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Brian A. Hopkins Rocky Mountain High DAY 4 (SUNDAY, 24 JUNE 2007) The sun brought us another brisk morning. We walked back up to the lodge for breakfast, this time eating in the more relaxed atmosphere of the grill/cantina, instead of the fancy-smancy restaurant. I counted half a dozen baseball caps. We sat next to and visited with an older couple who'd been hiking around for several days and had seen bears and other cool critters. I gave my navigator specific instructions to find a bear for me, hopefully a big griz. He was busy shoveling oatmeal into his mouth, but he nodded. After breakfast, we climbed back on the bikes and headed north for Yellowstone. I think it was about this time that I noticed my right turn signal indicator (on the dash) was flashing at me rather rapidly whenever in use, a sure sign that there was something wrong with that circuit. I checked and, sure enough, my right rear turn signal was out. Probably a bulb. I made a note to pull into an auto parts store at some point and buy a new one. We arrived at Yellowstone in short order. Saw some prairie dogs. The little buggers must be related to Arkansas squirrels (a reference to the ride report where Greg and I took the CBRs to Eureka Springs) because they love to run out into the road and play chicken with the bikes. We managed to miss every one of them that we encountered, but saw plenty of others squashed by motorists who aren't so considerate of the little daredevils. I just hope none of the prairie dogs follow me home, because I already have enough trouble with the friggin' gophers in my yard.
Yellowstone was, of course, gorgeous. And for once I felt we were entering one of the places on my list before the sun was going down and it was time to hunt for a room for the night. Still, we only did the western loop, stopping to wait for perhaps an hour on Old Faithful. The Lake was beautiful, nestled like a sapphire gem beneath the snow-capped mountains.
The Old Faithful Lodge was pretty neat. It'd be fun to stay there sometime, but I understand it's pretty expensive and booked solid well in advance every summer. There was a neat observatory on the roof that I would have liked to experience, but we didn't have a lot of time. The problem with trying to squeeze so much into ten days, of course, is that you're constantly on the go, trading ten minutes of "Ooo" and "Ahhh" for hours on the road making your way to the next place. Every one of the places we visited really deserved several days or even a week each for exploration and real appreciation. I decided very early in this trip to just relax and enjoy what I could, accepting this as a scouting mission for future trips where I would devote more time to each of the parks.
Along with hundreds of other boisterous tourists, we lined up on the benches around Old Faithful and waited for the geyser to put on her show.
For a long time, she just simmered and steamed, but in the ten minutes or so leading up to blowing her cool, she began to gurgle and spit, tossing hot water three or four feet into the air at times. These ejacu -- er, I mean eruptions -- were, of course, designated "premature." Greg kept making predictions (based upon satellite imagery beamed down from the mothership?) about when she would blow -- "Okay, here she goes. She's going to go right ... now!" -- and the lady behind us seemed to get a kick out of our antics, as each time I would raise the camera to my eye and get ready to capture the moment, as if I believed Greg knew his ass from a hole in the wall and had a clue about when the geyser would go off. I took a photo with my cell phone and sent it home to the wife; "Not quite time," I typed with the photo.
Just a couple minutes before Old Faithful unloaded, a big geyser about half a mile away down the hill went off, spraying water maybe 80 feet into the air. "Way to go, Oatmeal Boy," I said, "you brought us to the wrong geyser." The people waiting around us got a good laugh out of that, too. You can always count on motorcycle trash to provide entertainment. Ha.
The other geyser probably does this all the time, of course, as the pressure underground builds up and seeks release. The geysers downhill should always go off first. Then the pressure climbs up the hill and you get this from Old Faithful...
The old girl was right on time. The crowd ooo'd and ahhh'd. Cameras went crazy. I shot several with the camera, then took another with the cell phone and sent it home. "Cool" was the wife's reply a few seconds later. Yeah, it was pretty cool.
Afterward, we hopped back on the bikes and headed for Yellowstone's western entrance/exit. We didn't get too far, however, before running across a "covey" (as Elaine dubbed it) of moose/elk/mule deer/whatever lounging around the Firehole River. We got off the bikes and Elaine and I hiked down to the river banks to check them out, while Gregger cleaned his windscreen or something. The critters were totally unperturbed by our presence, just a buncha females and young'uns hanging out at the river for the day, trying to stay cool. Don't know where the males were; probably off in the woods talking about sports.
