Day 2

Today's ride was under an overcast sky and cool temperatures which only once reached 77 and spent most of the time in the low sixties. When I left Virginia yesterday, it was 57 and barely got into the seventies all the way to St. Louis. This is odd summer weather. 
I stopped for the day early in Colorado Springs due to rain over the Rockies rather than pushing on. Today was just hard riding and stopping only for gas and a few stops to give my bottom a rest. At least I didn't ride through driving rain like I did yesterday. "Does that thing actually keep you dry," an old guy asked when I stopped for gas. "Yes, it actually does," I answered. My Keen Targhee II hiking shoes are water proof too so the only thing that got wet were my gloves. Mercifully it wasn't typical August weather because I get soaked from sweating. If I ever need to replace it, I will buy a vented rain suit.

Tomorrow will be a short day and more scenic. My route will follow the Arkansas River by Royal Gorge to, Salida, the headwaters of the river. 

Royal Gorge is a popular white water rafting area.

Well, I got off OK and am staying at a motel on the east side of St. Louis. I prefer motels because I can pull my motorcycle up to the door as in this example:

This picture is actually from an earlier trip because it is raining here at the moment. I hit rain from Lexington, KY to St. Louis.

I did make a few stops on the way. One was just outside Charlottesville at the south entrance to the Skyline Drive. I wanted to have my National Park passport cancelled at the Shenandoah National Park which I accomplished at the Rockfish Gap entrance. All the years I have been going to national parks I never noticed the passports. If you have kids and travel a lot, they are a wonderful way to interest them in nature, geography, history, etc. You can check them out here:  http://easternnational.org/what-we-do/passport

Here is my Shenandoah stamp from this morning.

Yes it's nerdy. My daughter reminds me that I am a nerd. So if you're nerdy, have OCD or one of your ancestors is a squirrel then you'll find it fun, otherwise your mileage my vary.

On a perhaps more interesting note, I stopped to take some photos of the Humpback Covered Bridge near Covington, VA. It's less than a mile off Route 64. Take exit 10. Supposedly, it's the oldest such bridge in the United States.

You can read more about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humpback_Covered_Bridge or here http://www.virginiadot.org/info/faq-covbridge5.asp. The whole area around Covington is geologically active and there are many active hot springs. Thomas Jefferson once visited this area: a little history can be found here:  http://exhibits.hsl.virginia.edu/springs/warm. Nearby is the Homestead which also houses the decommissioned nuclear bunker for the U.S. Gov't. Tours are available.

I stopped at New River Grandview for a photo op. I didn't get my passport stamped... :-(, but my picture is better than the park service's... :-)

There's is here: https://www.nps.gov/neri/planyourvisit/grandview.htm

Not so far from here is the New River Gorge Bridge which is also worth a visit. The height is 876' feet above the river below.

The bridge is popular with those wanting to commit suicide or those who want the thrill of a near death experience because every year, West Virginia allows people to base jump off the bridge. This year the day is Saturday, October 21. Adrenaline junkies should check this out: https://officialbridgeday.com/

The rest of the ride was enduring rain...signing off.

Well, I'm planning another long distance trip on my motorcycle. This will be my eighth long distance trip on this particular motorcycle which I have owned 10 years and have put over 100,000 miles on over that time. I've done Virginia to Miami twice and five trips to America's West from Virginia. The furthest west I've been is Las Vegas. This time I'll going to San Diego to visit my son.  I'll leave Sunday August 6th and arrive in San Diego on Friday August 11th to spend the weekend in San Diego before heading back.

I've plotted a tentative itinerary. It's an aggressive schedule that plots out to be around 5800 miles in 14 days. The bulk of the travel will be getting out there and back. I consider getting 'out there' as getting to Denver, Co which is 1700 miles from Virginia. Getting there and back is 3400 miles which I'll do in 4 days. That leaves about 2400 miles to meander over a period of 10 days.

The way out roughly follows the old Midland Trail.The way back will partly follow some of old Route 66 the mother of all road trips.

This all sounds like a lot, which it is, but the point of not flying or driving a car is that I am riding a motorcycle which is the whole point. I'll be taking pictures which hopefully will keep things interesting for those who want to follow my adventure.

The Final Route

Final Route

On the way home, I stop by and visit the Japanese relocation camp in Grenada, Colorado. This site is where Japanese citizens were held against their will in violation of the U.S. constitution during WW2.

Then:

Now:

The final route was 5474 miles which I did in 13 days.  I burned 118 gallons of fuel for an average of 46 mpg. I usually average about 44 mpg on gas with E10 gas which is what is sold in Virginia. In the west, gas without ethanol is widely available especially at the name brand gasoline retailers. On ethanol free gas, my mpg averaged 53 mpg. The government website on ethanol says that you should only experience about a 2-3% decrease in fuel economy on E10 ( 10% ethanol ). However, it says you should experience a 25-30% decrease in mpg when using E85. This was closer to my experience using E10.

I can can confirm after driving across the U.S. that Americans prefer to drive trucks rather than automobiles( SUVs are classified as trucks with lower mpg requirements ). Roughly 53% of passenger vehicles are trucks. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_vehicles_in_the_United_States#Total_number_of_vehicles

It takes 131,000 BTUs of energy to create 1 gallon of ethanol although one gallon of ethanol has only 77,000 BTUs of energy available. Every time a gallon of ethanol is produced, there is a net energy loss of 54,000 BTUs of energy ( http://www.news.cornell.edu/Chronicle/01/8.23.01/Pimentel-ethanol.html ).

It costs about half the price in fossil fuels to produce a gallon of ethanol which is why fossil fuels are used to produce ethanol. From a cost standpoint, it would be a glaringly losing proposition to use ethanol to produce ethanol.

