Off the Pavement

© Ken Bingenheimer / RumBum.com

It's so not good when you take street bikes off their beloved streets.

Some motorcycles are built to go off the paved road, even off any road at all. Generally, these have knobby tires for getting a good grip and serious suspension that can take big bumps without complaining.

Then there are street bikes. As the name implies, these bikes work best when you keep them on the pavement. And the fact is, many street riders are loathe to take their bikes anywhere near gravel. You can slip and slide and bounce like crazy on that stuff. In addition, you kick up dust and the guy behind you gets to eat it. It's not like being in a car where you can roll up the windows.

But consider this: According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, there are 1.4 million miles of unpaved roads in the U.S. It stands to reason that there are a lot of really nice places you might like to go on your motorcycle that aren't paved.

So, if you're like us, sometimes you go anyway. Our experiences have been mixed in this regard. I mentioned last week how some of our guys took a dirt road outside of Taos down to a hot spring. There wasn't much to the spring and the road was very rough, with the result that Jason's bike snapped an electrical connection and he had to make a quick stop at a dealership to get it fixed.

Another time, in the early days of the OFMC, John proposed that we take the road from Phippsburg, CO, over Ripple Creek Pass to Meeker. He had looked at the map and figured there were about 10 miles of it that were unpaved. We could handle that, couldn't we?

Well, of course we said we could, only it turned out that there were about 40 miles of gravel, not 10. And it wasn't smooth gravel, either, as is sometimes the case. No, there was a lot of washboard and we bounced and banged our way over this road for what seemed like a long, long time. John even managed to drop his at-that-time brand new Honda Shadow in some deep sand along the way. My luggage rack was shaken so badly that it broke in two places and I had to stop at a welding shop in Salt Lake City to get it fixed.

Later that same day, Bill turned off on a dirt road by a lake we were passing, which quickly turned deeply rutted, and John dropped the Shadow again.

With that day clear in our memories, it was something of a surprise a few years later when John suggested that he show us the Trough Road, another gravel road that runs from Kremmling, CO, over to State Bridge. He had been on it recently, he assured us, and it was smooth and hard packed. It was in fact every bit as nice as he said it was and a beautiful ride to boot that Bill and I had never been on.

So as much as John, especially, dislikes gravel roads, here's the supreme irony. The worst stretch of gravel I've ever been on is John's driveway. His driveway is a tenth of a mile of loose, unpacked, large stone. On top of that, it's about 5 miles of better gravel from the main road to his driveway. More than one OFMC rider has biffed it going to or from his house.

We'll all agree to ride gravel sometimes, but let's just say we don't make John's house a frequent gathering spot.