Category: Motorcycle Adventure Ride

The Columbia River Gorge

I’ve visited a few places in my time and I have a few favorites.  The Columbia River Gorge is at the top of the list.   Sue and I flew to Portland a few years ago for a quick 48-hour circumnavigation of the Columbia River Gorge.  I wish I could tell you we rode a motorcycle, but it was four wheels this time.  I have motorcycled through the Columbia River Gorge several times so I guess I’ve got my bona fides if I needed to prove something.  But I don’t and there are times when a  car is my preferred mode of travel.  You know, if it gets cold, you turn on the heater.  If it gets hot, you turn on the AC.  If it rains, you hit the windshield wipers.  Yeah, I know, I’m not being manly.  It is what it is, my brothers.

So anyway, we grabbed a Hyundai Veloster at the Portland rental lot.  It appealed to us, it promised to sip fuel gingerly (a promise it met), and it was comfortable for our weekend getaway.

The smart (and scenic) money on the Columbia’s Oregon side is Highway 30 (also known as the Oregon Scenic Byway), an historic (read:  two-lane, non-freeway) route that parallels the Columbia River. Twisty and green with stunning views of the falls and more quiet, and offering lots of things to stop and photograph…it’s a road that checks all the boxes.  There’s Multnomah Falls, the Vista House, moss-covered concrete guardrails, and much more.

Continuing east along Highway 30, still south of the Columbia River, is a ticket into a flower-covered stretch of scenery through the Rowena Crest area.  Rowena Crest kind of sounds like a suburban housing tract, but it is anything but.  This is good country up here in the Pacific Northwest.

This is a premier wildflower area, and they were out in force during our visit.

Here’s a shot a shot of the Columbia River in the Rowena Crest area.

We crossed the Columbia River (after riding east for most of that morning) at Biggs.  Once we were in Washington, we turned left on Highway 14, the road in Washington that parallels the Columbia on the Washington side.  It’s another two-lane road, although it’s busier than Highway 30 on the Oregon side.

Traveling west on 14, we were pointed directly at Mt. Hood (a snow-covered inactive volcano in Oregon).

The views and the roads are impressive on both sides of the Columbia River.

After driving for a while on the Washingon side, we came to the Bridge of the Gods.  It was our ticket back into Oregon.  I first rode across this bridge after riding the 2005 Three Flags Classic Rally.  Good buddy Marty and I had been up to Canada and we were returning to southern California through Washington and Oregon.  I love everything about the Bridge, not the least of which is the road surface.  It’s grated iron, and if you look down while riding a motorcycle, it’s as if you’re flying.  You can’t see the road surface at all…all you see is the Columbia River water way below.  It’s really cool.

Here’s the view from the Washington side.

Here’s what it looks like as you drive across.

And one more photo, this time from the Oregon side…

During our weekend in the Columbia River area, we stayed in Hood River, a nice little town on the Oregon side.   Our hotel was on the river, near a favored spot for kiteboarding and standup paddling.

A circumnavigation of the Columbia River Gorge, using the Bridge of the Gods and the bridge at Biggs at the western and eastern anchor points, makes for an ideal two-day adventure ride.  Hood River is the place to stay.

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Take a look at the Motorcycle Classics story on the Columbia River Gorge, and more of our published works are here.

Phavorite Photos: Orlando and Velma

We started this Phavorite Photo series a short while ago at Python Pete’s suggestion, and while going through a few of my favorites recently the photo you see above popped out.  That’s my good buddies Orlando and Velma on their CSC RX3 headed up to Dante’s View, a natural overook that provides what has to be the best view of Death Valley (the view is shown in the photo below).  We were on the Destinations Deal tour, and Orlando and Velma bought their RX3 motorcycle specifically to go with us on this ride.  The Destinations Deal was a grand ride, and Orlando and Velma are great traveling companions.

I grabbed that photo of Orlando and Velma with my little Nikon D3300, its kit 18-55mm lens, and a polarizer. The D3300 was a superb traveling SLR.  The photo needed a little tweaking in PhotoShop to bring it up (they almost all always do).  A bit of cropping, a correction in levels, another correction in curves, eliminating an unsightly sign that was in the background, and just a little bit of vibrance and saturation enhancement.  Here’s what the original looked like:

I was particularly impressed with Orlando’s RX3 motorcycle. This was the second time I led a CSC tour with folks riding two up on an RX3. Orlando had no difficulty hanging with the rest of us (we were all riding solo), and surprisingly, his bike returned the same fuel economy.  There’s a lot to be said for small bikes.  I’ve said some of it before.

