observations

This turned out to be an inter­est­ing day for a vari­ety of rea­sons, not the least of which was the park­ing and loops sit­u­a­tion. There was appar­ently some last minute con­fu­sion between the club and the land man­agers about where we were sup­posed to park, and as a result, we wound up park­ing near the west­ern entrance to Walker Val­ley, and rid­ing a loop of sec­tions that were all at higher ele­va­tions. I mis­un­der­stood the instruc­tions in the flyer, which indi­cated that rid­ers needed to be pre­pared to carry an extra liter of fuel ( thought it said ‘after­noon’ rid­ers), and so arrived with no con­ve­nient way of car­ry­ing fuel. Any­way, got signed up, for Senior Inter­me­di­ate, as I hadn’t been on a dirt bike of any kind for over 6 weeks and Regional Points events are known for being pretty tough. That was when they let me know that morn­ing rid­ers too, need to carry extra fuel!

did a lit­tle warm­ing up, deter­mined that i had for­got to let any air out the back tire after air­ing it up to put it on the rack. Yep, 7 PSI is way too much! i let it down to my nor­mal 3–1/4 or so; ah, much bet­ter trac­tion and bite! Then i went back to the truck to fig­ure out how i was going to deal with this fuel issue, as i have no aux tank my bike, and i had no fuel bot­tle. ah, well, here’s a big plas­tic sack, i’ll just wrap my 1 gal jug in that and carry it in the day pack. With that prob­lem solved, I com­pletely for­got about car­ry­ing any extra water or snacks in my day pack, and headed out with­out either. The loop was what i call a ‘lol­lipop’ loop: ride a longish trail ride to the start of the sec­tions, ride all 10 sec­tions 3 times, and then ride the longish trail back to the pits. This means you get back to wher­ever you dumped the day­pack every loop, but not back to your vehi­cle. It wasn’t until the end of the first loop that I real­ized the I was going to run out of water, and had no snacks or other nutri­tion what­so­ever. argh.

Oh well, sec­tion 1 was a pretty easy tra­verse of a pile of sharp rocks, but I got through OK, so that’s a good start. In gen­eral, I rode pretty well, but I had some incon­sis­tent moments: stalled the bike in one sec­tion, a really stu­pid mis­take, and didn’t plan an ade­quate safety mar­gin into my line in another sec­tion the 3rd time through, and wound up sky­div­ing off of a 10-foot high rock into the bushes below. I rolled to a stop, picked the bike up, and when asked if the bike was OK (yes, they asked if I was OK first), replied, ‘of course: it’s a Sherco, you can’t hurt these things!” Got through three loops with lit­tle drama, picked my pack up from sec­tion 1, and headed back down the moun­tain. Got back to the pits, and drank about a liter of water, right then. had lunch, and went to col­lect my punch for my after­noon observ­ing assign­ment, I had sec­tion 3. About 1pm, I head back up the moun­tain, find sec­tion 3, and am then informed that there’s been a switch, I’m to observe sec­tion 4, a bit far­ther up the hill. Nor­mally, this would be a triv­ial change, except that I’m already tired, and seper­at­ing the two is about 1/4 mile of some of the nas­ti­est trail at walker val­ley. wind­ing through the trees, over the roots, and really, seri­ously steep uphill. sign at the bot­tom reads “up, turn, up, up, turn, turn, up, up, up”. ha. you a funny man, Ron! But I climb the moun­tain and find my sec­tion: a really inter­est­ing com­bi­na­tion of sharp turns and a vari­ety of paths, depend­ing on class, over a rock the size of a small cot­tage. The experts in par­tic­u­lar, I thought, had a nasty chal­lenge: a really sharp left u-turn fol­lowed by a rock climb with lit­tle run at the bot­tom, and only about a 6″ wide line. I spot­ted for quite a few folks there dur­ing the day, but had to catch sur­pris­ingly few bikes.

