It was 100 degrees F today down the hill. A/C at the shop could not keep up. Tonight at home on the mountain: View on the way home:
Saw a small herd at a waterhole while on vacation and up on the Grand Mesa. The young ones were running and splashing in the water!
Lived in Red Lodge, Montana for awhile. It was awesome, if its a hot day in town you can just cruise up the beartooth highway and relax in 35 degrees or colder
Love all of American but that country is really something special! Why on earth would you leave other than work?
I lived there for 2 years. When I got out of high school I went and ran equipment installing transmission pipelines for a few years to get some loot stashed away. Was a beautiful place, but i couldnt be a road warrior forever. I will return to live there someday tho! So until then i just visit, alot.
OFFTOPIC: You lived in Red Lodge? OUTSTANDING! I hope you appreciate what a fantastic corner of the world that place is! I am a long distance, endurance motorcycle rider. The idea is very simple: cover a lot of miles in a short period of time; but it is not a race, it is a rally and seriously, no one can 'race' for thousands of miles anyway. The whole thing is about endurance. Anyway, I was going to my son's place in Tacoma, WA back in '11, when he got back from the 'sandbox', and I live in RI on the east coast so this presented me with a terrific opportunity to do something I had wanted to do for a while, if I could 'hang tough' and actually pull it off. A CC50, or Coast- to- Coast trip in 50 hours or less. There are two versions, the 'standard' or short route, the one which allows some sleep or the northern route, which does not.... the northern route is called a CC50 Gold, or 'CC50, the hard way'. So I loaded up and started my CC50 on 6 June, 2011 at ~ 9:00 AM. Rode to Rye, NY, got my vial of Atlantic water (not required but a tradition) and headed west. Arrived at Ocean Shores, WA and got a vial of Pacific water in less than the allotted 50 hours, in fact, I cracked 48 and took 47:52 for the entire trip. An amazing trip but there are no high mountain passes on Rt. 90, and I really wanted to go through a high pass. So on the way back (a couple of weeks later, after recovering.... more or less) I went home via Beartooth Highway and, of course, Beartooth Pass. The pass had only been open two or three weeks when I was there and there was at least 12' of snow on the side of the road still. But the roads were clear, and it was a beautiful day at ~40F on the top of the pass. Strikingly beautiful. A couple photos of that trip: at the summit, me at the finish in Ocean Shores, and me holding the required start and finish time stamped, dated, computer receipts that are used as part of the qualification for having the ride certified (by the Iron Butt Association, and yes, that is a real organization with some very tenacious, serious members).
They are used as the time / date proof of the start and end of the ride. To document the ride, one must get the form from the Iron Butt Association (IBA) and have at least two witnesses, who can be contacted (and they actually are), make and sign a statement that the rider AND the motorcycle were at the start point on a particular date. Same thing with the end of the ride regarding witnesses. But in addition, the rider needs to document the ride, one of the things I did was to use a satellite tracking device which 'pings' the transponder's location every 10 minutes, and save the data to SpotWalla; mine is here: Coast to Coast Because these are timed rides, the rider needs to document the beginning, end and all stops along the way; those two receipts in the photo are the 'proof' of my starting and ending points, the date and time each one was given. Note the time, and compensate by 3 hours (I went through 4 time zones) and you will see that the gap is 47 hours, 52 minutes, which is my actual trip time. At the end of the ride, those receipts are worth more than gold 'cause the ride cannot be certified without them. The way it works is this: for a Coast- to- Coast ride, the rider MUST start off in a city or town that borders on an ocean (note, my destination was Tacoma, WA but that is on Puget Sound, not the Pacific ocean and so would not work as an end point: I had to go 80 miles past Tacoma to the actual Pacific to finish the ride) and get a computer generated, data and time stamped receipt for something, anything, and the name of the business and address must appear on the receipt. Same thing at the finish. Those two receipts 'prove' to the IBA where and exactly when the ride started and ended, and are bolstered with the rider's log, all receipts along the way (I stopped for fuel 18 times) and the witness statements. Brian
Fun. Well, kinda', in a left- handed sort of way. I was riding for more than 52 hours continuously, never being stopped or off the bike for 30 minutes, and most stops done in less than 3 minutes of stopped time to re-fuel. It was fun but also grueling. At the end, I could not lift my legs over the saddle and had to pick them up by grabbing my own pants cuff and lifting it. I watched two sunsets and two sunrises over my right shoulder. I rode all night through Montana, Idaho and the western part of Washington in the dark, in the rain, all while maintaining the speed limit and maybe just a touch more (75 MPH in the western states). I was the 45th person to accomplish this ride, and most, if not all, of the others used the whole 50 hour envelope. I broke 48 hours and asked where I landed in the 'standings', the IBA will not release that information because 'it is a rally, not a race'. So yeah, it was fun, and I did try it again, two times, but it comes with a price and a fair amount of pain; it was nearly two weeks before I could stand up straight and walk normally. Brian
For an IBA ride the stops along the way are also documented because different routes between points have different mileage. There is a basic Iron Butt 1000 that requires 1000 miles travel in 24 hours. It can pretty much be ridden in any direction, including a full circle but the way points are used to establish the route taken and thus the miles involved. There are all kinds of different challenges including an all 48 states in a short time or a corner to corner where you start at Key West and ride to the end of the road in Alaska. Almost all of the rides are timed challenges. I think the lower 48 is timed at 10 days but I am not an IBA rider. One of the motorcycle forums I am on has a celebrity that has ridden over 20 of the challenges and tends to combine them. He goes by Rollin' and will combine an IBA 1000 with a corner to corner across the US ride as an example. There are a number of recognized routes as well so a ride around Lake Superior can be easily put together as a specific 1000 mile ride.
Ah you could have ridden through Olympia to Aberdeen to Ocean shores and that would have been the coast right there.