I have more than a few favorite photos.  You’ll see more here on the ExhaustNotes blog.

Something we’ll do in each one of these Phavorite Photos blogs is show our prior favorites.  Just click on the photo to get to each earlier blog.  There’s only one so far; there will be more.

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Favorite Baja Hotels: Guerrero Negro’s Don Gus

That photo above could also be in our Phavorite Photos series.  It’s the motorcycles on one of our Baja rides (all CSC RX3s) parked outside our rooms at the Don Gus Hotel in Guerrero Negro.  That photo has always been one of my favorites.

Not fancy, not expensive, and comfortable:  That’s how I would describe the Don Gus Hotel in Guerrero Negro (incidentally, that’s also a pretty good good description of the RX3).  The Don Gus is on the main drag on the left as you come into town, and it’s nearly directly across the street from the more well-known Malarimmo’s.   The Don Gus has a nice bar and the food is great.

Malarimmo’s usually fills up quickly when the California gray whales are in nearby Scammon’s Lagoon (that would be from January through March).  There are at least a half-dozen hotels in Guerrero Negro, and the Don Gus is the one I’d go for if Malarimmo’s is booked up.  The Don Gus is less expensive than Malarimmo’s and the restaurant maybe isn’t as fancy, but it’s a good place to stay and you won’t be disappointed.  If you want a whale watching tour and Malarrimo’s is full, let the folks at the Don Gus know the night before and they’ll hook you up with another tour company.  They’ve done so for me many times, and I’ve found that once you are out on the water who you tour with doesn’t make a difference.  They are all great.

Looking at these photos….man, I have got to get my knees in the breeze and point my Enfield south.  I am missing Baja big time.  Gresh, you up for Tony’s fish tacos?

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How Much Milk Is Left?

A few weeks ago I read a Wall Street Journal opinion piece by Peter Funt (of the Candid Camera show).  His article was on the pandemic lockdowns and isolation inducing more folks to publish their memoirs, and Funt made the case that this was not such a good thing.  Most memoirs are God-awful boring.

That got me to thinking about the adventure touring genre.  You know, the books, blogs, videos, and endless Facebook posts and forums about adventure rides.

Adventure rides.

We used to call a motorcycle ride a motorcycle ride.  Now they are all “adventure” rides.  And we don’t tell a story or do a bike test.  Now, it’s a reveal.  Harley is going to introduce a new bike in few days.  But it’s not a new model announcement.  It’s a “reveal.”

Ten to twenty years ago, the place to go to read good riding stories was ADVRider.com and their Rides page (back then, the stories and photography were actually good) and HorizonsUnlimited.com.  Now it’s mostly videos, Facebook, and blogs.  There’s too much of this (and I say that as guy who writes a blog).  I seldom view any of it.  Which is not to say you should stop reading ExNotes.  We’re different, you know.  We’ve never had a “reveal” (other than that one unfortunate wardrobe accident in China) and we never will.

All of the above begs the question:  How much milk is left in the adventure riding cow?

Fads come in waves, and a surefire way to know that a wave is dissipating on shore is when a big company tries to surf in on the little bit of surf that’s left.  Witness the Pan America, Harley’s too much, too late entry into the ADV world.  Harley wants to compete with the BMW GS, KTM, and Ducati high end ADV bikes.

It’s hard for me to see how Harley is going to prevail.  For starters, my feeling is that most folks who ride big V-twin cruisers (folks who form the bulk of Harley’s current customer base) have little interest in adventure touring.   The premise is that Harley will attract a new crop of customers, presumably drawing the sheeple who would have bought BMWs, or KTMs, or Ducatis.  Color me skeptical, but I just don’t see it happening.