All in all, a very enjoy­able day, great fun to watch folks like Max and WIll do absolutely amaz­ing things with a motor­cy­cle. I can’t wait to head out to Funny Rocks for our next event.

keep those feet up!
black­dog

My rid­ing com­pan­ion for the final two days of my trip was feel­ing under the weather on mon­day, so we got a late start on tues­day. Not many pic­tures here, we came back via the Inter­states. We did get off at one point for a stretch and bath­room break, and dis­cov­ered this amus­ing mural on the ack of a ‘Trad­ing Post’ type gen­eral store:

our faith­ful steeds, in Ellens­burg, after JC had an in-flight dis­agree­ment with a bee. A quick stop to remove the stinger, and treat the sting, and we we’re back under­way.

at just a touch before 6pm on wednes­day, i rolled home. happy, if some­what road weary:

final stats:

26 days
6784.1 miles
mov­ing aver­age speed: 58.8 mph
115:22 hours actu­ally trav­el­ling.
7 of the 26 days were spent not mov­ing: vis­it­ing with friends or attend­ing the World Super­bike Races at Miller Motor­sports Park, in Tooele, Utah.

Spent two entire days sur­rounded by rac­ing machines, rac­ing peo­ple, and rac­ing. I couldn’t take decent pic­tures of the rac­ing (I didn’t have a long enough lens with me), so i tried to take some machin­ery and peo­ple pics. only par­tially successful.

here are some fron saturday:

and here are some from today:

Kinda of a laid back day at the track. We walked around a lot, went on the pit walk, and watched practice.

I did man­age to find the hel­met ser­vice guys and get the vents on my Hel­met fixed: yay Robert!
I also took a few pic­tures (hover over thumb­nails for captions):

Met three of my bud­dies here in SLC, in about 15 min­utes we’re headed out break­fast and thence to Miller Motor­sports Park, for the US Round on the World Super­bike Race series. Pic­tures and com­men­tary for the next three days may be sparse, occur at odd times of day, and may be infused with over­flow excite­ment, and/or beer. you have been warned!

keep on ridin’!
blackdog

Got a slow start this morn­ing, kind of on pur­pose, only have to make a cou­ple hun­dred miles today. spent a few min­utes decid­ing which way around the uinta moun­tains, north­ern route, throug Flam­ing Gorge, or south­ern route. Decided on the Flam­ing Gorge route, it only added 35 miles.
Turns out that was the right choice: it’s is gor­geous going up through the range there:

and they had some of my Biker Scum friends’ favorite crea­tures:

I then pulled a trick that Lara and I call ‘GPS Tour­ing’: ask the GPS for a direct, short­est dis­tance route to some­where. In cities, this gets you routes through inter­est­ing neigh­bor­hoods, in the wilds, it leads to par­tially, once-upon-a-time-paved goat trails like this:

and scenery like this:

A per­fect KTM road, it was awe­some! many smiles/mile on that leg of the jour­ney!
I made two obser­va­tions dur­ing my trav­els that i’ll share today:

The first is about hotel-room cof­fee; nearly every hotel room these days has a lit­tle 4-cup cof­fee maker. and most of them use the same 1 or brands of prepack­aged cof­fee grounds. I *NEED* my cof­fee in the morn­ing, espe­cially when I’m on the road, so i’ve been mak­ing cof­fee in hotel rooms for about 3 weeks now. I can tell you this: the water makes the dif­fer­ence. Even if the hotel buys high qual­ity cof­fee, if the have crap tap water, the cof­fee will only be mediocre. If the place has good-tasting tap water, the cof­fee will be accept­able, no mater what cof­fee they buy. I learned to make sure i had at least 4 cups of bot­tled water left in my hydra­tion pack when i checked in, that way i could make good coffee.

