cheerfulEven more adventures! This time was a 3 day weekend down to Montrose, CO for the annual North American V-Strom Gathering thingy. I rode down with a couple of somewhat local friends, Paul and Jeff.
We started out on Thursday afternoon. Jeff left out around 2pm and headed south, Paul headed out of Ogden around 6. It took him nearly 2 hours to make Salt Lake, which including getting a front row seat to seeing a car in front of him go totally sideways. It took us a further 2 hours to get to Spanish Fork… gah!
We arrived in Green River, and headed west on I-70. About 15 miles down the road, there is a turn off just off the shoulder of the interstate. Through a gate and into BLM land, there is a camp ground a few miles down a dirt road. It was a really spectacular place to camp. Truly out in the middle of no where, with no one around for miles and miles. Too bad we had a full moon, the stars would have been amazing.
Friday morning we went just a little further down the road to Black Dragon Canyon:
(click on any image for the full size version)
We stopped part way up the canyon and hiked around a bit.
We came in from the left, the road continues to the right and eventually goes up on top of the rocks.
Petroglyphs are all over this canyon. I found this neat mural under and overhang.
Here’s the black dragon, faded to red:
I kinda liked this guy, which was just to the left of the Black Dragon.
From here, we stopped for breakfast in Green River, and headed south towards Moab. We took a turn off north of Moab down about a 10 mile dirt road that took us across Courthouse Wash and into Arches National Park. This road was spectacular. I was nervous going in, but found myself sad it was over by the end. Really, the vstrom, aired down a bit, has no trouble with a road like this even loaded with gear. At one point, all 3 of us turned off the main road and were riding around the slick rock, what fun! I banged my engine guard a few times on rocks, was glad it was there.
Jeff making a short decent:
A stop at an area that showed off some dinosaur tracks embedded in the rock:
Paul shot down this road, so I had to get Jeff to ‘poise’ for me down this beautiful bit of road:
From here, we went into Moab and had some lunch, and then south to the La Sal cut off, over to Naturita, and on to Ridgway and Montrose.
Dropping out of the mountains and into Paradox Valley, between La Sal and Ridgway:
We arrived at 7:25 to the dinner and found the food was pretty much gone. Hurray! $25 a head for a plate full of dinner rolls. Camped, and then arrived at a game plan for the Saturday ride. I was rather disappointed that they did not offer any maps in our packets nor did they have any huge maps to point out possible routes on. Luckily, I knew the area and was able to lead the trip.
We headed south to Ouray, stopping in Ridgway to see the rafters get underway for the Whitewater Rodeo:
Just out of Ouray, I took the guys up towards Yankee Boy Basin. I’d been up here a few times via Jeep, and I was both really excited to try it on the bike and also a tad bit scared since I knew the road 
We didn’t go up all the way, as we had a big loop to go on and we certainly did not want to be late to our $25 dinner.
At one point, the road is carved into the side of the cliff.
Here’s a panoramic shot that should help to establish the scale here. Look for Paul coming down the road, Jeff taking photos on the side, and, for bonus points, the Subaru up the road that managed to lose a tire off the edge and was stuck:
Of course it was raining on us. It has rained on me every time I have been up this road, so…
We stopped at the Ouray overlook and took a few shots:
We stopped in Silverton and had a brew and a burger. Found this Snowmobile on the way out, looks like it probably still even runs!
We stopped up on top of Molas Pass and took a few shots:
360 degree panoramic from the top of the pass, it’s a big one:
We went towards Durango, but… we’d spent too much time playing in the dirt to do the whole Teluride loop, so we turned around and headed north. Unfortunately, it was a tad too wet on the 10mph curves just outside of Ouray to really get into the hard, but still a great ride, despite Jeff getting stuck behind slow cars and us losing him
This is where my photos end, although I think I have a few on my little camera I have not downloaded yet.
Another night of camping with a guy named Mike from California, who I think we managed to not scar too bad with our campground antics, on Saturday night.
Sunday, the initial plan was to ride up Black Canyon on the way out, but… we ended up deciding to not spent the $11 or whatever to go see it and just bombed on down the road to home. I don’t know what it was about today, but it was a hot, long ride. I was happy to be home.
55,000 miles on the bike now. Paul wants to spend 2-3 weeks next summer and ride Alaska, and I find myself getting excited about the idea. Stay tuned for more adventures.
Here’s a link to the whole gallery for these and additional photos
… and the bike purrs to life, snicks into gear, and leaps away from the parking spot.