No, what’s happening is a sea change, not an opportunity to do a little surfing in a dying market.  The world moves in fads, with each fad having about a ten-to-twenty-year life, and we’re due for a new one.  I just don’t know what it is.  Consider this:

    • In the 1960s, it was British vertical twins.  Those were cool years and the Triumphs, BSAs, Nortons, and Enfields of the day were cool bikes.
    • In the 1970s and the 1980s, it was Japanese machines (the so-called UJMs).   Honda’s 750 Four had five gears, and that fifth one was for the paradigm shift that swallowed the British empire and made us wonder if maybe Japan won World War II after all.  Four cylinders across the frame, with differences between manufacturers that could only be described as trivial.  The UJMs were kind of cool, too, but not as cool as the Britbikes (at least to my way of thinking).  But the Britbikes were toast, destined to emerge two decades down the road as the darlings of a small but well published vintage motorcycle market niche (and in case you missed it, that was a plug for Motorcycle Classics magazine).
    • In the 1990s, it was Harleys and all that went with it.  You know, middle aged guys becoming pirates and bikes festooned with chrome, leather fringe, and conchos.  I was one of them for awhile and I had everything but the tattoos.  Bikes that people with more money than brains bought (often paying over MSRP) so they could don do-rags, denim, and non-DOT helmets, and look pretty much exactly like all the other beer-bellied rugged individualists.  I was one of them for a while, too.
    • Sportbikes had a good run somewhere in the middle of all this, too, with ergonomics that guaranteed significant incomes for chiropractors and physical therapists, who frequently used that money to pay well over list price for a Harley (see above).  Guilty again.  You got me.  I had a TL1000S, a Triumph Daytona, and a Speed Triple.
    • With the turn of the century, the trend migrated toward 650-pound, liter-plus bikes styled like dirt bikes and equipped with electronics rivaling Air Force One.   Denim and do-rags were replaced by Power Ranger clothing.  Everybody wanted to be Charlie and Ewen, but few could afford the chase trucks and mechanics, and even fewer could handle one of the bloated beasts off road.  Most adorned driveways and Starbuck’s parking lots.  I mean, the headlight lenses on some of these things cost $1800; no way anyone was taking those wunderbikes into the woods.  I’m sort of guilty here.  I had a Triumph Tiger.  I took it off road just once and it was terrifying.

I think we are fast approaching the last throes of the overweight off-road $25K-to-$30K wannabee adventure bikes and their thousand-dollar Aerostitch-wearing riders…you know, the guys who stand on the pegs even when riding on level asphalt.  (Sit down, guys…your “sell by” date flew by years ago and I’ll say what everyone else is thinking:  You look silly.)

So what’s next?

Electric motorcycles?  Nope, I don’t think that’s going to happen in any major way.  Alta is gone, Zero is struggling, and the Livewire may have already suffered electrocution as a consequence of Harley’s rewiring.  Electric bikes don’t sound like motorcycles, the range is not there (it’s not going to be any time soon), and I think a motorcycle without an internal combustion engine really isn’t a motorcycle at all.  So what will be the next big moto thing?

Self-driving motorcycles?  Nope.  Dead on arrival, I think.

Even more “mode complexity” on street bikes?  Probably not.  That sort of thing appeals to juvenile minds (ones susceptible to Jedi mind tricks).  I think even the easily-led characters mentioned above recognize this as too gimmicky.  I once had a pimply faced kid ask me at one of the IMS shows how many modes our imported-from-China 250cc ADV bike had, and I told him:  Two.  On, and off.  He nodded knowingly, as if I had let him in on a great secret, and wandered off toward the Ducati booth.

I think the ADV thing is going to dry up, even though we are still seeing sales upticks in the motorcycle market.  Sort of.  ADV-style bike trends have been up, but it always was a relatively small market segment and the current increase (most likely the result of the “more free stuff” crowd rocking Washington these days) appears to be big but actually is not.  Dirt bike sales are up, but that’s for off road dirt bikes only.  Street bike sales are down about 10%.  And that thing about motorcycle sales overall going up?  Yeah, it is, but it’s mostly ATVs (of the 4-wheel persuasion, which are included in the motorcycle sales figures).  One bit of actual data, and that is this:  CSC can’t keep bikes in stock.  They sell out as soon as they arrive.  But CSC delivers real value at a very reasonable price…I don’t know that I ever saw an RX-Anything with conchos and fringe.  And CSC motorcycles are definitely not $25K driveway bling.  Yeah, the big bike ADV thing is fast approaching its “sell by”date, I think.  The fat lady is singing, folks.  It’s almost over.

