The Great Divide Ride

[Imnosaint]

From my book, Forget that I'm Dying. The ride was in June, 2022.



There were a number of ways I could’ve approached this ride, but the one I was most familiar with, the one I had practiced the majority of in my traveling life, was as a filmmaker.

The ride was a route through the most national parks one could visit in a loop along the Great Divide, including the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, Mesa Verde, the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, the Great Sand Dunes, Rocky Mountain, the Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks. Even though we were starting in the footprint of Utah’s Grand Circle, we skipped the Beehive State, having duly visited Zion, Bryce, Capitol Reef, Canyonlands and Arches National Parks on other trips, stickers adhered.

My walk-on friend and fellow Triumph enthusiast, Brian, was the trip planner and included another rider, Mark, who was supposed to join the adventure mid-tour, somewhere around Denver, but the coronavirus had different plans for him. Brian and I talked at length about the route, sharing maps and spreadsheets, laying out the way with as an efficient schedule as possible. In that process I kept indicating that I’m down for the ride as well, while Brian, having ridden with me through Utah was more than skeptical, he’d seen me travel firsthand, which, I guess, wasn’t very pretty and more daunting than I had recognized for myself. It wasn’t until I asked Brian about his riding jacket, when I realized I wasn’t included in the rider pool. “Why do you want to know?” He said. “Because I want to buy that one for this trip.” “Well, to be clear, what trip are we talking about here?” He asked. “The National Park trip.” I said. And that was awkward. He was thinking I wasn’t up to the arduous nature of riding the three thousand-plus miles in twenty days in June. And I was thinking, “Yeah, I could do that. If not, I could just go home.” This is where talking would’ve come in handy, on both our parts.

Once we got that figured out, I bought new gear, we planned more in earnest, and I invited my friend Ed Candland along. I’d been begging him to join me for another ride since we knocked out the Pacific Coast Highway a decade before. I called him up. “Ed, I’ve got a bucket list. I want to go on a ride and I want to go with you.” It should be noted that Ed is the busiest guy I know, a staple in Utah’s music education scene if not the entire planet traveling all over the globe, and at the time in the throes of building his bow-rehairing business, which through the years were barriers to our riding together, but Ed had just retired from teaching, and I played the cancer card. “I’ve been diagnosed with a rare, aggressive and terminal blood cancer and would really like to ride with you again.” I’ve learned all kinds of things about cancer since I’ve had it rubbed in my face, not the least of which is its persuasiveness. Ed joined the tour.

This is something done not without a good amount of forethought, planning and gearing up. Whether it be for a few days or a few weeks, the gear is the same, it’s just the amount of consumables that changes. While Brian and I were in for the full twenty-plus days, Ed was only able to join us for the first four which included camping at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon and then moving on to Mesa Verde. There are a number of types of gear required for such an adventure, the two at the top of the list are riding and camping gear, of which Ed had none save for his helmet and a jacket I gave him years ago when we did the Pacific Coast Highway ride and documentary, so Ed made a quick trip from his home in St. George to ours in Bountiful where we got him outfitted and packed.

While Brian was making his way from the bay area of California to Southern Utah, Ed and I rode the I-15 corridor three hundred miles to Santa Clara, Utah, where we’d all meet up and officially begin what has become known as the Pearls on the Strand Tour. When I interviewed Brian for this trip’s documentary he talked about his premise of averting his midlife crisis by buying a motorcycle and justifying its acquisition by riding to “Use the national parks as pearls on the strand… and that will pull me forward…” And thus the documentary was named, not realizing how many entendres pearls and strand would soon adopt throughout this journey.

On the night before departure we met to talk about the trip plan and to get Ed and Brian better acquainted which wasn’t difficult to do. I’m not sure what it is, but it’s been my experience when I bring two friends together from disparate backgrounds they click, some click better than we clicked, and that’s okay. If there’s any single meaning I could draw from living it is to make connections, and if that takes a motorcycle trip, those connections root deep. We met at (the) Inn Santa Clara, a dream-come-true vision of my dear friend Jennifer and her architect husband Richard, an innovative departure on how one travels and stays away from home. Inn Santa Clara has become my home away from home whenever I’m in Southern Utah.

