Its hard to believe that four days ago I was riding in 100 degree heat. Today was borderline cold, with temps down to the mid 40's, and high winds (predicted to be 40mph). So I have had heat, cold, rain, and wind. The front that I rode through yesterday left some fresh snow on the mountains:
I passed through some pretty country that I hadn't seen before, though. The section of highway 20 leading to Stanley, Idaho was particularly nice as the road travels along the Salmon river canyon. Then when I got to Stanley, there were views of the Sawtooth mountains:
As I got closer to my destination for the day, Lowman, Id, I got higher and got into some clouds and slight drizzle. I don't think I have been below 5000 feet since I entered Yellowstone park three days ago. However, the place where I am staying had a feature that made everything fine:
A little store that sold individual beers and snacks to go with the hot tub.
It's called the Sourdough Lodge, and it ain't fancy:
It also has no cell phone service or WiFi in the room. I am writing this blog from the lodge restaurant.
I may be developing some sort of electrical issues. I have a voltmeter type of device I installed on the bike that shows the battery status. It is a light that shows green when the battery is being charged and then yellow and red when the battery voltage is low or not being charged. Today it would not stay green unless I had a lot of revs. It caused me to shut off my heated vest when I wanted it on. However, this evening I discovered I have at some time switched the high beam on, which adds another bulb and about the same wattage drain as the vest. I'm going to try disconnecting the low beam bulb, which is on all the time and see how it goes. I would really like to have my heated grips and especially the vest since the temps tomorrow morning are supposed to be in the 30's. I can always switch the high beam on temporarily if I want to make sure I am more visible to an oncoming car or one that might pull out in front of me. The battery on the bike is the original, and is almost 7 years old and 98,000 miles, which is far beyond what my experience has been with motorcycle batteries.
This morning I spent three and a half hours in this museum:
Most of the time was spent in the firearms museum, but there are three other parts that I also checked out......western art, native peoples (i.e., Indians), and Bill Cody's life and career.
There are over 1500 firearms displayed on the main floor, and more in the lower floor that I didn't get to. Here is a picture of the entrance:
One of the rifles in this display is the Marlin 39A that I bought when I was 14. It wasn't my first gun, either. Different times, then.
The had a room full of hunting trophies:
And firearm displays consisting of almost every model made by every American gun manufacturer:
These are all Winchester model 94s, except for that one second from right, and I have one of those.
They had some presentation firearms that were given to presidents. Somehow I don't think the current president is going to get one.
And some of the machinery used to make firearms in the early 20th century. There were some huge factories employing thousands of workers:
After I left the museum I went back through Yellowstone, but this time through the middle instead of the northern roads. As I approached the park I could see some really dark clouds ahead, so I stopped to put on my rain gear. Then, just inside the park I camp upon this guy:
I think that's a Griz, but Carolyn says she thinks there aren't any in Yellowstone. At least he didn't pull this trick on me:
As I rode through the park there were some brief thundershowers with intense rain and even some hail. And it got worse. On the way from West Yellowstone to Idaho Falls, which is about 100 miles, it rained almost constantly as I passed through cells of thunderstorms. At one time the wind and rain were so intense I just couldn't ride.....I was afraid I would get blown over or hydroplane. I pulled over to the side of the road and just sat there until it passed and got back to a simple steady rain. By the time I got to Idaho Falls at just after 6pm I had definitely had enough for the day.
But, tomorrow is another day and it is supposed to be dry and relatively cool. More Good Roads ahead!
On my way to Cody I went through the northern tip of Yellowstone park in order to ride the Beartooth highway. I had done this road several years ago and the ride was somewhat spoiled by road construction over a large portion of the road. I figured this time it should be perfect with all that new pavement.......wrong again! They were still doing construction and there were several delays, one right after the other. But I managed to pass most of the traffic after the last delay and had a good ride with nobody in front of me all the way into Red Lodge. I took a few pictures today but the only one worth showing was the obligatory Bison shot. I have seen buffalo every time I have been in Yellowstone but never so many as this time. I think the northern area of the park is most favorable for them as it is less forested:
Of course, every place there were bison visible from the road, everybody had to stop, and if I hadn't been on a motorcycle I wouldn't have been able to get past. I only stopped to take this picture because the critters were crossing the road in front of me and I didn't want to piss them off and get gored by an angry momma buffalo.
So now I am in Cody and planning on visiting the Western Museum tomorrow.
