Highway 395 closed yesterday just north of Bridgeport due to snow. I know that road well. I’ve ridden it a bunch of times and it’s a favorite, but wow, the weather can turn on a dime up there. Once you leave Bishop heading north, the elevation goes up abruptly, and in the next 30 miles or so it can go from cold to damn cold mighty quickly.
I once rode my KLR 650 up to Lake Tahoe on a press junket and the weather was okay. Moderate, not too cold, nice riding weather on the roads in and around Tahoe. The ride home was something else, though. Tahoe is pretty high in elevation and I dropped maybe two or three thousand feet coming down the mountain to Highway 395. That’s when the cold really set in. I had good gear on, but no electric vest, and the cold was brutal. I stopped at the Bridgeport Inn maybe a hundred miles down the road and went in for breakfast. Well, that’s not entirely true. I went in to warm up, and I wanted to just sit there for a couple of hours sipping coffee after breakfast. It worked, but it took a while.
You know, the funny thing is that another hundred miles or so south when I rolled through Adelanto on the 395, it was so hot I took most of that gear off. The temperature had gone from near freezing on the 395 north of Bridgeport to nearly 100 degrees down in the desert.
The KLR 650 was a good road bike and a great traveling companion. I rode it all over Baja and through a lot of the American Southwest. It’s gone down the road now (I sold it to a friend of a friend who may still have it). Good fuel economy, it could touch 100 mph on a good day, and the thing was just comfortable. The ergonomics were perfect for me. It was was one of the great ones.
I remember the bad weather rides way better than any of the ones with clear skies and moderate temperatures. That ride back from Tahoe will stay with me for a long time.
More epic rides are here.