We left the Inn early the next morning to escape the heat of early June and get into the altitudes of the Arizona Strip and on to the North Rim. Brian had a campsite reserved at Demotte Campground not far from the Kaibab Lodge where we stopped to set up tents and then made our way to the canyon in the light of a glorious afternoon. One of many little epiphanies that punched through the patina of my self-awareness was how much at home I feel at a national park, and this trip and others would prove that every time we passed that familiar National Park Service signage.

I didn’t realize at the time the struggle Brian was having with me being along for the ride. It wasn’t that he was against it, it was his perpetual wondering if I was going to wake up the next day, call it quits and head home. Therein was a bit of a dilemma for him with the choice of accompanying me back to Bountiful or continuing along the strand on this trip that he not only painstakingly planned, but was also a bucket list for him. I felt his malaise more as a background noise than anything more obvious, even through his persistent welfare checking along the way–nothing bothersome or over the top, he was careful–I remained aloof to his worries and I’m not sure if that was just a simple defense mechanism so I could enjoy the trip. To admit it, it being the guillotine of my condition, was to allow it, as was my thinking along the way, so I stuffed it along with my sensitivity to Brian’s dilemma way down into one of my panniers. The first test of my perseverance would be the day we left the North Rim and rode to Mesa Verde, three hundred sixty six miles. Piece of cake.

Highway 67 out of the North Rim to Jacob Lake and 89A through Marble Canyon and the Navajo Bridge is one of my all-time favorite routes, having traveled it over a dozen times on rides and during production for The Mountain Meadows Massacre documentary. The road leaves the forested Kaibab Plateau and descends into the House Rock Valley, skirting the Vermillion Cliffs National Monument until it crosses the Colorado River, winds up past Antelope Pass Canyon and on to Page, Arizona.

It’s the most beautiful part of the Arizona strip. From Page we rolled through the less-beautiful part of the Strip and left Arizona as we hit The Four Corners and entered into Colorado and made our way to Mancos where Brian had an AirBnB reserved for us just outside of Mesa Verde National Park. It was an amazing day. I arrived tired, but so did the other two and I was no worse for wear. Eighteen days to go.

While my folks were still living in Southern Utah they’d take the time to pack a picnic lunch and head out to the area’s environs in their Dodge Ramcharger, from the Beaver Dam Wash National Conservation Area to Lee’s Ferry and the Cliffdwellers, and all points in between; the impetus of my own wanderlust. I was too busy with my new found social life as a California transplant at a very small, very conservative community college to pay much heed to their accounts of their discoveries, but now their voices come back to me like a narrative when I walk our common ground, and they had a lot to say as we rode through Mesa Verde National Park. I’d been primed for this visit with rock art and petroglyphs from my travels around Utah, but as we hiked into the Long House I was instantly infatuated with the human spirit that created and sustained this ancient domicile. The organization of labor, the calculations, the innovations, and the endurance of this site spoke to two simultaneous notions, the efficacy of community, and us modern folk aren’t as special as we think we are. My parents’ fascination and respect for the indigenous was no longer lost on me while I not only got an introduction to the area’s natural history, I took a deeper dive into their fascination with it and added a new insight into their shared scope of humanity.

 

[Imnosaint]

Ed left the tour the following day making his own memorable solo ride back to Southern Utah with a promise that we’d ride together again, soon. Brian and I rode the Million Dollar Highway through Southwestern Colorado’s spectacular land. Not sure what it is about human nature that gets us to compare things, maybe it’s a survival mechanism, but while we rolled through that part of Colorado I had to let go of my certitude that Utah was the most beautiful place in the country.

From the looming Shiprock on the southern horizon behind us to the San Juan National Forest, to Silverton and beyond, I had my natural beauty schema broadened considerably and made room in my experience for what Colorado had to offer, which kind of prepared me for the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park. Not really. I had no idea.