The main reason for ever staying in Lewiston is the Old Spiral Highway. I'm always saying this road or that road is my favorite, but I really mean it when I say the Old Spiral Highway is the best motorcycle road ever! It has all the ingredients; no traffic, good pavement, tons of curves, and good sight lines around the corners. Check out this pic I took of my Zumo display:
That is a picture of only a small part of the highway.
After the Spiral Highway I took highway 12 over Lolo pass and then into Missoula. There is a lot of raving about this road in motorcycle websites. One sign that people often post is one that says "curves next 99 miles". I saw that sign and I took this picture of another one:
However, in my opinion it is overrated. There are lots of gentle, sweeping curves, but mainly just enough to keep it interesting and not very challenging. The scenery, though, is really nice, as the road follows the Clearwater river for much of the way. It looks like this:
When I got to Missoula I had a short visit with my nephew's daughter (grand niece?) Emily. Emily and her fiancé are just graduated from the University in Missoula and are starting full time jobs. They first spent a fascinating summer backpacking in Colorado, Utah, and California. They kept a blog of their adventures and I recommend it to anyone who thinks blogs are just boring like this one. They hiked a bunch of peaks above 14,000 ft in Colorado and did a 7 day tour of the John Muir trail in California. The pictures alone are worth the visit. Aaron is a really, really good photographer. Anyway, the blog is RambleontoSingMySong.wordpress.com. It is fun to hear from these two young, fit, bright people in the prime of their lives. Here is a pic of them in front of their new digs:
And here is one Aaron took of the three of us:
I believe Emily was named after my mother. Mom would be very proud of her.
After leaving Missoula, I took some back roads over to Helena where I am staying tonight. It was Montana Big Sky country:
What it also was, was pretty unpopulated country and I damn near ran out of gas. I had been running at 80 to 85 mph (I was running late due to the visit and losing an hour from the time change to mountain time) and my low fuel light came on way earlier than normal. By the time I got gas I had a half gallon left in the tank.
Another good ride today, with much more pleasant temperatures......and a road beyond being a Good Road, the Old Spiral Highway is a Great Road.
I like to do at least one long road ride each summer, and my excuse for the one I started today is to see the Buffalo Bill Western Museum in Cody Wyoming. Of course, I don't go straight there, but instead ride all the Good Roads that I can get to on the way. Big Mike and I had planned this ride together, but his chronic back problems caused him to need to cancel. Hang in there Mike, we still have plenty of time.
The plan was to leave on Monday, 16 September, but the forecast for Western Washington was for a rainy week, starting Sunday, so I decided to leave on Saturday the 14th. I just bought all new leathers after Carolyn told me my jacket was looking really tacky and my pants have gone three years without washing. Check my new gear, or "kit" as the Brits say.
I really like the way everything fits, especially the jacket, and the jacket turned out to be perfect for the first day of the ride because it was HOT. Tonight I am staying in Clarkston, Washington at the Idaho state line, and it was predicted to be 96 degrees.......wrong! It was 100! I had to stop a couple of times to get a cold drink and cool off in some air conditioning. My new jacket saved me because it has vented leather in the chest and back and I could feel it drafting air through. Still, when the ambient air temp is greater than body temp, there is not a lot of cooling from that. The next test will be when it is cold. Will the removable liner keep the cold air from getting to me? I have a heated vest if all else fails.
This first day also reinforced my desire to not ride on weekends......there was a lot more traffic, and it got particularly bad on hwy 12 between Packwood and Naches. First, they were letting the water out of Rimrock reservoir in preparation for the winter rains and snow, and this causes huge rapids on the river below the dam; perfect for rafting I guess, because there were hundreds of people rafting the river. All these people needed transportation from the take-out point back to the put-in point, so there were lots of buses towing rafts up the hill and pulling empty trailers back down the hill. This whole mess was compounded by road re-surfacing in two places that caused massive delays. The consequence of all this was that I didn't get halfway through my day's route until about 1 pm. Here is a pic of the typical waiting line:
I was waiting a little ways back in order to stay in the shade. I tried to get some pictures of the rafters but only got this one:
Seems like I've done a lot of complaining, but actually it was a nice ride and I enjoyed many parts of it. I love to ride through the forests of the Cascade mountains, and I also got to see some new territory between Yakima and the Idaho line. Lots of agriculture going on there, including hops, corn, apples and grapes. Here is the obligatory pic of Mt Rainer:
Today was 390 miles. The bike ran great in the hot temps. The only equipment problem I have is that the Garmin Zumo is not talking to my Senna SMH10 headset, so I don't get voice prompts. It just means I have to pay more attention to the screen for warning of upcoming turns. I recently downloaded new updated maps for the Zumo, and it hasn't worked well since. Time to call Garmin when I get home.