I pull onto the interstate from Wendover, NV, and rip the throttle open. The inline 4 of the stolen bike screams as it punishes the pavement and zips me up to clearly illegal speeds. The wide open expanse of the Bonneville Salt Flats, vaugely glowing white at 1 in the morning, remains clearly indifferent to my defiance of the law.
I shoot past car and truck alike, heading deeper into the empty darkness of salt and pavement. The wind roars in my helmet, and I can just barely hear though it and my ear plugs as my helmet speakers start pounding out Zombie-Zombie’s ‘Driving this road until death takes me’.
The unplanned and sudden death of scores of moths leave tiny carcasses that flitter to the ground in my wake of noise and …
Was it fiction or fact?
Yesterday, I was going to die. It was all laid out in front of me. It was certain. No limping home from this one, at least that’s what my brain told me. Here’s the setup:
I got on the interstate headed south the 22.5 miles to work. Construction zone ahead with speed limit 55, but I had a mile or so, so I blip it up to 75, and merge over to the left lane (3 lanes here). Mental map of traffic says there is a car to my right, two more and a truck to the far right, and a white car just in front, going slightly faster than me. I see brake lights ahead, where the construction starts, so I left off a bit, now I am doing about 60-65. My attention comes back to the car in front of me, which, apparently, had come to a complete stop less than 1/8 of a mile in front of me. It seems there was a car just in front of it that had stopped under an overpass just inside of a lane shift in the construction zone.
Panic. I pull on hard front brakes, shifting down, little rear brakes, front tire barking. White car is getting close, and I am going to hit them. There is no two bones about it, I can’t get rid of my speed fast enough to stop. I am going to smack right into the white car and there is nothing to be done about it. My brain suddenly presents two options to me:
1) Continue braking, hit rear of car, “Oh God, Here We Go”
2) Swerve to the right, possibly side wipe traffic to right
Option 2 sounded like less pain, so… I let up on the brakes a tad, swerved to the right, waiting for the contact with the traffic… that never came. I flew past the stopped traffic with a foot or two to spare, and I check my right shoulder: no cars there. I’m clear.
I arrived to work (after two more minor incidents) slightly shaken, but all in all, it’s not going to convince me to stop riding.
All in all, every day is more experience. 30,000+ miles of riding for me in all weather conditions and traffic and I still learn new things every day.
After months of planning, and despite last minute drama, I managed to break away for a week and enjoy Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons for a week with some college friends. It would doubly nice as it turned out to be far cheaper than I had planned on. Go case of ramen and tent camping!
The temperatures were just right, and I think we managed to get in just before the big summer rush. Nevertheless, there were a number of people there.
I think we managed to see almost every animal the park hosts, from midnight wolves crossing the road, to elk, deer, moose, bison, and black and grizzly bears. I managed to get a few photos of critters, but I think this one is my favorite:
It’s good to be back home, but I wouldn’t mind just going back to Wyoming for a few more weeks!
You can find more pictures, both from my camera and my friend’s cameras (as they upload them), here.
So, I’ve been busy, and meaning to update, but I just haven’t had the time. As such, I thought it was high time to post a wrap up of randomness from the last, oh… month or so. So, prepare yourself for a Mel-like post of epic proportions.
Near the end of April, the UTA (Utah Transit Authority) opened their new light rail system called the Front Runner, a nod towards the fact that it runs parallel to the Wasatch Front, and, I’m guessing, also prompted by the ‘Rail Runner’ down in NM that opened more than a year in advance. I had been watching test trains run up and down the rails on the side of the interstate during my commutes, and my interest was growing about the whole thing. I discovered that they were having ‘free’ rides on the train for the first week of service, so I decided about the day before it opened that I wanted in on that. I really like trains, you see. Amanda and I trudged down to the local station. The line was out to the parking lot, and it took us about an hour or so to make it to the platform, and finally on the train. It was standing room only, but the ride to Salt Lake was fairly short. We took a free bus from the main station in Salt Lake down to the outdoor mall thingy nearby. Amanda, who was totally nonplussed about waiting that long in line for a train, and who had been making fun of Utahan’s comments while in line, was amazed by the bus. Apparently, she was not used to public transit buses with seat cushions and no trash/graffiti. We had some food, watched a movie, and arrived back at the train station around 11pm. This time around, the train was nearly empty and we managed a seat upstairs. Amanda proceeded to leave the first bit of trash on the train, which was the ad section from the paper she was reading, and I surfed the net on my phone via the free wifi service on board the train. All in all, it is a nice service. I plan to ride my bicycle over to the station and ride it into work off and on.