We entered at the South Rim access and made our way around the western side of the Gunnison River to the Painted Wall. If while visiting you never looked down you’d be hard pressed to whistle in astonishment, but arrive at any place where your gaze makes your optic nerves reflect the river below and you’ll begin to understand that the National Park Service has certain standards to preserve by. I was also beginning to understand that these lands set aside from humanity’s machinations were more than just beautiful and diverse in wildlife and natural history, there was a common feeling that was tying them all together, something more than that nostalgia of the park service signage and entry gates. This was my fourteenth national park, and given that sometimes it takes me a while to realize the background noise of my living, the familiarity of that feeling was punching through my consciousness. I’m trying to define that feeling and what comes to mind is cryptobiotic soil. Any hike along the Escalante Grand Staircase will draw close to this hidden tiny life that just looks like dark dirt, where it’s actually a biome on tiny levels. While cryptobiotic crust is delicate, it can endure the worst the climate can throw at it, but once it’s compromised by an errant boot or mountain bike tire, the entire surrounding system is compromised, wiping out decades of growth and life. I think it’s that precariousness, that survival despite the marching progress of civilization that commands my respect and reverence. That’s the feeling, mixed in with concern and love for the land in the boundaries of what someone had the forethought to set aside and preserve.

We camped at Collegiate Peaks campground west of Buena Vista up Cottonwood Canyon. Brian’s trip planning was paying off with evening respites in beautiful campsites and accommodations making it so all I had to do was keep crashing his party.

“I started out with this – this is the grand culmination of these trips that I have done and these plans that I have made – it’s my trip and Eric is joining me on my trip,” Brian says in his interview for the documentary. “Somewhere in Colorado the trip shifted for me and it shifted in a real material way… it became Eric’s trip. That was a huge shift for me, a really cool shift for me. I was able to really stop treating this as something that was all mine, and this goal was now a shared goal.”

I had no idea. In my cancer-card oblivion I never once considered that this was his gig, the last hurrah of his own national parks tour that would wind up his mid-life crisis. I was the one interviewing Brian for the documentary and was incredulous at first when I heard him honestly express his feelings, not only about whether I was capable of a twenty-plus day, five thousand-mile ride, but about my encroachment into his bucket list. And there we were talking about me in the third person as if I were still in my motel room. This interview was shot on the eve of our early return to Bountiful, where I still had no idea until I rolled camera. He never once let on nor did he ever express his doubts as to whether I’d make it. Instead, Brian became my self-proclaimed concierge for the rest of the trip.

“It wasn’t just ticking off parks. It was seeing him wake up the next day and say, ‘let’s keep going.’ That was really a major shift for me. The last half of this trip has been all about supporting Eric on his journey and that’s created a new journey for me which has been very rewarding for me.” Brian’s eyes were welling up and his voice broke just a little. I sat there behind my tiny GoPro trying to reckon what I just heard as a filmmaker in the luxury of that third-person.

 

[Imnosaint]

We went on to the Great Sand Dunes National Park and on to Denver where we took a break from riding and each other with our respective kids, his son in Denver and my daughter in Longmont. It was a good break. Time for some laundry, a shower or two, to check out the Explorer, to have remarkable Mexican food and the best part, to visit with Katie and Peter. It was during this time I noticed a painful bump forming where my right clavicle makes a junction with my sternum, about the size of a ten millimeter nut. You need to understand that in motorcycle culture, measuring everything is done to that baseline. I was a bit suspicious that it was forming as a reaction to the fact that my throttle hand was down at the operating end of that appendage, so I didn’t give it much thought after that except as an impetus for more Tylenol.

Two sleeps and showers later Brian and I reunited in Longmont and continued our tour along the strand, this day hitting the pearl of Rocky Mountain National Park, an in-and-out to Bear Lake with a bit of hiking and a time-lapse or two before we moved on to Lander, Wyoming. It was there when we were checking into to our rooms for the night where I met what I mistakenly determined to be a young Eastern European woman, the clerk doing the checking, who spoke mostly in monosyllabic bursts with an intended vibe of I’m-not-really-interested-in-talking-to-you which became a personal challenge to me, being a human communication expert and all. The temporal context of this was at the cusp of the American realization that Russia was bombing the crap out of Ukraine and it was suddenly becoming unfashionable to think that Putin was an acceptable role model of a post-democratic western civilization dictator, and Russians in general might not be as friendly and warm as the Stohli commercials would have us believe, not the least of whom was handing us our room keys. So, to break the verbal stalemate I asked if the restaurant across the parking area was any good. She responded in her terse Siberian sneer, “They serve food. What more do you want?” Glasnost did not cover food reviews. Point: Russian desk clerk.