So, given that the ADV milk is drying up, the next big thing will be…

Hell, I don’t know.

What do you think?  You guys figure it out and let me know.  And if you think you know, leave a comment here.  Curious minds want to know.

Chongqing to Tibet!

The RG3 is Zongshen’s newest motorcycle, and yesterday this video and its description showed up in my feed:

We are excited to share the epic journey of RG3 crew! Along the 318 national highway, our RG3 adventurers spent 12 days riding to reach Lhasa, Tibet from our factory in Chongqing. May the journey inspire you to start you own!

This is cool stuff and Zongshen (sold by CSC Motorcycles here in North America) is a cool company.   I’ve been in the Zongshen plant a bunch of times along with good buddy Gobi Gresh, and we rode with Zongshen across China.

Gresh and I had a lot of fun with the Cult of the Zong, and we joked about the lines we’d be able to use after our 6,000-mile ride in the Ancient Kingdom.  You know, little things we’d slip into a conversation like “as I was riding across the Gobi Desert” and “when we rode down off the Tibetan plateau” and others. We knew it would gave us the street cred we needed to converse with hardcore riders making the trek to Starbuck’s.

Zongshen puts together first class videos, and I always watch their new ones as they are released.  One of my Zongshen favorites is the one they did on our China ride:

And another I enjoy is Joe Gresh’s video on that same ride:

I enjoy videos, but I enjoy a good book even more.  You might, too!

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Pan America Adventure Motorcycle: The World’s First No-Compromise Harley-Davidson

What does that even mean, no compromise?

Hear me out. Like you I’ve read all the reviews on Harley’s new Pan America Adventure-Glide and they have been uniformly positive. Surprising is the word most frequently used by the tattered remnants of the moto-press when describing the Pan America. And it is surprising.

I’m not likely to ever test ride a Pan America. I offer Harley-Davidson nothing but suffering and heartache. Why would Harley loan me a bike in a category I pretty much despise? I can’t stand big Adventure bikes. I don’t like them one little bit. I think they are dangerous off road. Anyone who sends me one to test ride is a fool and Harley-Davidson’s marketing department is not populated by fools. Luckily I don’t need to ride one because Kevin Duke, the hardest working man in motorcycle journalism, says the Pan America is a good bike and that’s all you really need to know.

The no compromise hook in this story is the most impressive part of the new Pan America. It’s the first Harley (since the late 1960s) that competes head to head with the best the world has to offer and does it at a competitive price. In all areas the new bike is acceptable, meets expectations and is even, dare I say, good.

Most all the high-end, heavy, dangerously inadequate offroad Adventure bikes clock in at around 20,000 US dollars retail and they all weigh nearly the same ground-crushing 600 pounds. It must be a class requirement. Check out the manufacturer-provided spec sheets on a GS BMW, Ducati Multi Service, and KTM Breakdown. All of the numbers are within spitting distance of each other.

And that’s the amazing part. Harley-frigging-Davidson has made a competent motorcycle for the same price as everyone else. There’s no brand penalty. Harley-Davidson has made a motorcycle that the owner isn’t required to look through leather-fringed, nostalgia-tinted lenses to justify. No more having to tell non-Harley riders that they don’t get it when their questions turn pointed. Like all cults, the Harley cult requires actively looking the other way when hard facts and performance figures per dollar are bandied about.

With the Pan America there’s no need to believe in the Harley mystique. There’s no need to defend anemic performance by waving an American flag. The Pan America stands on its own merits as a motorcycle, nothing more. Is it as good as the other big Adventure bikes? I can’t say but the fact that it’s spoken of in the same breath and held up in comparison to the world’s best Adventure bikes is a stunning turnaround for a company that seemed hopelessly stuck in neutral by its mad marketing genius.

As much as I hate big Adventure bikes, I love the new Harley-Davidson Pan America.

I hope it’s a harbinger of change. I hope it succeeds beyond Harley’s wildest dreams and ushers in a new era of 150-horsepower Sportsters that handle, stop and are as fast as any other guy’s bikes. The late 1960s was the last time Sportsters were hot. That’s a long, long time to rest on your laurels. Let’s hope the Pan American gives stodgy old Harley-Davidson new life and a desire to be measured against the very best. Listen, if there’s any way you can afford to go out and buy one, go out and buy one. Tell Harley I sent you. Maybe they’ll even let me take one for a ride.