Daughter Jenny has expressed some interest in learning to ride and getting her own bike. During a recent visit by her and the grand-kids we got a chance to give her a taste of what it's like to ride. I don't have a motorcycle that is really her size to learn on, but the kid's XR 70 is easy to ride (no clutch), and pretty un-intimidating. First some basic instructions:
Then she is on her way:
She likes it!
Then a couple of days later I got a chance to introduce her to road riding, as a passenger. We rode the street bike up to Mt St Helens while Carolyn took the kids in the van. Jen and I got a head start because we took all the back roads:
I thought that by the time we got up to the Johnston Ridge visitor center she would have had enough and would opt to ride back in the van, but no, she wanted to ride back too. Here we are getting ready to leave the parking lot::
It was riding at it's best: good weather, Good Roads, and a safe ride. The helmet intercom didn't work for awhile and it made me realize how much it helps to make rider and passenger feel less isolated from one another. Once it started working we yakked away.
The next step for Jen is to take the Motorcycle Safety Foundation Basic Rider Course, which is taught quite often in her home town of San Francisco.
To recap, the WBDR is a mostly off road tour of Washington from the Oregon state line to the Canadian border. It goes generally through national forests and state lands at high elevations. A good map of the route can be seen at this website: http://www.backcountrydiscoveryroutes.com/WABDR. It is promoted as a six day ride, but I knew that by traveling light on an off-road oriented bike and staying in motels, it could be done in four days.
I have been obsessed with finishing this ride. I also have felt bad about skipping one of the so-called "difficult" sections on my ride last year, when I was riding by myself and was hot, tired, and out of water before I got to the section. I found a riding partner this summer who I knew was an excellent rider, who also wanted to do the ride, so we made plans to do it. He had not done any of the route, so he wanted to start from the beginning and do the whole thing.
Since I have already described the first day in the post mentioned above, I won't spend too much time on that part. However, the area covered in the first day's ride has become very familiar to me because I often take day rides over there and have been exploring and finding more good roads. I included some of these roads in modifying the official route, and we also started from our houses instead of the official start in Stevenson, so that the first day to Packwood was 210 miles instead of the official distance of 110 miles or so.
Here is a pic of me getting ready to leave......all clean and spiffy:
We had several fortunate things happen on this trip, and one of them which benefited us the whole way was that it had been raining across central and western Washington in the week before we left, and that made for a pretty dust-free ride for the following rider. Here is a short video of a part of the first day's ride that shows the mud puddles had plenty of water:
So, the first day was pretty uneventful, but tiring to my riding partner who was on a KTM which have notoriously hard seats, so it was a long day for him. Here is a picture of him, by the way. Jim is 75 years old, so at 72, I may still have some riding time left:
Jim McCllelan
Notice the DIY hand guards made from bleach bottles.......an $8000 motorcycle with redneck accessories.
The second day out of Packwood started poorly. We had a long road ride to the start of the dirt section, but shortly after the first graded road we began a section of really gnarly jeep trails that seemed to have many optional paths to get around bogs and ruts. It was in this section that Jim apparently took one option while I took another, and we got separated. I ended up following a marked trail that may have been a snowmobile trail as there were few tracks and I was sometimes riding through tall grass and mud. However, I could see on my GPS that the planned route was just off to the side a little ways and I felt I would soon merge back onto it. When I did, though, Jim was nowhere to be seen. I assumed, since I was going so slow through the bogs, that he was ahead of me. I kept going and kept going and began to wonder if somehow he was behind me, but had no way to know for sure. I stopped for awhile but worried that if he was ahead of me we would be getting even more separated. Eventually I got to the first section marked "difficult" on the WBDR map. It was a loose, rocky uphill that I had done last year and this time it seemed easier. I was riding a long time by myself and approaching the second difficult section which I knew was worse and was the one I bypassed last year. I stopped at a section of paved road and spent some more time waiting and also called Jim's wife to see if he had checked in with her, but he had not. Then, just before the hardest part, Jim caught up with me. Turns out, he had waited for me when we first separated, and he was behind me the whole time. He had met a guy in a truck who had seen me so he knew he had to hustle and catch up. We ended up riding the difficult section together, which was a big relief for me. It turned out to be not so bad and I made it with no problems. I guess the reputation of the section is based on the experiences of less skilled riders or riders on bigger adventure style bikes with camping gear. My little KLX 250 is perfect for that kind of riding, though.
