onward and upward in elevation!

June 23, 2008

Another morning another pre ride bike inspection. As I was giving the bike a once over checking the chain, tires, screws, ect I noticed something I didn’t want to notice. One of the metal brackets holding my cases on had sheared off. The actual metal had broken free from the weld so great another trip to the welding shop… the bike was still rideable so I hit up the campground office checked the yellow pages and I was off to the nearest town Salida Colorado to get it welded back together. The welding took all of a couple minutes and I was back on the road. I suppose it must have broken free from all the hard riding I had done the day before in the Carson national forest. But really now can I not go one day without something breaking! This morning I rode to a town called Canon City after leaving Salida. Now one thing I have come to realization is that anywhere you drive in Colorado is awesome, whether you’re driving to a welding shop or the next town over. I followed highway 50 for about 60 miles or so and it was a good ride along a river, I think it was the Arkansas River, lots of twisties and lots of fun accelerating and declaring through the turns! Another fun part of the ride was all the rafting and kayakers out taking on the white water. I had to stop a bunch of times to take pictures, and finally I realized that I would never make it to Denver that day if I didn’t stop taking so many pictures. I got into Canon City and I was hungry so I found a spot with a bunch of other motorcycles and I parked in the mix of them. Turns out the group of bikers I happened to park by were on their way to Sturgis which didn’t begin until August so needless to say they were just out exploring the US as I was. After chatting it up with some of the biker gang they suggested I take an undeveloped road called highway 67 over the mountains to get to Colorado springs. This particular highway was just the kind of dual sporting I was looking for, it was a well marked out gravel road about 30 miles long which snaked its way through the Rockies. Tons of switchbacks and no guard rails what so ever. There were also a lot of very cool one lane bridges. Riding continued like this for an hour or so, and I finally arrived at the end of the dirt road in a mining town just outside of Colorado Springs. However as I got to the town I began to fell little drops of rain so I pulled over and donned my full rain gear, except for the waterproof liners to my pants which resulted in a very cold and a very wet ride the rest of the day. They are just such a hassle to put on and I didn’t think it would have rained as much as it did. I continued on to ride to the summit of Pikes Peak because I really wanted to drive up it but when I got there they park ranger said that it was snowing and hailing at the top and they wouldn’t let me drive my bike up there. So I had to nix that idea, oh well I will just have to find another fourteener to go up! Since the rain was getting worse I decided to just bypass Colorado Springs and head to Denver where I would be staying with my friend Amy from UVA. As soon as I got within Denver city limits the rain completely stopped and it actually got pretty warm. Denver, another very cool city to go to, I am sad though I did not get to spend as much time here but I must move on. Amy took me too a really cool pizza place, which has a very distinctive evil theme. Instead of numbers to know when your pizza is ready they give you some sort of space craft toy which basically took up the entire table, the pizza was really good and they had Coors Original on tap which my friend Becca got me absolutely hooked on however they don’t serve it very many places. Well tomorrow its off to more Colorado exploring. I’ll be heading to Boulder and I may even check out the Coors Factory.