Almost a month ago, I went with a group of local V-Strom riders out on the Pony Express route. Yes, that Pony Express. There is a leg from the middle of Utah over to Nevada that is still dirt road. Still utterly desolate. It was really amazing to ride 145 miles of dirt in the West Utah Desert and know that it had not been altered much since the days of the actual Pony Express. I’ll have a more in-depth write up of this once I get the pictures off the camera. It was a great day, with about 8 of us out there, flying down dirt roads at 60 MPH on the motorcycles. It really helped me get used to dirt and get over any remaining dirt road fears I had had on the bike. My tip of the day: air down to about 20PSI front and back. It makes dirt roads feel like highways.
Weekend before last was the Northwest Caving Association’s 2008 regional. It was held in central Idaho, near American Falls, out on the Great Rift in the middle of the Wapi lava flow. I debated going for about a week or two. I was going to take the motorcycle, but then I wasn’t going to go, but then I was, and ultimately, I took the pickup. The drive up there was great. I had never been in that part of the country before and I rather enjoyed the scenery. I arrived early Saturday morning, just in time to learn I had missed the trip signups for most of the actual caving for the day. But, there was a couple headed down the lava flow a ways to hike to some ‘kipuka’ areas. This means an island of the original land that the lava did not flow over. I was game, and soon, I was in the back of a Toyota heading down dirt roads. We met up with a woman with a dog and an older guy with two dogs, and headed off. I found the lava flow to be ‘soft’, as it seemed more weathered, and much more lichen growing on it than I was used to from NM. I still have scars on my boots from hiking the Valley of Fires lava near Carizozo, NM. The other folks commented on how rough the lava here was, and I just smirked thinking of my old stomping grounds in NM. We hiked about 4 miles total, and explored a couple of holes and two kipukas. Nothing major was found, but it was interesting.
Back at camp, I had dinner with the group, and enjoyed talking to the cavers for a while after. I knew no one here, except sort of from a grotto meeting or two down in Utah. But, I could still pick out the same sort of folks I knew from back home. It is kind of funny, the different personalities that crop up in the same sort of event, ya know? I ended up going to bed around 9, as I was dead tired, and slept like a rock for the night in my new tent that Amanda bought me for my birthday. Around 9ish, I lurched out of the tent and over to the signup sheets for Sunday. On the way, a guy I had met the night before who was kind of from my new grotto in Utah stopped me. He said, ‘Me and this guy, Brian, are going into Creons after dinner. You want to come?’ I thought for a moment. ‘Sure, why not?’ Heck, I knew nothing of this cave, but I figured I would find out over the course of the day. I managed to get in on a trip into Crystal Ice Cave, which was just a stone’s throw from the camping area. I was the random guy in a group of 6 guys from Seattle. These guys reminded me a lot of the old, original NMT caving club, so I had no trouble blending in, as it were. They made sure I had rope experience, and we headed to the hole.
Crystal Ice Cave, like a lot of the caves in this area, is located right on the Great Rift, which is a crack in the earth that runs almost north-south for many miles. From this crack, from time to time, lava bubbles out in flows, or spits out in cinder cones. This happens about every 2000 years. The last time it happened was about 2000 years ago, so it is apparently due up. When the lava retreats back into the earth, it leaves behind this large crack, and it is in this crack where the caves in this region are. Crystal Ice Cave is within a sizeable lava vent, and gets its name from the fact that it contains ice year round. Back in the 70′s or so, someone actually blasted a tunnel down into the cave, installed windows to trap the cold air, and offered commercial tours of the cave. This was shut down in the early 90′s, as (I assume) interest waned and the ice was starting to melt due to all the warm air the new new tunnel generated. It was sealed off and left. Since then, the ice has come back. The upshot is that this is a thru trip, meaning that you go in one entrance, through the cave, and leave via a different entrance. In the case of this cave, both of those entrances are vertical, and require a rope and gear.