Berk, on right, telling Gresh to go back to Starbucks and fetch a Pumpkin Spice Latte for him.

My 1st International Motorcycle Adventure, Eh?

Everybody has their preferred riding schtick and for me it’s international motorcycle travel.  Anyone can ride their cruiser to a local hangout for a beer or their GS to Starbuck’s for a $6 cup of coffee.  My riding is all about crossing international borders and collecting cool photos in places most two-legged mammals only dream about.  Just to make a point, I once rode a 150cc scooter (my CSC Mustang) to Cabo San Lucas and back.  The day after we returned, I needed something at Costco and I rode the little CSC there.  When I parked it, a beer-bellied dude in a gigondo 4×4 pickup told me, “that’s a little cute bike.”  He didn’t intend it to be a compliment.

“Thanks,” I said.

“I ride a (brand name deleted to protect the guilty),” he announced, his chest swelling with Made in ‘Merica pride to the point it almost equalled his waistline.   “We ride all over.”  He emphasized the “all” to make sure I got the point.

“Cool,” I said.  “Where do you go?”

Cook’s Corner, the ultimate So Cal burger/biker stand.

“Last week,” he told me, “we rode to Cook’s Corner!”

Cook’s Corner is a southern California burger joint about 40 miles from where we were talking.

“Where do you all go on that little thang?” He actually said “you all” and “thang,” but he didn’t have the accent to match the colloquialisms.  Okay, I had the guy dialed.

“Well, we rode to Cabo San Lucas and back last week.” I said.

Mr. 4×4’s jaw dropped.  Literally.  He looked at me, speechless, dumbfoundedly breathing through his open mouth.  Without another word he climbed into his big truck and rode off.  Our conversation was over.  So much for the biker brotherhood, I guess.

My 150cc CSC Baja Blaster. I had a lot of fun and covered a lot of miles on that little Mustang.

The international motorcycle travel bug bit me when I was still in school.  I had a ’71 Honda 750 Four back in the day (that’s me 50 years ago in the big photo up top).  One of my Army ROTC buddies had the first-year Kawasaki 500cc triple.  It was a hellaciously-fast two stroke with a white gas tank and  blue competition stripes.  We were in New Jersey and we wanted to do something different, so we dialed in Canada as our destination.  They say it’s almost like going to another country.

And so we left.  Our gear consisted of jeans, tennis shoes, windbreaker jackets, and in a nod toward safety, cheap helmets (ATGATT hadn’t been invented yet).  We carried whatever else we needed in small gym bags bungied to our seats.  Unfortunately, in those days “whatever else we needed” did not include cameras so I don’t have any photos from that trip.  That’s okay, because all they would have shown was rain.

A 1969 Kawasaki 500cc, two-stroke triple. Widowmakers, they were called, in a nod to their often unpredictable handling.

As two Army guys about to become Second Louies, we joked about being draft dodgers in reverse.  We were looking forward to active duty (me in Artillery and Keith in Infantry).  We were going to Canada not to duck the draft, but as a fling before wearing fatigues full time.  We didn’t really know what we were doing, so we took freeways all the way up to the border. It rained nearly the entire time.  All the way up and all the way back.  We bought sleeping bags because they looked cool on the bikes (it was a Then Came Bronson thing), but we stayed in hotels.  It was raining too hard to camp, and besides, the sleeping bags were soaked through and we didn’t think to bring a tent.  We got as far as Montreal, which seemed far enough to give us Canada bragging rights.  We spent that single Montreal night in a cheap dive and pointed the bikes south the next day.

These days, I know to check the weather, bring rain gear (even if none is forecast), and study a map to find the most interesting roads (rather than the fastest).  But hey, we were young and dumb, it was an adventure ride, it crossed an internationational border, and riding four days in a steady cold rain was a lot of fun.  I didn’t think so at the time, but that’s how I remember it today.  In fact, I remember that ride like it was last month.  And it got me hooked on international motorcycle adventures.  Canada was to be the first of many.

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More epic international rides?  Right here, folks!