If SUVs were reclassified as automobiles with the higher mpg requirements, that would go a long way toward reducing pollution rather than using ethanol which actually has the opposite effect. We could also save money by eliminating ethanol subsidies.

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Tweedledum: "I know what you're thinking about, but it isn't so, nohow."

Tweedledee: "Contrariwise, if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic."

Tweedledee: "If you think we're wax-works, you ought to pay, you know!"

Tweedledum: "Contrariwise, if you think we're alive you ought to speak to us!"

Dee & Dum: "That's logic!"

Alice: "Well, it's been nice meeting you. Goodbye!"

Tweedledee: "You're beginning backwards!"

Tweedledum: "Aye, the first thing in a visit is to say: How do you do and shake hands, shake hands, shake hands. How do you do and shake hands and state your name and business."

Dee & Dum: "That's manners!"

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Sand Dunes National Park

Thursday, after surviving the bear, I head south to Alamosa to visit the Great Sand Dunes National Park.

It's an impressive pile of sand sitting at the base of the Sangre de Cristo mountains.

The specks are people.

Well, tomorrow is Friday and I decide to head home. It's a long drive about 1700 miles.

San Luis Valley

Leaving Ouray, my destination is the Orient Land Trust in the San Luis Valley which is between the San Juan and the Sangre de Cristo.  Both moutain ranges boast of at least a half a dozen peaks about 14,000 feet. I will camp out up slope on the Sangre de Cristo mountains at around 8,600' at Valley View Hot Springs which sits at the trail head of a trail that leads to the Orient Mine and a bat cave. The cave is the home to around 250,000 Mexican free tailed bats.

The San Luis Valley was the northern most outpost of sixteenth century Spain. If you remember your American history, you'll recall that the Spanish established the first non-native settlements in the Americas almost a century before the Jamestown colony in 1607 and before the Pilgrims at Plymouth Bay in 1620. In fact, the first non-native settlers on mainland North America were African slaves left in South Carolina in 1526 by Spaniards who abandoned a settlement attempt.

The Navajo Indians believe that the first man and first woman came up from the underworld in this valley. They also believe that it is the place where life enters and leaves this world.

The Ute Indians also lived here and when first encountering the Spanish in 1598, referred to their horses as 'magic dogs.' The Ute's routinely used dogs to pull their belongings. They successfully kept out 'settlers' until 1851.


Looking at the Sangre de Cristo mountains.

The base of the mountains lies about 7 miles away. Behind me are the San Juan mountains.

I took this from the base of the Sangre de Cristo mountains looking across the valley to the San Juan mountains.

When I arrive at Valley View, they tell me a mother Black Bear and her cub are roaming around getting into the trash. The bear was relocated from the Colorado Springs are to Bonanza, Co which is about 50 miles north of this location. Colorado Department of Wildlife people show up and set traps to relocate the bears yet again.

I hike to the bat cave in the evening. About a 2 mile taking about 1.5 hours round trip.

Later that night, as I am asleep in my tent, the cub gets trapped in the bear trap which is a large steel cage. The mother is not happy and I hear her running around my tent. I get up as daylight dawns and walk down near the cage to have a look.

To the right of the bear behind the bushes is the trapped cub. Prior to this the mother bear was shot with rubber bullets. This usually drives most bears away but it hasn't worked on this one. To make a long story short, the bear was later shot and killed the next night. The rangers attempted to dart it four times, but this just made it more agitated.

Driving through the Ages

My destination for today is Ouray Colorado one of my favorite places in the U.S. I'm a sucker for natural history, so I'm taking Rt. 191 from Rock Springs, Wyoming ( just to the east of Green River ) down through the Flaming Gorge to Vernal, Utah and then to Ouray.  The reason I mentioned natural history is because the entire route is marked by road signs pointing out the age and name of the rock formations.  The signs in Utah don't give the ages, but you can get the idea from this picture.

If you can't read the sign, it says: "Mississippian Madison Formation, Remnants of an Ancient Sea". The Wyoming sign would have added that this is occurred  ~340 MYA. Wiki has a page on the Madison Group. See this web time machine for ages.

As I drove I saw signs pointing out petrified forests, sites where archaic crocodile teeth were found and petrified sand dunes.

I'll drive 60 miles before I see a gas station. I saw one building. This is an open range area so I have to watch for cattle. So far on this trip, I've seen Bison, Elk, Deer, Antelope, a Grizzly bear, and prairie dogs.

The fence in the right side of the picture is about ten feet tall and is a snow drift fence. These line much of the road.

Looking back at the Flaming Gorge Dam.

I just leave Ridgway, Colorado on my way to Ouray. I'm ten miles out and the San Juan mountains rise up in front of me. I back-packed these mountains for six weeks in August, 1973 with Colorado Outward Bound. I fell in love with the Rockies as a kid. In the '60's I spent a few summers in Denver with my parents and they took me into the mountains quite often. I still remember playing in the snow in July. As an East Coaster, this was simply amazing. Perhaps it's a bit of nostalgia, but I feel at home here.

Ouray sits just at their base.

The streets in Ouray are all gravel except for main street. Many of the homes are small Victorians.

I pull into the Best Western where I made a reservation earlier today at a welcome center in Dinosaur, Colorado.

 I update my blog while I do my laundry. Before leaving, I bought a roll of quarters and some single laundry detergent packets at Target. So far, there is nothing I haven't used. So I packed just right for this trip. I haven't camped out yet, but I plan to do that tomorrow. About a fourth of my space is taken by the camping equipment which consists of a sleeping bag and tent.

The sign above my motorcycle says "Welcome to the Switzerland of America."

I am going to tour the Rockies the next few days before I head back home.