BUT, after getting by the hard stuff I was storming along heading into Ellensberg when I hit a rock I didn't see at high speed and got a pinch flat in the rear tire. I should have stopped and patched it, but Jim was ahead of me and he had a can of flat fix that he swore would fix any flat. By trying to continue on, I ended up spinning the tire on the rim and ripping the valve stem out of the tube. The bike became un-rideable. I have ridden on flat tires on dirt bike before, but this was much worse......probably because the tire had more flexible sidewalls, or maybe because I had no rim locks in. Here is a pic of me slewing sideways at 5 mph trying to stay upright:
I was hoping to make it to Ellensberg, but the effort of riding on that flat was wearing me out. And it was hot. I finally asked Jim to ride into Ellensberg to get a new tube while I worked on getting the wheel off. The first problem to solve was finding a way to get the wheel off the ground far enough to remove it. There were no trees or logs around, but I found a couple of rocks and managed to hoist it up enough.
Meanwhile, Jim was having some luck. He got onto pavement and found a guy on a road bike at a stop sign who volunteered to lead him to the local bike shop. Then when he pulled into the shop parking lot, a sheriff deputy pulled in behind him. Jim has faked his street legal-ness by putting the plate from his Suzuki road bike onto the KTM. If the sheriff checked the plate numbers Jim's bike might have gotten confiscated, but the sheriff just wanted to talk about bikes. The next lucky event was that Jim decided maybe he better get gas before heading back out to meet me. He ended up putting 2.3 gallons in his 2.4 gallon tank. Had he run out on the way back to me we would have both been stranded.
When he got back to me, we installed the new tube and aired it up enough with the bicycle pump I carry for me to ride the rest of the way into Ellensberg. It was about 95 degrees there, and this is what i looked like when we checked into the motel:
Hot, tired, and very dehydrated, but after a cold shower and a cold beer and I was good to go. The second day was only 135 miles, but the hardest day.
The third day, which was all new territory to me, was from Ellensberg to Lake Chelan. It consisted of great tracks through lots of burned-out forest, wonderful views and high altitude. It even had a water crossing:
There were still some forest fires around and the air was a little smokey as can be seen in this pic. The backpack carried my after-ride shoes and clothes for four days. Just like last year, I ended up hating that thing because it tended to close up my jacket vents and made it hotter. You might wonder why I wear the jacket if it is so hot. The reason is that the jacket is armored in the elbows and shoulders and normally vents well enough when moving.
Shortly before we got to Lake Chelan we came to another section where there was a bypass route. This one was due to the route being "overgrown but passable". That's a good description. Here is the video:
There was a Lexus 4WD SUV that we passed before this section and they claimed they were going to use it. If so, they probably flattened a lot of the bushes and would make it easier for the next bikes.
We took a break at a scenic stream crossing shortly afterward and maybe you can see the bloody right hand from getting smacked by one of the branches:
And this is Jim's new helmet decor:
This pic shows Lake Chelan in the distance. The day ended with 188 miles:
The last day between Lake Chelan and the Canadian border was cooler with some rain towards the end. One of the interesting places we came to was the town site of the town of Ruby. I'll let the sign tell the story:
Looking up and down main street now, this is the view:
We had some route following difficulties on this day. Jim claimed it went one way, and I thought it went another. The first time it happened, we followed Jim's route and this is what we got into:
There are probably 100 people or more who travel the WBDR during the summer. Does this look like the route they follow? I was ready to turn around, but this is no problem for a rider of Jim's capability, so we went around this deadfall and came to another which had us doing some true off roading:
The next time we disagreed, Jim's route led us to a gated path that looked like it hadn't been used for years and I balked, so we went my way, which was more like the roads we had been on. Then it happened one more time, and this time I admit Jim was right. I would have missed the section of road called "skull and Crossbones", which I had read about on the official route map. The name sounds ominous, but the road was not difficult. It might have been named that for an abandoned ranch we passed which perhaps had had a tragic event.
By this time Jim was spending a lot of time standing on the pegs to avoid that hard KTM seat. In one smooth section with no dust, I got a chance to ride very close to him and take this video:
Eventually, after passing through some rain showers, we got to the Nighthawk border crossing, but of course we didn't actually go into Canada because it is such a hassle getting back nowadays.
The day ended with 187 miles for a total of 720 miles. A great ride on Good Roads, and a memorable adventure.
And how did we get home? Jim had a friend waiting with his van and trailer in nearby Oroville, so thankfully we didn't have to spend two days droning down the highway on dirt bikes.
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