The other obser­va­tion is about restroom air hand dry­ers. Most pub­lic restrooms that you run into on the road have those awful warm-air hand dry­ers. They suck, we all know that. In one restroom I used, I think in New Mex­ico, I ran into a device called a Dyson Air-Blade. This is an air-hand dryer that really works. Flash tells me that they are every­where in Japan, and it’s just because were a coun­try of idiots that we still have the lame ‘World Dryer’ brand that we have. Hope­fully, these things will take over the mar­ket, and one more source of petty incon­ve­nience will be removed from our trav­el­ling lives.

Tomor­row, day 1 World Super­bike Rac­ing from Miller Motor­sports Park!

keep the rub­ber side down,
blackdog

Spent Wednes­day not trav­el­ling. Hung around with Flash. First task, after cof­fee of course, was to check the bal­ance on the wheels on the Giraffe. Took us about 45 min­utes; front one needed 1.5 ounces, the back was per­fect. Re-installed them, fig­ured out a fix to the bro­ken radar detec­tor mount, and we’re done in the garage. I com­man­deer their washer/dryer and do my laun­dry. Then flash and I head out to run errands and see some spe­cial parts of Ft. Collins.

Flash finds me a credit union, and then we hit JAX: a com­bi­na­tion sur­plus store and REI-level out­door store. I look for a wind­breaker to make sure I will be warm enough in SLC. They have a cou­ple, but they are REI-level priced: $80 and up! We pon­der run­ning to a real REI, then flash says, ‘hey, there’s another JAX in town, a farm and ranch store’ so we head out. Another huge store, com­bi­na­tion west­ern wear, ranch sup­ply, and feed store. Wow. But I find a nice Colum­bia wind­breaker, on sale for $30. Cheap bas­tard for the win! Times 2: flash also found a new straw hat ($7.95):

Then we head to some­place called the Swetsville Zoo. 30 years of fan­ci­ful ani­mals and vehi­cles, all cre­ated out of dis­carded auto and motor­cy­cle parts. Its won­der­ful. I’ll be putting up an entire photo gallery as soon as I’ve had time to sort them all! Then back to Fort Collins Brew­ing to fill up one of Flash’s growlers (it’s ½ price growler day!). and I of course sam­ple a few more fine brews. I could get used to this town.

Thurs­day was schizoid day; the first ½ was beau­ti­ful. From Fort Collins to Steam­boat Springs. Rist Canyon, Poudre canyon, CO-14… won­der­ful roads, won­der­ful riding.

The sec­ond ½ of the day was dif­fi­cult: high alti­tude rolling ter­rain, and vis­cious wind. At one point I was climb­ing a steep pitch at 6800ft ele­va­tion, into a 45mph head­wind (yeah, I stopped, pulled out my geek weather gizmo, and mea­sured it!) and the best the Giraffe could man­age was 76mph. wow, I never expected that! Still as soon as I got back down to 5000 feet or so, the poor bike seemed to get it’s wind back. But it was a long cou­ple of hours fight­ing to keep the bike on the road. Finally made it Utah, and motored up to Dinosaur National Mon­u­ment. Really inter­est­ing place, it’d be cool to have time to hike around the entire thing.

One of the cool things to do with a GPS is to get to some out-of-the way place, and then ask for a ‘short­est dis­tance’ route some­where. This tac­tic lead me from Dinosaur NM to Ver­nal via this beau­ti­ful lit­tle valley.

Final win of the day: on the way into Ver­nal UT, I spotty ‘The Quarry’: steak­house and brew­pub: yay dinner!

Pick­ing up where I left off, imme­di­ately after the thun­der­storm line blew through North Platte, there was a dra­matic change. The air was 20 degrees cooler, the humid­ity dropped by about 35 points, and there was this awe­some color and tex­ture to the sky.