The Springfield Mile

That photo above?  It’s the Springfield mile, with riders exiting Turn 4 at over 100 mph on their way up to 140 or so. These boys are really flying.  It is an incredible thing to see.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.  Two blogs back I wrote about the East Windsor half-mile dirt track, which has gone the way of the dodo bird.  The Springfield Mile is bigger and better and last I checked it’s still with us.  A dozen years ago I made the trek out to Illinois watch the big boys (and a lady or two) mix it up and it was awesome.  I don’t know if this is accurate or if it’s more biker bullshit, but the guys claim the bikes hit 140 mph in the straights and maintain a cool 100 in the turns.  And “straights” is a relative term.  The track is basically a big oval, with the straights being less of a curve.  What’s nice about oval track racing, though, is you usually can see all the action all the time.  When you go to a grand prix type event, you get to see the bikes or the cars for just an instant when they scream past wherever you are.  Oval tracks are a better deal, I think.

We planned to ride to Springfield from So Cal, but just before it was wheels-in-the-wells time my good buddy Larry passed and I stayed for his funeral.  We flew instead and because that gave us a little bit more of our most precious commodity (time), we bopped around Springfield a bit more.  We visited Springfield’s Lincoln Museum and had a lot of fun getting there. I drove our rental car and we promptly got lost (it was in the pre-GPS era). We pulled alongside a police officer and he gave us directions. As soon as I pulled away, I asked my buds which way to go. “I don’t know,” they answered, “we weren’t listening…” Neither was I. We all had a good laugh over that one.

An interesting Norton in the fairgrounds parking lot.
Another shot of the Norton.

The Illinois State Fairgrounds has two tracks, on a quarter-mile dirt oval and the other the big mile.  The quarter-mile races were awesome.  This racing, all by itself, would have been worth the trip out there.  I love watching the flat trackers.

These boys are kicking up some dirt coming out of Turn 4 on the Illinois State Fairgrounds quarter-mile track.
One of the riders lost it coming our of Turn 4 and he crashed hard directly in front of us.
I didn’t think he was going to get up, but he did.  The next day, this guy won a heat on the 1-mile track.  The announcer said he was “tougher than a $2 steak.” I believe it.

The next day, we went to the 1-mile track on the other side of the State Fairgrounds.

The field entering Turn 2 at over 100 mph on the Springfield 1-mile track. The noise is incredible and there’s nothing like it.  These guys are drifting sideways at 100 mph, just a few inches apart!
The same shot as above, but with the two fastest riders at the Springfield Mile identified.  The arrows point to Chris Carr (National No. 4 in the white and orange leathers) and Kenny Coolbeth (National No. 1 in the black leathers).  Coolbeth won on Sunday and Carr won on Monday.  This photo was just after the start.
One lap later: Coolbeth and Carr are riding as a closely-matched pair well ahead of the group.

I was really happy with these shots. I had my old Nikon D200 and a cheap lens (a 10-year old, mostly plastic, $139 Sigma 70-300). I zoomed out to 300 mm, set the ISO to 1000 for a very high shutter speed (even though it was a bright day), and the lens at f5.6 (the fastest the inexpensive Sigma would go at 300mm).  The camera’s autofocus wouldn’t keep up with the motorcycles at this speed, so I manually focused on Turn 2 and waited (but not for long) for the motorcycles to enter the viewfinder.  It was close enough for government work, freezing the 100 mph action for the photos you see above.

Kenny Coolbeth, after winning the Springfield Mile.
Nicole Cheza, a very fast rider. She won the “Dash for Cash” and the crowd loved it.
A Harley XR-750 rider having fun.

As you might expect, there were quite a few things happening off the track, too.  Johnsonville Brats had a huge tractor trailer onsite equipped with grills, and they were serving free grilled brat sandwiches.  It was a first for me, and it worked…I’ve been buying Johnsonville brats ever since.  There were hundreds of interesting motorcycles on display and a vintage World War II bomber orbiting the area.

An old B-17 flying above the track…it made several appearances that weekend.
An old Ariel Square Four. The owner started it and it sounded like two Triumph 650s.
An old two-stroke Bridgestone, a marque that never quite made it in the US. Imagine the marketing discussions in Japan: “Let’s logo it the BS…that will work!”

So there you have it, along with a bit of advice from yours truly:  If you ever have an opportunity to see the Springfield Mile, go for it.  I had a great time and I would do it again in a heartbeat.

More epic rides are here!

