ROCKY MOUNTAIN HIGH
The BMW Club of Colorado each year does a 100,000 foot ride, where over the course of a long day you end up going over mountain Passes that have a cumulative total of over 100,000 feet. I have always wanted to do this ride. Several years ago Jeff Stokes and Ed Rosco did it and I was envious at the time and even thought about crashing their ride but did not. 2020 was such a bust because of locking down for the continuing Covid mess, that I was determined to try and ride as much as possible over my beloved Great Basin and the West as a whole. So far this riding season I have gone to Yosemite via two passes, Southern Utah on the Ducati with DeVern and Ed Rosco on his S1000RR, the MOA rally in Great Falls, and Paonia with DeVern and the last time I checked I have ridden my three motorcycles a tad less than 12,000 miles with at least two months, weather permitting, of the riding season left.
DeVern and I, along with our friend who lives in Gunnison, David K Haedt, decided to do this ride and made plans to meet him in Meeker Colorado on Thursday August 5th, so that we would do the ride to the start of this adventure in two days. He had stayed in Meeker at a nice motel and we made reservations there. Several weeks previous to this, when we went to Paonia, we had gone by Way of Meeker, had lunch at the Meeker Cafe and then down to Glenwood Springs, so on leaving Salt Lake early Thursday morning, we met as we usually do at the Conoco Station in Kamas and then proceeded over Wolf Creek to Duchesne and then Highway 40 to Dinosaur Colorado where we would turn down to Rangeley and then East to Meeker. We decided to save the Meeker Cafe, which is in an old historic hotel, for breakfast the next morning so we ate at another place along the main highway.
This was my second outing on my 2021 Tiger 900 Pro GT, bought for a long trip that DeVern and I have signed up for on the Routa 40 in Chile and Argentina in January of next year, where you take your own bike, which will be shipped from Houston and after the 33 day ride, returned to Houston in the Spring. Unfortunately at this juncture it looks like Covid will postpone it for 2022. The Tiger is a great handling and very smooth and quiet engine and gets fantastic gas mileage and holding 5.3 gallons a range so that DeVern doesn't have to stop sooner than he needs to because either my Ducati or BMW RS needs fuel. On one stretch of this trip I got over 62 mpg.
The Tiger has an off-road mode and we had decided to do a stretch of about 80 miles on dirt, a few miles East of Meeker (Country Road 8) that ends up near Phippsburg and from there we would wend our way on Friday afternoon to the maelstrom of traffic in Denver, we planned on stopping by BMW of Denver to get some last minute instructions on the ride that would leave from there on Saturday Morning about 7. DeVern's wife Cathy is a wiz at making reservations and found us a nice Hotel near BMW of Denver which is actually located in Centennial Colorado.
The dirt ride was through some really beautiful scenery even with smoke in the air for much of the weekend and we stopped for a rest on the dirt part and there was an informational plaque with information on the surrounding topography .
Earlier on Friday the 6th my newest grandson was born and I told both DeVern and David K I wanted to take them out to dinner to celebrate and we ended up taking an expensive Uber ride both ways, the place we went to was close enough so that David could walk over, but after the dinner, we gave him a ride back on our way to the Hotel.
BMW of Denver was a madhouse Saturday morning with a 180+ motorcycles getting ready for this ride. We completed the registration, got our Tee Shirts and found someone with a file for the GPS that they transferred to DeVern's GPS and he then transferred it to both David's and Mine and just before 7 am we left Denver and did not return till about 5:30 in the afternoon to Prospect Park where the end of the ride and dinner and the prize drawing were held. The only bad thing about the GPS file is that it was turn by turn and not Waypoints, and if you missed a turn you had your GPS, till you adjusted it repeatedly telling you to make a U turn, at one point this went on for 25+ minutes and I finally turned off my Sena Unit just to gain some sanity. You would think that with 180 bikes, it would almost be a mass group ride, but honestly they got spaced out a lot and some people who had done this before, did the ride in reverse, once in a while we would see a fair number of bikes either a head or slightly behind, but most of the time it was just the three of us.
David K lives in Gunnison and he had promised us lunch when we got to his house, but low and behold no one was home and instead we had coffee, and tea for me and left after about 15 minutes for the next mountain pass. After Gunnison we did Cottonwood Pass which is over 12,000 feet, but the road was great with beautiful scenery. I know I should stop more and take pictures, but being a very verbal person I take mental notes of the surroundings. We ended up loosing sight of David just before Buena Vista and didn't see him till Sunday morning, when he dropped by our hotel for the continental breakfast in the lobby area, before we took off for the ride home to Salt Lake.
In my youth, when I had a full head of hair, I had the opportunity to drive vehicles one summer in London, Paris, Rome, Athens, the Mulsanne Straight at LeMan's and along the Amalfi Coast and I will tell you here and now, I have never driven or ridden in worst traffic than just before and through Leadville Colorado, more than bumper to bumper , even the sidewalks were completely inundated with people, a large part of the way, I just pulled in the clutch and move both feet to move the bike 2 or 3 feet until traffic stopped again. Several of the small towns we drove through in Colorado had a lot of tourist traffic and it didn't help that the mud slide around Glenn Wood Springs had recently transpired and the road was still closed.
Some of these passes, I have ridden before on previous trips to Colorado or on my way to New Mexico and Santa Fe, my favorite's of the new passes, were the last couple of passes, Juniper and Squaw Pass. In this politically correct era, for good and bad that we live in, I am surprised it has not be renamed, liked several areas in Utah and California. Thinking of Mollie's Nipple and Squaw Valley. Squaw pass was up at the top near Mt. Evans the highest peak in Colorado and had wonderful twisties for much of its length, a tad less than ten thousand feet in height. I always think of a quote from the John McFee from Basin and Range. “Basin and Range, Basin and Range, A mile in height between Basin and Range”. All you need to know to find your way around the Western United States.
From there, as the early evening started its approach we headed to Prospect Park and the meal provided by BMW of Denver and the drawing for prizes. David K was behind us, and elected to head back to his hotel and did not stop at the dinner.
I would certainly consider doing this ride again, and supposedly they vary it slightly for year to year.
The next day we returned on highway 40 the whole way to the Wasatch front so that I could meet my newest Grandson. I ended up from Thursday to Sunday riding almost 1,800 miles.
