be that the name is “OFMC,” and you can let those initials represent whatever you want. Everyone is happy and we still have our killer logo. Is this a great country or what?!

The Old Farts Motorcycle Club headed southwest this year, to the land of blazing heat. Descending into Laughlin, NV, we could feel the heat rising until it felt, in the most literal sense possible, like a sauna. Probably about 110 degrees.

We rode about 1,600 miles this time, and learned a number of interesting, useful things. For one, you can’t get a cold brew anywhere on the Navajo reservation. We pulled into Tuba City, AZ, hot and dusty and ready for a swimming pool and/or a cold beer and found that neither was available. No pool was actually surprising considering we were at the Quality Inn. The redeeming factor was that the people working at the Quality Inn were absolutely the nicest, more friendly, most helpful folks you’ll ever meet. Plus, it was a gorgeous evening to sit out on the lawn and enjoy the perfect, cool night.

There were nine of us this year and that’s really too many. That many guys can’t just roll into town and expect to find room at the inn. And having reservations for the whole trip removes the spontaneity that has so often led to the best part of our trips.

So what do you do? You can’t tell three or four guys they’re disinvited next year. No, the only approach I can see that makes sense is to take more trips and you just assume that some guys will be on one trip but not another. With any luck, this will be a situation where too much of a good thing is resolved by having even more of a good thing.

It’s hard to believe, but we’re leaving on our annual bike trip in less than three weeks, June 15. This is kind of early for us, but we’re going south, to Arizona and New Mexico and Nevada, so it will be warm. There will be nine of us this year in this Old Farts Motorcycle Club excursion.

We’re going to ride the Unaweep Highway, which several of us have been on, but other haven’t, and it’s a good one. Then we’ll head on down through the Monument Valley and on to Fraser, AZ. In case you’ve never been to Fraser, let me tell you about it. It’s an old mining town not far from Sedona, and it sits up on the side of a mountain so steep that the road zig-zags back and forth through town. The front of a building faces the street in one direction and the same street passes by on the back side of the building. There’s no such thing as a cross-street.

From there we’ll head on to Laughlin, NV, where we’ve been a couple times before. It’s a lot like Las Vegas was before it got huge, and it’s on a river just down from a dam and reservoir. Nice place. Then we’ll work our way on home again, spending a couple days in places in Colorado that we’ve passed through but never stopped at.

Less than three weeks! Hot dang!