Back on the bikes, we exited the park and headed west for Idaho. I wanted to see at least a little bit of what Crazytrain had been so excited about. Unbeknownst to either myself or my navigator, however, you really have to get into western Idaho and the Sawtooths to get to the good stuff. The part of Idaho we rode is called the Lost River Range and, frankly, it ought to remain lost forfreakingever! The wind was back with a vengeance. The landscape was monotonously flat and boring. To the west, we could see the mountains, but there were no paved roads heading that way. I kept seeing dirt roads and ATV trails heading up into the hills to the west and was missing my Dakar, with which I would have definitely pealed off in that direction. We were confined to the flatland and the incessant wind coming down off the mountains (from the left, of course!). The wind was so strong, I hung off the side of the bike, pretending to be a motoGP racer stuck in the longest left-hand turn of my life. It went on and on and on... At one point on Highway 28, we came upon the scene of an accident. A biker had gone off the road, dropping 30 or 40 feet down into a gully. There were several cars and pickemups already pulled over and a half dozen or so motorcyclists already stopped (probably his riding buddies), so we pressed on. All I saw was a red cruiser wadded up way down in the gully. How the rider could have survived such a tumble is beyond me. For that matter, how he had crashed is beyond me -- unless the wind shoved him off the road. He certainly couldn't have blown a turn ... because there were no freakin' turns! Maybe he fell asleep? Somewhere ... What was the name of that town anyway? Was it Leadore? Doesn't matter, cause I don't plan to ever be on that freakin' Highway From Hell again! ... we stopped for lunch at a little burger joint. The waitress, a girl about 12 years old with a big cold sore on her mouth, comes out and first thing she says is that they have no hamburger meat. WTF? We start asking what they do have and the girl knows absolutely nothing. Every question we ask, she has to go to the back and ask the owner/cook/somebody. An ambulance goes howling past, bound for the downed rider we'd passed about 20 miles back -- probably coming out of Salmon, the next town up the road. I thought briefly about that whole "critical first hour" thing when you're injured and wished the guy luck. There's no telling how long he'd been out there off the road in the sweltering heat or how long it would take to get proper medical attention. When the cook (Cold Sore Girl's mother, sister, auntie?) finally came out of the back to answer some questions, she said she'd heard about the injured rider on the CB radio in the back, but didn't have any information other than the ambulance had been dispatched to retrieve him. "We have lots of crashes around here," she said. "Sometimes it's the heat. Sometimes it's Dead Man's Curve that gets them..." I'm like WTF!?!?! There wasn't a real curve within 100 miles of the joint, let alone something worthy of the name "Dead Man's." I think that town's seen a little too much inbreeding. Get out and about a little bit, people, learn some proper oral hygiene, and for god's sake, kill a cow so you can stock your burger joint with the proper vittles when tourists come through. Lord knows there are enough of them loitering in the pastures around Dead Man's Curve. I had a chicken sandwich. Or was it fish? I forget. We ate and got the hell outta there. In my rearview mirror, the place looked just like something out of The Twilight Zone. Adi-fuckin'-os! Oh yeah, at the burger joint there were also three or four Harley riders at a neighboring table -- the only other customers (also eating something other than hamburgers). When we got there, they were amusing themselves by dreaming up questions to ask Cold Sore Girl, just to send her to the back for answers. I only mention them because the one guy looked so totally ridiculous. Refusing to wear a helmet (that just wouldn't be cool, right?), he was adorned in the traditional do-rag and sunglasses. He'd been on the bike so long (I forget where he said he was from, but I think he said he'd been on the road for 7 weeks), that his face was a deep, dark brown, weathered and cracked like an old leather shoe. Only when he removed the sunglasses, it was still white around his eyes, so that he looked like some freakish raccoon wannabee. I just wanted to hold up a mirror and say, "Dude, have you seen how ridiculous you look?" [Addendum: Elaine says the raccoon guy was from Missouri.] Eventually -- seemed like a freakin' lifetime! -- we passed into Montana and on through Missoula. We stopped in Arlee for dinner and got a recommendation to stay at a place called Ninepipes Indian Lodge across from the Kicking Horse Reservoir on Highway 93.
Ninepipes turned out to be a nice place. We had some drinks in the bar. Greg shot some pool (I knew from a previous incident not to play against him), mostly trying to impress the barmaid. Elaine and I did a little exploring, checking out the pond out back and a couple of old wagons. I even put my little travel tripod to good use and got a photo of us sitting on an old buckboard.
There was yet another glorious sunset, and we called it a day. I forgot to write down my odometer reading before turning in, so I don't know how many miles we did on this day ... all I know is I'll never repeat that particular route through Idaho for as long as I live. [Addendum: Greg says he recorded 544 miles for this day.]
