Colorado Mountain High
Colorado Mountain High
LEANINGS
Peter Egan
"AREN'T YOU AND JIM RIDING YOUR bikes out to Colorado?" my wife, Barbara, asked innocently.
"No, we're taking them in the van," I replied, with an evasive shift of the eyeballs.
Only last winter, you see, I had explained to Barb that the whole reason I needed a dual-sport bike like the Suzuki DR650, in addition to a pure dirt bike like my KTM 525, was so I could ride straight from my own garage to a trailhead without trucks or trailers. I hadn't specified that, ideally, the trailhead should be less than 1000 miles from home.
“I suppose we could ride from Wisconsin to Colorado, but my new DOT knobbies would be vaporized halfway through Nebraska,” I offered.
“Well, if you’re driving the van, why don't you just take the KTM?” “Because,” I replied, “we’re going to be riding on a few sections of highway, and the bikes have to be road-legal.” Barb looked at me a bit doubtfully. She loves motorcycles, but sometimes struggles with narrow specialization in the dirt world. You can hardly blame her. Just that morning, I’d placed an order for a new black KTM 950 Adventure-“for longdistance travel with some bad roads thrown in...” It’s hard to explain the almost infinitesimally small nuances of pavement texture and motorcycle selection to a sane person.
On that baffling note, l quickly loaded my DR into the blue Ford van, tossed in my enormous duffel bag and headed over to Jim Wargula’s house.
Jim had just bought himself an immaculate, slightly used Honda XR650R, made street-legal with a Baja Designs lighting kit and a virtually useless rearview mirror that looked like a dental tool, only shakier. Wc loaded up Jim’s bike and headed west.
We’d been invited to Colorado by my friend Mike Mosiman, who lives in Fort Collins with the eastern wall of the Rockies rising, literally, out of his backyard. “You’ve gotta come out here and go riding,” Mike had been urging me for months. “We’ve got great dual-sport trails, and we could take a street ride straight up into Rocky Mountain National Park. If you and Jim bring the XR and the DR for the trails, I’ve got enough streetbikes for all three of us.”
Hard to resist an invitation like that, so off we went, pounding westward on 1-80 with nothing to sustain us but honeyroasted peanuts and a huge stack of motorcycle magazines.
We made it to Fort Collins the next afternoon. Mike was in the driveway, attaching a tankbag to his luminous orange KTM 950 Adventure. Next to it sat a BMW R1150GS and his brandnew Triumph Thruxton. We changed into our street riding gear and headed off for a 100-mile loop into the mountains before dark.
Naturally, I gravitated to the KTM 950, anxious to find out if I’d made a mistake by ordering one, having done only a short test ride near our local dealership. We Sturned and climbed our way into the hills above town, branching off and climbing ever higher toward the white-capped peaks on perfect pavement and endless curves. At a pass between two valleys we stopped to take in the majestic view.
“What do you think,” Mike asked, grinning.
“Great roads,” I said, “but not much scenery...”
“Are you glad you ordered that KTM?”
“If I hadn't,” I said, “I'd be stopping at the nearest ranger station to call my dealer. I love this thing.”
Wc returned to Fort Collins before sunset and Mike took us to dinner at a lively, crowded Mexican restaurant called the Rio Grande. “People come here for the margaritas,” he said. “They have some secret ingredient.” “Alcohol,” 1 concluded, halfway through my first glass.
The next day’s ride was a repeat of the first, but we went higher and farther into the mountains on even more spectacular roads, and down along the gorge of the Poudre River. Mike’s friend Dave Scott came along on his exquisitely restored Daytona Orange BMW R90S. We traded bikes at one point, and I decided that if I ever take the trouble to restore another old classic bike, it’s going to be an R90S. It’s still beautiful, and it still works in the modern world. But it was also nice to get back on that other orange bike, the KTM Adventure. It’s one of those rare motorcycles that instantly make me feel like I’ve come home-despite having a seat like an upholstered plank. Luckily, the bike is so much fun, you hardly notice. Euphoric amnesia of the butt, I call it.
On Sunday we trailered our dual-sport bikes (don’t tell Barb) up to a national forest in the high, lonesome country near the Wyoming border, and unloaded with light snow flurries swirling around.
Strangely, the terrain reminded me almost exactly of my favorite trails in northern Wisconsin; the same mixture of exposed rock ridges, evergreens, poplars and stream crossings. Seems 10,000-foot elevation in Colorado produces almost the same climate band as 600-foot does in northern Wisconsin.
The only difference, of course, was the surrounding background of those beautiful white peaks-no small thing.
We traded bikes and I got to ride Jim’s XR650R and Mike’s KTM 625 for a while. Both are tauter, more committed dirtbikes than the DR650, but I was always happy to get back on my own Suzuki. It was the Cadillac of the group: smooth, comfortable, effortlessly torquey and perfectly adapted for these trails and this moment in time.
Late in the afternoon, we turned down the trail toward Mike’s truck and I had one of those brief flashes of insight when you realize that, for several hours, you have been perfectly happy.
For me, these moments always seem to involve the right motorcycle, complete preoccupation with the road or trail ahead of your front wheel, good friends and the total absence of doubt.
It’s a hard combination to put together, but sometimes wc get it right. E3