When on the road on a motorcycle there comes a time in every day’s adventure where one molts from their gear–first the gloves, then the helmet, the balaclava, the boots, the outer shell, the riding pants, the wool layers, the compression stockings–giving nudity a newfound joy and purpose. It’s the easiest way to lose thirty pounds. We emerged from our respective rooms clad in civilian attire and decided to forgo the Indian place across the street and try the Food restaurant instead. Also when on the road on a motorcycle, once one parks it at the end of the day, one avoids getting back on it until sunrise the next day out of respect for one’s ass. We walked in, were greeted and seated promptly by a host also of international origin who handed us menus and took our drink orders. The fare looked promising and just as we were asking aloud what the desk clerk might have meant with her strictly descriptive opinion about the establishment’s food, she showed up to take our order, desperate, it seemed, to keep her eyes from rolling. I don’t recall what we ordered, but we did refrain from asking her for any recommendations.

You’ve seen similar nut-cases, I’m sure, mounted atop ADV bikes, typically BMWs, clad in gear with prominent insignias testifying to the rider’s credit card debt justified under the guise of reducing uncertainty in the event that the shiny side goes down instead of up. There’s a tell-tale indication of who’s a neophyte and who’s a veteran rider by the distance between the shoulder pads of their riding jackets and the bottom of their brain buckets. Those who ride in fear have less distance. And when this traveling sideshow comes to a stop it attracts two kinds of onlookers, the wannabes and the donethats. The former have a reverence and awe while their eyes scan the machine crusted over in the ride’s patina and inevitably the word someday is mumbled, right after they ask if that’s a BMW. The latter is a bit more foreboding.

During our Pandemic Northwest Tour, Addie and I stopped at a market in Mendocino for lunch, and as we were in the process of peeling, an old guy pulled up in an old pickup truck and asked the usual origin/destination questions before he got into his cautionary tale of laying down his Electra Glide to avoid a collision with some old lady behind the wheel of her Oldsmobile, taking off his left leg up to his knee and bashing his unhelmeted skull in on the chrome bumper of the car, only to live so he can recount the story to us, to Addie especially. Not to mention, “Isn’t that too much bike for you?” or “What’s a girl like you doing on a bike like that?” They’re like zombies.

I guess there’s a third type, but they don’t approach us because they’re scurrying the opposite direction, covering their children’s eyes. And rightfully so.

We left Lander for the spectacular ride through the Bridger-Teton National Forest that delivers every motorist and some even nuttier bicyclists to a vista of the Grand Tetons. My introduction to this gathering of summits was when Mindy and I first visited Yellowstone two-up on my Blackbird. We approached the park from West Yellowstone and popped out the south side on Highway 191 having no idea of what we were going to ride by or through, this before the days of GPS and handy smartphones. Come to think of it, travel was better then without the electronically mediated expectation of someone’s fancy Instagram, Tik-Tok or Facebook posts boasting of their conquest of a roadside vista. The Blackbird sped us along parallel to the Grand Tetons where we finally succumbed to a turnout to stop and be awed. It was raining hard while the range’s metamorphic gneiss knifed the dew point of the atmosphere’s ceiling, their abruptness and grandeur sealing indelibly into my brain and my heart. Such was the feeling, once again, as Brian and I looked over the Teton Valley to their majesty, draped in the day’s air pressure collisions of mist.