DAY 5 (MONDAY, 25 JUNE 2007) Sometime in the wee hours, it started raining, so that everything was quite drenched by the time I crawled outta bed in the morning. The ZZR was getting a bath, compliments of Mother Nature. Since the bike was nice and wet, I took the opportunity to take a towel outside and scrub away some of the bug crud. If you let it go too long, the bike starts to reek. And whenever you're not moving, a horde of flies gathers round, cannibalizing their dead relatives. "Hey, isn't that cousin Alfred from down around Missoula?" "You mean the fella all squished and unhappy looking on the right blinker? You're right, that is him." "Cool, let's eat his guts." "Great idea!"
It was snowing at higher elevations (in fact, at our first gas stop that morning, some guy asked if we were heading north and warned us that there was snow falling north of Glacier). The peaks above Ninepipes Lodge sported a fairy dusting of new powder that morning. We took our time with breakfast, and the rain obligingly moved on. Of course, part of the reason we took our time with breakfast is because the waitress hadn't shown up for work on time. When she finally arrived about 20 minutes late -- a very attractive little blonde honey -- she looked to have had a rough night on the town or something. I was trying to figure out how you'd have such a wild night in the middle of freakin' nowhere, especially on a Sunday. Why no one else in the hotel's restaurant could take our order is also beyond me. I mean, it's not like the cook hadn't shown up.
We rode north, circling Flathead Lake. Very pretty, but it was too cold to stop for photos. I had my vest cranking and my heated grips on high (Elaine was wearing my warm gloves). In Kalispell or Whitefish or Eureka or somewheres along that route, we stopped at a NAPA Auto Parts store. I pulled the turn signal bulb and held it up to the sun. Hmmm ... looks good. I had brought along a small digital multimeter, so I used it to test the bulb. Yup, it's good. Something else was wrong. Got to digging around and discovered that the wire going into the back of the bulb socket was bad; it had probably vibrated loose. Repairing it would require some soldering -- and even then it might not hold. Thought about using some JB Weld, but then realized JB Weld was probably non-conductive. I sent Elaine into the store to find a tube and confirm my suspicions ... the package agreed with me. We'd already wasted 20 or 30 minutes screwing with it, and I didn't want to waste any more time, so I buttoned the bike back up and we moved on. The guy at NAPA was very helpful, double-checking the bulb for me (I sure wanted it to be just that easy), letting Elaine run outside with JB Weld and whatnot, and later giving me a strip of electrical tape so I could tape off my bad wire to keep it from shorting out against anything. Thanks, dude!
I'd just have to remember that I didn't have a right rear blinker and do the old arm-in-the-air turn signal (like I learned to do on my bicycle when I was five years old) anytime I had someone close behind me. Getting rear-ended this far from home was not an option! In Eureka, we stopped for lunch (Elaine shouted, "Eureka, they're going to stop and feed me!") at a cool little cafe where you could scribble on the walls if you were so inclined. Some of the sigs dated back to the sixties (assuming they were authentic). The food was excellent and their desserts alone were worth the trip. I also had a really big cup of cappucino, which warmed my insides up nicely. We met a nappy-headed couple hiking across the continent with their dog. The dog was friendly, so I petted her, but you couldn't have paid me to touch the dreadlocks on either one of her owners. Then it was north to the border and into British Columbia, Canada. The customs agent looked at my passport and wanted to know if I was carrying any firearms. I kept my inner smartass in check and refrained from asking him if he thought I would need any of my firearms in Canada. Elaine said he specifically asked them if they were carrying any "rifles and shotguns," to which she wanted to say, "Yeah, they're right there on the gun rack; don't you see them?" Fortunately, she also restrained her inner smartass. In my experience, customs agents have zero sense of humor. The guy asked me where I was going and I pointed to Greg and Elaine, who'd already gone through, and said, "Wherever those clowns lead me," which prompted all sorts of questions about how I knew them, how long I had known them, and how we had met. "Isn't it a long way from Oklahoma City to Dallas?" the guy asked, as if not believing I could have friends that lived so far away. "Well," I told him, "it's certainly a shorter ride from OKC to Dallas than it is to Canada..." Ultimately, after searching my bags but refraining from any serious anal probing, they could find no reason to keep me out of Canada and let me pass. At least it was easier than getting into Mexico.
Continuing north through the Rockies, Canada didn't feel any different than the States. You even rode on the right side of the road (unless you're passing, as in the photo below left).