The entrance we went into was about a 140 foot repel. Two experienced Seattle guys went in, and then they sent their pack of 3 newbies in. The first guy twisted his knee trying to get on rope, and ended up not going into the cave at all. The second guy went in fine, but the third guy manged to get the trail of his cow’s tail stuck into his repel device with the rope, and was hung up about 10 foot or so off the floor. It took over an hour to get him off the rope and down. I went down next. At the bottom, I was surprised as the rope took a turn into what looked like a snow slide. My options were to get off rope and slide down it, or just stay on rope to the bottom. I elected to stay on rope, as the problem with the snow slide was that if you didn’t get stopped halfway down, you’d end up up to your knees at least in wet slush. We walked out of the snow and into a large breakdown cavern. It was just above freezing in the cave, and for about the first time, I had a chance to really see beams of light played out around the cave. We ended up on top of a pile of breakdown, facing a vertical wall of ice and snow and rock with a rope dangling from it. One by one, we clipped in and ascended the rope to the top, to a long tunnel which had a floor of solid ice, several feet thick. We had to wait in the middle for another group coming from the other direction to pass us. This group included a kid who was probably no more than 12, who had been practicing for this particular trip for over a year. He was doing great.
Once we were re-assembled on top of the wall in the new tunnel, we started down it. The first room we dubbed the ‘margarita’ room, as the floor was about an inch deep of wet slush on top of the ice, and it really looked like sludging through a huge margarita. The next room’s ice was mostly dry, just wet enough for my boots to suck up some of the moisture, and freeze to the ice if I stood still. Here the Seattle guys took lots of photos, which they say they will email me eventually. This tunnel continued for a good ways, with ice-waterfalls and ice-stalagmites and other speleothems. It terminated for us at a large wall of stalagmites (stalagmites might reach the ceiling, stalactites hang tight from the ceiling…). Jutting out most unusually from the West wall was a wooden structure housing a window, with a pair of 110V outlets corroding down the front of it. The trip leader climbed the ice carefully, and opened the window, and then crawled through. Each of us followed in turn, into the dynamited tunnel used in the commercial cave. This tunnel was obviously a lot of work at one time, as it had stone walls, and a few other windows that looked out into the tunnel from behind the blockage. We found the large steel plate that seals off the old tunnel, and turned around and went back to the little grotto that had a rope dangling from above. I was the second one up this 60 foot climb, which came out into a little depression in the lava flow through a narrow opening that was blocked to keep rocks out with what, at one time, anyway, was a sign that read, ‘CAUTION: DUCK CROSSING’.
That evening, as dinner wound down, Jessie and I put our gear together and went to round up the other guy. Turns out he didn’t want to go. However, we picked up two more guys, and set off for a 3/4 mile hike through the dusk to the cave. This cave was rather… interesting. We found the hole, rigged up our gear, and I was chosen to go in first. Strangely enough, I’ve been doing this long enough that apparently, I had the most experience, so… in I go. The cave is a hole in the bottom of a small depression. I crawl in, and monkey walk along a short ledge where the rope is tethered to the wall with two pieces of webbing, gingerly reach out and pull the rope up to me, and get my repel device locked on. Then, I turned, and eased off the ledge and onto the rope. Below me, the walls waffle from side to side and I cannot see the bottom, but judging by the weight of the rope, there is a long ways to go. The walls are about 2.5-5 foot apart and about 25-50 foot wide. I start down. I go, and go… and go… and go… and pass a snow packed ledge. I start over it, and decide that I should stop here and wait for the others. I get off rope and holler up, ‘OFF ROPE’ and wait. A while later, Matt comes down and tells me they never heard me, they just waited until the rope was slack and went. Jessie follows. I then head over the ledge on the rope again and down to the very bottom. It had to have been 250 foot. At the bottom, it was still narrow, and there was just barely enough room for the 3 of us. Here, the floor was choked off with ice and there was not much to look at. So, there I am, at the bottom of a 250 foot deep pit, in the middle of Idaho, at 11pm at night, on my birthday. It was a good day. We ascended the rope up and headed out of the cave into the night, and hiked back the long way. I ended up just driving home from there instead of camping another night.
So, it is good to be back into caving. There is another regional of the Rocky Mountain section happening in Wyoming over the 4th, that I am planning to go to. Jessie also claims he will drop me a line and we’ll go caving locally this summer, so, we’ll see.
This last weekend, I went down to Cedar City to the Western V-Strom Gathering. About 50-60 folks on Suzuki V-Strom bikes showed up. I probably put on about 800 miles this last week, and managed a high of 53 miles to the gallon on the way back. I’ll have a few photos of this sometime soon. Bryce Canyon national park was pretty neat, and Cedar Breaks and that whole area was an awesome area to ride in. I rode down by myself, but came back with a couple of guys from the Salt Lake area. We seem to have quite the active group of riders up here, we’ve been riding at least once a month for the last while.
Anyway, that’s my updates. I hope you enjoyed.