Tues­day dawns clear, beau­ti­ful, and actu­ally chilly, for the first time in days. I haven’t really been chilly since I left Lub­bock, TX. I head west on I-80, actu­ally using the grip heaters and jacket liner. Here is a pic of my cock­pit:

GPS on the top, a Garmin Street­pi­lot 2720, old but it get’s the job done. Below that is the KTM dash. The left-hand knob is the heat con­trol for my jacket liner (plus pants liner if its really cold). The LED next to it flashes to tell me how far i’ve got the heat turned up. The KTM dig­i­tal speedo and ODO is next. It has two trip meters, I use #1 to track miles on the cur­rent tank, and #2 to track total miles for the day. I use the trip com­puter in the GPS to track total miles for the trip. The tachome­ter is obvi­ous, the LED above it is a volt­age mon­i­tor: green is good, yel­low and red means that volt­age is drop­ping. So far, I’ve not had an issue with alter­na­tor capac­ity. The right-hand knob and LED is a sim­i­lar con­trol to the one on the left, but this one con­trols the heated grips. And on top of my tankbag, a paper map of the state-of-the-day. That give me a way of see­ing an overview in addi­tion the detail the GPS gives me. It works out pretty well.

I cut north­west up to Scotts­bluff, NE to visit my par­ents gravesites and to have lunch with my favorite uncle, Mike. I get to town and ring him up. Well, it turn out that the same storm front had been through the pan­han­dle of Nebraska the day before, only it had dropped golf ball to baseball-sized hail. My uncle is in the roof­ing busi­ness, so he was way busy, and 45 miles south, in Kim­ball. So I drive out to the ceme­tery, won­der­ing as I approach the gate, how hard it will be to find the grave sites. But my mind has a pic­ture of the site, and I know which way they face, and I ride right to them. They are well kept and just as I remem­ber. A few min­utes reflec­tion on every­thing they gave me and did for me seemed appro­pri­ate; dad taught me the value of hard work and integrity, and mom taught me the value of belief in your­self and care­ful plan­ning. I miss them. But I leave think­ing that they’d both be pretty happy with the son they raised.

I blast down the road to Kim­ball, and find my uncle walk­ing around on top of the town bak­ery. We have lunch and a nice chat. I gotta keep in bet­ter touch with him. Res­o­lu­tion #625!

From there, it was an unevent­ful cou­ple of hours to Fort Collins, to visit Flash and Beth. I get to the address in the GPS, and have a sud­den mem­ory prob­lem: I remem­bered the address as 1516, but the GPS is pro­grammed for 1416. But at 1416, I run out of road. I slowly ride around the cor­ner, think­ing the patio on the place looks famil­iar, then I see an old white Alfa Romeo in the dri­ve­way: yep that’s the place! (Beth is a rabid Ital­ian car and motor­cy­cle fanan­tic). There’s ducati’s (and cagi­vas and guzzis and.…) in that there garage.

Quick unload, change clothes, and I help myself to a beer from the beer fridge (as instructed: “there, now you know where it is, get yer own damn beers” – flash), a Fat Tire ale, from New Bel­gium brew­ery. Flash com­ments that I chose well. I say that Fat Tire and 1554 are sta­ples of our beer inven­tory at home. He says ‘you wanna go visit the brew­ery’. Sure, I say. So we go off on a short brew­ery tour. I for­got my cam­era, so here are a cou­ple of cell phone shots that flash kindly took.

You will notice that i’m hold­ing the growler with both hands. There’s two rea­sons for that; it’s really good beer, and there­fore impor­tant, and i’ve been sam­pling beers with some amount of aban­don and am now some­what drunk. That also explains (at least partly) the stu­pid grin.