In Cranbrook, we ran across a motorcycle shop (Cranbrook Motorsports). Greg wanted to stop for a new pair of gloves because his hands were cold. I hinted to Elaine that it might be nice to have my warm gloves back, more for the chance of rain than anything else, so she bought herself a new pair of gloves, too. There was a cool little red and black CBR125RR on the sales floor. Since they don't import them to the States, I'd never seen one before. It looked just like the 600's and 1000's, only in miniature. I took a photo of it with my cell phone and sent it to my daughter Summer. Just what she needs! My original plan had been to just cross the border for a nice pic -- "Hey, look at me, I've ridden in Canada!" -- but Greg and Elaine wanted to see Banff National Park and Lake Louise. I'm sure glad that they did! We took Highway 95/93 north under threatening skies, eventually crossing into Alberta and entering Banff. This was certainly the most glorious stretch of the Rockies: formidable and majestic at the same time, draperied in green and tipped in white, shrouded in the brisk damp fog you get at higher elevations ... the kinda mist that feels just one degree shy of falling as snow. I think they call Banff the Birthplace of the Rockies. I can certainly see why.
Lake Louise proved to be one of the most gorgeous bodies of water I've ever seen. Cradled by mountains. Fed by glaciers. Her water was an incomparable aquamarine. People come from all over the world to see this place, for good reason.
Sadly, we'd reached what had to be our "farthest north," and it was time to turn south. Leaving Banff, we passed a dozen or more cars pulled to the side of the road. Flying past at our usual warp speed, I turned my head to see what everyone was stopped for, and there beside the road was a mother grizzly bear and two cubs. A freakin' grizzly bear and cubs! Not twenty feet from the roadside! This was on Canada's Highway 1, which has 8-foot fences on either side and critter-only overpasses specifically built to keep the animals off the roadway. Holy crap, I thought, a grizzly and two cubs so close you could almost touch them! When in my life would I ever have such an opportunity again? But Gregger wasn't stopping. WHY THE HELL ISN'T HE STOPPING?!?!? Screw that, I'M going to damn sure stop! And then I realized that Elaine had my camera with her on the Wing. The Wing that Gregger was piloting off into the distance at about 90 mph. I should have stopped anyway. He'd have realized I was no longer back there and come back after me. Anyway, to cut to the point and leave out all the bitching and moaning, I saw a mama grizzly and two cubs. Briefly. But I don't have the photos to prove it.
The sun was setting on us again and here we were still on the road. (Keep in mind that the sun doesn't even set that far north until 10 or 11 at night.) We rolled into Canmore looking for a room, all of us hungry and tired, and two of us extremely irritated about the grizzly incident. There were no rooms to be found. Everything was booked up or the price was just ridiculous. I spotted a pizza place and suggested we eat. The place was called Boston Pizza and is evidently a large chain in Canada. The pizza was excellent and went a long way toward putting everyone in a better mood. By the time we were leaving the parking lot, we were all laughing and carrying on again (though I can't remember what about -- just the fact that we were laughing like a buncha idiots remains in my memory banks). We got back on the bikes and followed the road to a place called Dead Man's Flats, where we got a room in spite of the town's name.
DAY 6 (TUESDAY, 26 JUNE 2007) Breakfast the next morning was at a nearby truckstop, then it was back in the saddle and south into the U.S.A. The Canadian border guy didn't even make us stop; just waved us on through. States-side, however, we were grilled with all sorts of questions and searched. They seemed worried I was bringing in some Canadian beef. "We have to watch out for mad cow disease," they explained. I replied that I hadn't even eaten any beef (probably not true) and the guy said, "Then you missed out on a good steak," in a condescending you're-a-dumbass tone. Can't win, I guess. While the one guy was grilling me, another read the URL off the back of my bike and wanted to know all about my website, my bike, our moto adventures, etc. I finally dug a business card out of my tankbag for him.
We reached Glacier National Park late in the afternoon. Wouldn't you know it, Going to the Sun Road was shut down because there'd been an avalanche ... get this ... back in NOVEMBER. For crying out loud, guys, do you know how far I came? Seven friggin' months and you don't have the road repaired? Argh! Very aggravating. We saw what we could -- which wasn't much but was still very beautiful -- but I will have to go back to Glacier again. There's no way that little excursion checks it off my list.
We finally settled for the night in Great Falls, locating an available (and affordable) room at the usual 10 or 11 p.m. Elaine and I were exhausted. Gregger the Alien was still buzzing from his Monster Energy Drinks and ready to do another 500 miles. My companions were out of clean clothes (I'd brought enough clean stuff to last the entire trip), so we decided that the following morning we'd relax and take it easy. I could sleep in, while Greg and Elaine would watch their clothing tumble around in the hotel's machines. It goes without saying that Greg's motorcycle rags would constitute a load all on their own...
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