I LUV the Valley OH!
posted by: Ty 6/24/09
Life is good in Death Valley, on a dual-sport motorcycle. Aboard one of these two-wheeled Swiss Army knives you can visit vistas so amazing that the scenery becomes more important than the ride itself. Imagine that. You want to slow down and take it all in. Stop a while. Inhale the view.
One of the truly great things about living in Southern California is that Death Valley, and the adjacent Panamint Mountain range, are only about 300 miles away. Quite rideable to and from.
And it may be criminal to say on a site named RockMoto, but this is one place where the some of best moments don’t include either your preferred music or the even sound of a motorcycle. Near silence is best. Just the whoosh of the wind through the grass and bush, and the rhythm of your very own body, are more than enough and all you really want in Death Valley.
Sit there on a lonely boulder for a while and you can be overcome by the realization of what you actually are. Pretty much just a sand flea on the endless beach that is the cosmos. The stone scenery all around you was here ages before any of us showed up, and will be here eons after you blow away like so much desert dust.
Wait till dark, look up, and the lack of city lighting fills the black sky with more shining stars than you’ve ever seen. Billions of them, projecting their twinkles from millions of light years away. Again, you’re reminded that in the grand scheme of things, you’re a speck, completely insignificant and irrelevant.
“I yam what I yam, and tha’s all I yam,” says Popeye the Sailor Man. But, for the moment, you’re here, you understand your tiny place in the universe, you have just enough sense to be able to take it in and appreciate it. And there are always more trails to ride, so who cares?
You can’t really do Death Valley right without a dual-purpose motorcycle. There are some rather fast, smooth highways that snake their way through the base of the valley. And they are entertaining. But to get to the really amazing places, you need to go off-road, and you still need to be street-legal. This is a National Park, after all, and Mr. Ranger is not going to let you enjoy your open-class motocross bike where hikers and mountain-bikers also roam.
Yes, you can drive to the good spots with a 4x4 Jeep, truck or SUV. But I’ve watched these rolling cages out on the trails, and the washboards and ruts just bounce their occupants up and down like Whack-a-Moles at the arcade. Mostly seems like a good way to churn up one’s lunch.
On a dual-sport, you stand up and let your legs absorb any of the bumps your long-travel suspension doesn’t eat up. You enjoy the trail, instead of fighting it, and kind of glide across the wilderness. You certainly feel more like you are out there, a part of it, immersed in the surroundings, not just looking at it through a windshield, detached. Once again, when it’s car vs. bike, the two-wheeler prevails.
The must-do ride is Titus Canyon. First, head over the border to Nevada and gas up in itty bitty Beatty, the kind of place I like calling a “garden spot.” Turn around and pay a visit to the creepy ghost town of Rhyolite, named after the volcanic rock. The skeletal remains of the Cook Bank stand out here. You quickly understand why the crusty pioneers heading West across America bothered to stick around someplace where it gets to be 120 degrees in the summer. Mining. Money. Quick riches, or at least the dreams of them.
Keep going and get on the trail to Titus Canyon. This is what Death Valley is all about. The deeper you ride into the canyon the quicker the terrain changes. Turn a corner and the view’s completely different in texture and color. A brainy friend once told me that Death Valley has a greater concentration of diverse geological formations than any other site on Earth. I don’t doubt him. Red rock to green rock. Marbled rock to sulfur yellow. Smooth to jagged and sandstone shale to solid hard. It’s all here.
The path turns into a wild ride of darkened switchbacks, claustrophobically weaving between towering limestone on either side of the trail. And then, just like that, you pop out on the other side, into the broad daylight, and headed toward the flat, alluvial plain that is the center of the valley.
Keep going and you’ll wind up on the bottom of the valley floor, at a site named Badwater, 282 feet beneath sea level and the lowest point in all of North America. Not far away are the crazy nine miles of paved road called Artist’s Drive. One lane of smooth, fresh asphalt, cut through solid volcanic rock, diving up and down over the foothills like a giant black strand of squid-ink pasta. With a light, nimble dual-purpose bike, this might be the most fun on two wheels that you can pack into a few minutes.
And there’s much more, spread over roughly 3,000 square miles. Dante’s View. Furnace Creek. Mosaic Canyon, the Devil’s Golf Course. I can barely touch on the many things magical to macabre in Death Valley, and my words don’t do it any justice. Widely known for being hottest/driest/lowest, it’s simply one of the greatest places to ride your motorcycle.
Get there.
Grit and Bear It
posted by: Jessica 12/17/08
It was early autumn in the Northeast, and I planned to ride an Aprilia Tuono from my home in Stamford, Connecticut, to the Berkshires to spend a weekend with my folks. When I left at noon, it was a glorious, Indian summer kind of day – blue skies, warm air and leaves everywhere tinged with color. I stopped at a friend’s house and borrowed some bungees to lash my backpack to the rear seat. He pointed to dark clouds in the distance and asked if I wanted to borrow a rain suit too. No, I said, I didn’t feel like carrying anything else. And who cared if I got a little wet?
So I wound through the twisties of western Connecticut, heading north to the Massachusetts border. I rode by bubbling rivers and glassy reservoirs on roads canopied by lush trees, while a cool wind breezed through my open jacket. Heaven. Then I got near Canaan, and I looked up at a completely black sky. That’s funny, I thought, it was blue just a second ago.
Moments later, I was dumped on. Buckets of rain, thick drops pounding through the tiny holes in my mesh jacket. My jeans were soaked in an instant, and I couldn’t see the lines on the road. But there was nowhere to pull over for shelter. So I stayed on the throttle, just trying to be smooth in the driving rain. Stay cool, I thought, while my heart pounded. And please, bike, stay upright.
I chugged on through, and within ten minutes, the rain stopped. The sky cleared and the sun reappeared above. Ha, I said to myself. I can handle that. I started to dry out, feeling like a trooper. I laughed in the face of danger. Then, a few minutes later, I looked up and saw huge, dark clouds.
Oh, no.
It poured for half an hour, until I got to Stockbridge. I was close to my parents’ house by then, so I gritted my teeth and kept going. I’m not that hard core – honestly, every bone in my body wanted to stop – but I just wanted to get it over with. Sheets of water covered the streets, and other drivers had actually pulled off the road. All I had was two tires with two quarters’ worth of traction, and I couldn’t see a damn thing. I wiped my visor every few seconds with my dripping, gloved hand and repeated to myself over and over: Stay cool, stay cool.
Just a few minutes before I got to my parents’ neighborhood, the sky completely cleared up. It was sunny and 80 degrees, a perfect, gorgeous day. Apparently, it hadn’t rained at all near the house. Not a single drop of water on a single blade of grass.
When I pulled up to the house, my parents were relaxing on the porch, wearing shorts and flip-flops and sipping iced tea. I got off the bike, soaked to the absolute bone, and peeled off my soggy jacket. I took off my gloves, revealing hands that were stained black with dye. I stood there for a few moments, shivering, while my folks fanned themselves with the newspaper. Finally, my dad shook his head and said, “You make that look like fun.”