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Riding With The Carrizozo Mud Chuckers

Sixty-one miles north of my place in La Luz, New Mexico lies the town of Carrizozo. The seat of Lincoln County, Carrizozo’s streets are laid out at an angle to the intersection of Carrizozo’s two main highways, 380 and 54. There are colorful donkey statues stationed around, a junkyard church on the outskirts of town and the Carrizozo Mud Chuckers motorcycle club.

The Mud Chuckers MC, founded by my riding buddy, Mike, is primarily a dirt-based riding club. The area around Carrizozo has hundreds of graded farm roads and tight mountain trails. It’s an ideal spot for racking up miles on the dirt. I recently joined them on one of their frequent moto-camping rides. The Chuckers shun traditional campgrounds preferring instead to camp anywhere they can find a spot with no people around.

Like all the ‘Chuckers rides I’ve been on the pace was downright leisurely with frequent stops to look at old mine sites, hunt for geodes, gold deposits and old metal objects or just sit in the shade to discuss unimportant things. The ‘Chuckers are in no hurry to get anywhere and that suits me just fine.

On this day we rode west to Socorro, NM and took the Escondida Lake exit to the Back Country Byway. The Byway meanders generally east-west then south with the terrain ranging from desert scrub to medium-high trees. At the speed we operate it’s best to look for a campsite early because ‘Chuckers don’t like stress. We checked out several places but nothing looked appealing. There was either no shade or no firewood or a stinky dead cow rotting nearby so we pushed on.

Eddie dropped his KLR 650 in a sand wash and bent his clutch hand so that it didn’t want to work right. He was doing 45mph so the impact, while soft, still hurt. The ‘Chuckers are not spring chickens. In perfect tune we can hardly swing a leg over the motorcycle. Eddie called it a day. Since we never leave a man behind we short cut the Byway and followed him back to his house in Carrizozo where we had begun this adventure.

With Eddie’s DNF, that left me, Dan and Mike still on the lead lap. By now it was getting late so we abandoned our plan to camp on the Back Country Byway and decided the higher mountains behind White Oaks would be the best option. It was late and we still had a 30-mile ride to the forest.

We found a spot with plenty of firewood and soft ground. We managed to get camp set up just before dark, which is always a good idea. Once they find a place to roost the Carrizozo Mud Chuckers really come on the pipe. The fire was roaring, Mike brought along pork chops and a metal grill to cook with. I don’t know where he stores all that junk on his 390 KTM. Sizzling pork chops, boiling coffee, cookies, beef jerky, Wheat Thins: man, things were hopping at camp this evening. The altitude we were camping was around 7000 feet, it got pretty cold, probably in the 30’s but around the fire it was 75 degrees.

Campfire nights last longer than regular ones and I turned in at midnight. Mike and Dan sat up longer. Flickering lights and murmured shadow conversation played across the inside of my tent. I felt safe knowing the bear would go after them before me. The next morning The Mud Chucker’s were in no hurry to leave. We restarted the fire and had coffee with whatever scraps of food we had left over from last night’s feast. The Mud Chuckers always leave their campsites cleaner than they found them and the way they put out a campfire borders on obsessive.

When I got back home it felt like I had been away a month instead of only two days. Camping on a motorcycle seems to distort time and distance. Changing your observation point really does have a profound effect.

Mike and Eddie want to start a motorcycle tour business. Their plan is to buy a few TW200 Yamahas and run all inclusive, guided camping tours around New Mexico. It sounds like a pain in the butt to me. Why ruin a nice motorcycle ride with business?

I’ll let you know if the tour company idea works out. Maybe a full ExhaustNotes.us tour review or something. Get the ‘Chuckers to kick in a free tour as an ExhaustNotes subscriber gimmick?

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Tulsa and Oklahoma’s Green Country

You may recall that about a year and a half ago I did a blog on our visit to Oklahoma and the great riding in the eastern half of the state around the Tulsa area.  I wrote a piece about that for Motorcycle Classics magazine and you can get to most of it online here.  You can pick up a copy of the latest issue at your local newstand.  Better yet, subscribe to Motorcycle Classics.

Your two blogmeisters (yours truly and Joe Gresh) have been published in several motorcycle magazines and other publications both in print and in the digital world.  You can get to a partial compendium of our articles by clicking here for me and here for Gresh (or by clicking on either of the above photos).

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