Such visions are stupefying to me, not in a slack-jawed, oh-my-god kind of way, but in a mindless detachment of anything that might demand a bit of vigilance on my part. We parked along the side of the road at a summit to get some shots. I’ve been in the habit of hanging my helmet on the right-side passenger foot peg, out of the way of accessing the panniers while still being a safe spot to stash the most important riding gear on my person. For some reason I decided to remove the loaded pannier from the left side and as I lifted it from its frame and set it on the ground, the weight of the right-side pannier pulled my Tiger over on a highside drop, my helmet breaking its fall. Honestly, any kind of tipping on a motorcycle is going to be expensive; the Blackbird tipped over onto its highside while parked, crushing a fiberglass pannier and some other bits, resulting in a repair costing in excess of three grand. The Tiger’s tip wasn’t quite so exorbitant, especially since I haven’t had the heart or the means to replace the Schuberth helmet. Its outer shell was scarred, but the impact absorbing liner was fine, or so I kept telling myself, warding off the superstitious whisperings of every YouTube video I’ve ever watched about motorcycle helmets.

 

[dierkz]

Awesome trip and report!

 

[Imnosaint]

We reached our campsite at Lizard Creek on the north end of Jackson Lake and I quickly settled in for a nice late-afternoon in a hammock while all the miles accumulated to that point settled into me, stoking the effects of the maintenance chemotherapy and making me think I had no business being there at all. I could see Brian by the fire ring in his Big Agnes camp chair looking at his iPhone, no doubt checking weather conditions, but I couldn’t pull focus on him.

My large bones ached, from my femurs and pelvis to my sternum, the 10mm lump, clavicles, and humeri, pain I had wrongly attributed to the time on the Tiger. Eleven days into this I was bound to be feeling some effects. My skin burned in a rash in stupid places like my eyebrows, inner ears, the mucous membranes of my mouth and all over my chest and throughout my groin. My ears started ringing, again, not unusual given the amount of wind noise I subjected myself to during the day’s ride. I would’ve had ear plugs but my aural canals were so inflamed that I couldn’t keep them in. As I was trying to parse out the effects from the ride against the Rituximab in my bloodstream, I felt myself slipping, fingers and toes going cold, my core flush with sweat. I could feel the cortisol and adrenaline radiating and lighting up my limbic system with panic; all responses with which I was not only familiar, I had training to abate their effects – four-count in, four-count retain, four-count out, four-count resist, repeat; get feet higher than my heart–easy to do in a hammock; focus on an object, this being the second hand of my Citizen diver’s watch. If I crash there’s no way in hell recovery could get to me in time, especially since my ego prohibited me from alerting Brian to my tumbling. Compounding the panic I began to understand at depth the jeopardy I not only put myself in, but I subjected Brian to as well, potentially disrupting his dream trip and turning the Great Divide tour into a logistical nightmare.

Inhale, hold, exhale, hold, tick-tick-tick, seconds, moments, minutes. My extremities are flushing, my head is pounding, the pain has ramped, but my wits returned. I cupped my hands over my mouth and breathed to abate the hyperventilation. The ringing cleared and my left arm resumed a resting position, giving me a clear shot of stocking feet raised up in the other end of the hammock, just above my head. I didn’t say anything to Brian. I slept better that night than any night previous on that ride.

The following morning Brian’s concierge/spidey senses must have been tingling since he beaned me straight into my eyes and asked if I was okay. “Let’s keep going,” I said. Having survived the previous evening’s peril I was ready, again, to take it all on. Only Mother Nature could dissuade me at that point, mounting up and riding out of Lizard Creek on to the John D. Rockefeller Memorial Parkway to the south entrance of Yellowstone National Park, where she said, “Hold my beer.”

The rain started just before we went through the entrance station and persistently increased in volume as we rode along the Lewis River. We stopped at Lewis Falls for a breather and a pic or two and a reassessment of the day’s plan; make it over the Beartooth Highway to Red Lodge, Montana, where we’d have a nice relaxing stay. We were both soaked, but not soaked through, our gear doing what we paid for it to do, so we mounted and rode on over the Great Divide around Yellowstone Lake where Mother Nature was noticeably amping up her dissuasive attempts.

We stopped at Lake Yellowstone Lodge for a bite and some coffee and after Brian consulted his iCharts it was clear Beartooth Pass was out of the question since it was engulfed in blizzard conditions and the National Weather Service began warning us of Mother Nature’s wrath. We got back on the Grand Loop Road, crossed over the Yellowstone River onto Highway 14, up past Avalanche Peak where it was snowing and Brian cursing, and carefully ambled along the shelf road that Fourteen turns into along Middle Creek, which was no longer a creek. I’ve been in and covered enough flooding events to know what that smells like, and even several hundred feet above the river, I could smell its trouble and our egress of Yellowstone became even more hasty. Tourists in the national park weren’t so lucky. Five inches of rainfall and as much snowpack melt combined to wash out roads and shut down the park right behind our exit to Cody.