Sun­day was a day to see fam­ily, and take care of an errand. Got up at a rea­son­able hour and sailed up I-35 to Des Moines. First stop, the T-mobile store in West Val­ley Mall to get a replace­ment for my dead Cliq XT, and give them back their oh-so-stylish lime green Motorola loaner phone. A few min­utes wait­ing for an ‘asso­ciate’ and I start into my spiel: bro­ken phone, cust. Svc agreed to sell me a stop­gap phone at full dis­count, notes are in the account, but Austin couldn’t do it due to an area-wide pol­icy: no price over­rides. Period. I believe the Austin-area sales man­ager for T-mobile is an idjit. Any­way, twenty min­utes of quizzi­cal looks from ‘Stacy’ and I had my new phone. Pow­ered it up, and gave a half-hearted try to get though the silly Moto­blur setup. It didn’t work, and I resolved to take care of it after I got to Emmy’s place out in Panora.
Short ride to the west, and I arrive. Out of the rid­ing gear, take a few pics, and try to get the phone work­ing. Oh Crap: no t-mobile out here. After some vis­it­ing with var­i­ous fam­ily, and a nice din­ner, I got back on the bike and rode 30 miles back towards Des Moines, got on the T-mobile net, and got the phone work­ing. Sheesh. A non-bypassable exter­nal depen­dency to get a phone work­ing is a really crappy user expe­ri­ence. Oh well.
While hang­ing around in Panora, I got a look at my brother Shawn’s lat­est project:

It’s a ’55 caddy hearse chas­sis with a cus­tom camper built on the back. It’s been sit­ting in a pas­ture for the last 20 years. Shawn bought it cheap and plans on putting it back in run­ning and camp­ing shape. Includ­ing restor­ing and redo­ing the flame paint job. Awesome!

Started look­ing at weather for­casts for Mon­day: hmmmm, whad­dya mean tor­nado watches through most of cen­tral Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dako­tas?!. Guess I’ll get up early and make tracks west before the atmos­phere get’s all hot and both­ered.
So Mon­day dawns clear and warm in Des Moines. H head west on 44, tak­ing 44 and 30 all the way to Grand Island. Warm and humid, with the unre­lent­ing south wind, but no rain or thun­der­storms. Some clas­sic rural scenery on the way west:

I pro­ceed on west to North Platte, NE with­out too much inci­dent. By the time I get to a North Platte hotel, the wind is blow­ing 35mph and gust­ing higher. One of the desk clerks looks and me and asks “how’d you get here on a motor­cy­cle, today?” “ at a 40-degree angle”, I mime. We all laugh. But I’m beat, sore arms and hands and lower back.
So I’m sit­ting here in a hotel room, watch­ing thun­der­heads grow out­side, and clouds race by at 50mph. get­ting’ nas­tier by the minute. Hope­fully all this blows over tonight and I don’t have to ride through too much more of it tomor­row. Another evening of excit­ing Weather Chan­nel TV!

Be good, y’all!
blackdog

Got up early this morn­ing, hop­ing to get a few miles under the wheels before the heat became oppres­sive. Which was suc­cess­ful. But, as Ms. Shooz so astutely notes, if it’s not one thing it’s another. In this case, wind: A gusty quar­ter­ing tail­wind, any­where from 15-50mpg, and any­where from straight over my tail­pack to right in my right ear. That lasted from south of Wichita to the south­ern out­skirts of KC. It’s quite tir­ing, con­stantly being on watch for the next wind­break, lest i dive off the right side of the road, or the next cut, lest I wind up doing some 80mph off-reading in the median. Rid­dle me this, bat­man: Under what con­di­tions can a rider be leaned to the right, hold­ing coun­ter­steer­ing pres­sure on the right bar, and in a gen­tle left turn? Yep, it blew that hard. Road and scenery wise, a bit of a bor­ing day, just mov­ing my butt from one loca­tion on the planet to another at this point. Olka­homa and Kansas are really quite pretty this time of year, though. Every­thing is green and lush. And humid. Did I men­tion humid?

As I drew near KC, I noticed a way­point on my GPS. it says ‘Garmin’. What the heck does that mean…. HELLO! It means I am approach­ing the cen­ter of the nav­i­ga­tion toys uni­verse. So I stopped for the oblig­a­tory pic­ture.