We plan to ride the San Juan Skyway (also known as the million dollar highway), Monarch Pass, Hoosier Pass, Loveland Pass, Rocky Mountain National Park, some really winding roads in the North East corner of Yellowstone, Yellowstone, and the Grand Tetons.
Today's ride is 3/4 about "just getting there" and 1/4 about having a fun ride. We started with 100+ miles heading South on I-25. Freeway riding in my opinion is some of the most boring riding you can do and I avoid it whenever I can. I took no pictures and left the bike on cruise control most of the time.
By the time we reached Walsenburg, the temperature had climbed nearly to 94 degrees and I was starting to sweat despite wearing my light mesh jacket and gloves. Normally we would stop here to gas and get something to eat, but we decided just to push on. We turned off the freeway onto highway 160 heading West.
The traffic was very heavy for the first 30 miles or so. I don't know if the traffic has to do with all the fires we've had in the area. There was a little bit of smoke haze, but there were no visible plumes of smoke from the East Peak fire only 10 miles South of us. I haven't heard any news about the fire's containment in a few days. But whatever the cause, most of the traffic turned South towards Laveta just before we started climbing Laveta pass.
Laveta pass is a very mello pass. There are no steep climbs or hairpin turns, and it doesn't climb very high. But it brought the temperature down into the 70s very quickly and that was nice.
Once over Laveta, we stopped for gas, then began another long boring part of the ride across the San Luis Valley and Alamosa. It was nearing noon now. Nan and I talked and decided to try to push across the valley to the town of South Fork for lunch. A massive 90K acre fire evacuated South Fork for a few weeks recently and we thought we'd spend our lunch money there to try and help the economy a bit.
Surprisingly, the temperatures stayed in the low 80s all the way across the valley. Often, the San Luis valley has the lowest temperatures in the Winter and some of the hottest temperatures in the summer. But today was very comfortable for a long straight flat boring ride.
Once in South Fork we drove up and back looking for somewhere to eat. We settled on the Hungry Logger. They have a lunch buffet with 1/2 lb of your choice of BBQ meat, plus all you can eat for everything else. The BBQ was very good as well as mashed potatos/gravy, and other sides. My favorite thing was the speed. Often you can burn 90 minutes trying to do a sit down lunch, but this was very quick. We were done and ready to go in under 30 minutes.
The clouds were gathering and rain storms were visible all around us by the time we were back on the road. Almost immediately we were hit with big fat rain drops, but not with a shower. It continued to spit randomly at us for 5 or 10 miles as we wound our way up the start of Wolf Creek Pass.
The West Fork Complex fire is still burning both North and South of us, but there was no evidence of the fire actually reaching the highway anywhere that we could see, and no Smoke plumes. But the clouds were so low and the valley walls so high that we couldn't have seen anything anyway. Once we started really climbing towards Wolf Creek, the rain got a bit more serious. We'd go through light showers for a minute, then it would stop, then come back again, but never hard enough to make us stop and put on rain gear.
When we reached the top of Wolf Creek Pass we stopped for a picture and to stretch legs. I thought about taking a panoramic picture of the pass, but there's so many dead trees from the bark beetle that I decided it wasn't something I wanted to remember. All of the dead trees is what they think allowed the fires to burn so fast through the area.
Down the other side of the pass we hit more serious rain. At one stretch we were heavily showered on for 5 minutes, but still we pressed on. By the time we reached the bottom I was pretty wet but not uncomfortable, and within 10 minutes back in the warmer air, I was dry.
The area around Pagosa Springs looks very green, so they must have been having allot of rain the last few weeks..
We rode on through Pagosa and on into Durango without any more rain. We pulled into our hotel just a few minutes behind John, Angela, Eric, and Shauna. They had a 2 hour longer ride than us from Arizona, but we'd started after them.
We checked into our rooms and took a short break, then met up to go find dinner. We often eat at Serious Texas BBQ when we're in Durango. One of the restaurants was nearby so we decided to walk to it. Angela looked it up and said it was Point Three miles away, so off we went. Every minute or so, someone would ask if it was Point Three miles yet, and that became the evening's joke. Everywhere we wanted to go from then on, it was Point Three miles away.
The BBQ was very good as always. We sat around a big picnic table on their outdoor porch and gabbed about all of our old friends in Arizona, ate our dinner, and tried to embarass Kyle with our stories and jokes. He was a great sport and gave back as much as he got.
After an hour of sitting and talking, we decided it was time give them back their table and began the point three mile walk back to the hotel.
By now it as only 7:00 and no one was ready to sleep, so we grabbed a table and some chairs in front of the hotel and continued talking. John and Angela went across the street to a store to buy water and popcorn. I grabbed our trail mix, gatorades and baby carrots and continued the gab fest until it started to sprinkle on us. So we went to Nan and my room and kept on talking. By 9:30 the jokes were corny and we were all so tired it was time to split up.
Ready to ride after lunch in South Fork
The Hungry Logger restaurant
Showers going up Wolf Creek Pass
Dry spell on the pass
Nan and I on Wolf Creek Pass
Nan, Kyle, and I on Wolf Creek
Left to right, John, Angela, Kyle, Clay, Nannette, Shauna, and Eric in front of the hotel gabbing
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