We had a yard sale in a Pizza Hut in Cody. Yard sale is more of a river running or kayaking term where one swamps their craft losing all the contents therein. The moto version of yard sale is getting a booth at a franchise restaurant and peeling off all the saturated Gore-Tex layers, gloves, helmets, balaclavas, do-rags, liners and midlayers, maintaining just enough room to sit down and nurse a cup of coffee. It was in that state when we realized we should’ve checked out that Pizza Hut a little closer, and since I won’t say anything if I can’t say anything nice, I’ll leave our yard sale experience at that.

Back on our Triumphs we ambled through Buffalo Bill Cody’s namesake in Wyoming and pointed the Tigers north to Montana looking forward to reserved, warm, dry hotel accommodations and staging yet another yard sale in our respective rooms to dry out our tents, bags, pads and riding gear. We rode through rain and amazing cloud formations all the way, skirting around the Beartooth Highway while the weather system that made it unrideable was now dogging us through Badger Basin, up to Belfry where we turned west to Red Lodge. We found our spot at the end of the Beartooth Highway, the Beartooth Hideaway Inn, nestled on the other side of the road adjacent to Rock Creek. We parked the bikes under the lobby’s covered entrance and dismounted. The smell was back, that earthy, mulchy, sewery odor of a torrent tearing down river banks and washing trees and fauna downstream, but we were too worn to pay much heed, even to the roar of the water on the other side of the highway.

We checked into our respective rooms, staged the yard sales and changed into street clothes with sensible shoes. We were on opposite ends of the facility, my end being the closest to the highway and the river where I parked my Tiger close to the hotel’s east entrance by their indoor pool to reduce the steps I’d be taking to unload my bike. After porting the last pannier to my room, I stepped back outside to see what the smell and the roar was all about. There across the road was Rock Creek, chewing away at its banks, four, maybe five feet higher than usual, hitting the bridge of the 308 that intersected the highway just to the north of our position. The road was still open and its reinforced bank and steel guardrails appeared to be doing their engineered jobs. Brian joined me at the river’s edge and we watched the violent grayish brown current cave in the banks on the east side and undulate over the debris that was lodging underneath from upstream. “I’ll bet you we’ll be evacuated come morning,” I said.

My fatigue had compounded with the day’s chase and without much ground gained from crashing the afternoon before in Lizard Creek. Despite protein-loading and amping on caffeine I felt physically aloof, my brain not letting go of the perception of speed on the bike, making any perambulation on my own seem like slow motion. We were just past the halfway point of the Great Divide tour with Glacier National Park next on the strand, a place as sacred to me as the Tetons. Beyond Glacier was a loop around to Teddy Roosevelt National Park, down to Mount Rushmore and Custer State Park in South Dakota, back to Rock Springs and home to Bountiful, another two thousand miles. I knew it was on the itinerary that Brian so carefully and meticulously planned with reservations, but I could not fathom even the four hundred twenty miles to Glacier. I had hit the wall without the power of the eroding torrent of my own will.

We talked over options at length, one being Brian would continue on to complete his plan while I made my way back to Bountiful, but he abruptly sacked the notion and suggested we double back to Cody and figure out our exit plan from there. Glacier was in the path of the storm front currently dogging us, and the Dakotas held the promise of century-mark temps; one extreme to the other, enough to acquiesce to Mother Nature and call it. As handy an explanation as that would’ve been for cutting the tour short, it wasn’t the true reason for Brian’s retour with me. I was the reason. He wasn’t going to let me travel home on my own in my condition.

 

[Imnosaint]

I went back to my room, turned up the heat and crawled into bed and slept hard for almost ten hours. I would’ve slept longer were it not for Brian banging on my door at seven the next morning shouting, “They’re evacuating us! We’ve got to get moving.” The room was still strewn from the yard sale and I was still trying to figure out where the hell I was. I opened the door to find Brian there. “We gotta go now. You okay?” I could see past him down the short hallway past the indoor pool out to the parking lot where I left the Tiger. I could see the river from there. “You better move your bike,” he said, and he was right. I dressed in my riding gear and moved my bike to the hotel’s covered entry. On my way back to my room I saw what was left of the highway, the northbound lanes gone along with the sidewalk, concrete retaining wall and the guardrail.

Once we got the bikes loaded our departure from the hotel was hampered by a massive front-end loader trying to vacate in the same direction. There were power lines overhead that were twanging like huge bass strings on a piano as their anchors were being undermined on the diminishing bank of the river that was now cresting and flowing into our direction. Both of us twisted the throttles and scooted past the tractor onto a side street that took us up above a bench west of the flooding town, its Broadway now a fork of the raging Rock Creek.

We detoured north out of Red Lodge up to a road that took us back to Bridger and Montana’s State Road 72 that follows and crosses the Clark’s Fork of the Yellowstone River a number of times. Each bridge was attended by State DOT workers, yellow lights and high-vis vested men seemingly determining the integrity of each structure being battered by the high water. Wyoming had the same vigilance. We rolled into Cody and found vacancies at a mid-century motor-inn where we could park the Triumphs just outside of each room and prepare for the next day’s travel, four hundred and forty miles to Bountiful. The motel had a courtyard of sorts, a place where I could go into filmmaker mode and shoot the interview with Brian with a backdrop of the motel’s context, our bikes nosed into the parking spaces, our conversation putting me into the third person.

We wrapped the Pearls on the Strand documentary and the Great Divide Tour the following day after an uneventful eight-hour ride back to Bountiful. No return to Utah would be complete, though, without a photo op at the Devil’s Slide. It has other names, but I’m assuming to write to polite company. Brian made his way back to the bay area the following day.

At that point, I was 0 for 3. We cut the Pacific (Pandemic) Northwest Tour short due to mechanical issues, the Grand Canyon (Escalante) ride short due to me issues, and now this. I needed a win, a completion, the same determination that got me back on the Tiger to do a successful solo Pacific Northwest ride the following August.

 

[Imnosaint]

Awesome trip and report!

Thank you. There's more...

 

[HopeOverLandandSea]

Incredible trip report, LOVED the pictures and was riding right along with you as I hit many of those same locations in 2023. I clicked over and subscribed to your YT channel, looking forward to watching the reports there.

Hoping that you are on the journey back to health. I remember your timeline from this trip very specifically as we originally had planned to be in Yellowstone the week of that flooding. Instead we decided to to wait and planned our trip up to Niagara Falls. (Summer 2022)

This story really resonates with me as my wife had already gotten weaker and spent much of our trip in a wheel chair any time we had to walk to see something. We thought it was her recovering from arthritis / new meds but turned out her cancer had come back. We found out about 2 weeks after getting home and then she passed away in August 2022 about 5 or 6 weeks after that trip.

Stay strong, fight the good fight.
Sam

 

[Imnosaint]

Incredible trip report, LOVED the pictures and was riding right along with you as I hit many of those same locations in 2023. I clicked over and subscribed to your YT channel, looking forward to watching the reports there.

Hoping that you are on the journey back to health. I remember your timeline from this trip very specifically as we originally had planned to be in Yellowstone the week of that flooding. Instead we decided to to wait and planned our trip up to Niagara Falls. (Summer 2022)

This story really resonates with me as my wife had already gotten weaker and spent much of our trip in a wheel chair any time we had to walk to see something. We thought it was her recovering from arthritis / new meds but turned out her cancer had come back. We found out about 2 weeks after getting home and then she passed away in August 2022 about 5 or 6 weeks after that trip.

Stay strong, fight the good fight.
Sam

Oh, Sam, I'm heartbroken to hear about your companion. It appears her days were full and beautiful with you escorting her to the sights and sounds of your travel, the best therapy there is. I've subbed to your YT channel as well and see a lot of familiar trails. Keep it up. Travel is also a great salve for broken hearts.

Hope you keep in touch, and I hope to see you out there.

Cheers,

Eric