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Family Style Run to Highway 36

THE SIGN on Highway 36, Northern California.

I’ve been letting this li’l blog languish for some time: too busy doing, not much time for documenting. Anyway, excuses aside…

I’d been wanting to head up to ride the legendary Highway 36 and a few months back my pops happened to mention that he’d heard of a mythical road up in Northern California that was “over 100 miles, curves all the way to the coast.” Highway 36. Surprisingly, he said he wanted to ride it with me, surprising because he rides a big cruiser and likes to well, just cruise. So I hatched a plan to get my brother Justin to ride down from Oregon and meet us at one end of 36 so the three of us could ride it together over Labor Day weekend.

Long story short: Justin was on his way to meet us in Eureka when his bike died in Crescent City. My dad and I rode up to see if we could help him out, but the bike refused to return to life, so the next morning my dad and I rode back down to Fortuna and headed over 36 while Justin waited for his tolerant and understanding wife Ruth to come get him.

36 is a truly amazing road: 140 miles of up-and-down twisties between Fortuna and Red Bluff. There are many awesome roads in CA but the cool thing about 36 is that you’re basically out in the middle of nowhere for 140 miles—you don’t really see too many cars. And the terrain changes a lot. Make sure you fill your tank and bring water – it was cold when we started out in Fortuna but got up to 100 degrees for the last third of the ride as we closed in on Red Bluff.

All in, we did about about 940 miles in just under 38 hours. Not exactly Iron Butt mileage, but not too shabby. Next up: can I do this run in one day? Up the coast from SF to Skaggs and then Fortuna, across 36 to Red Bluff and back down 5 to home?

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Photos: Easter Morning Pre-sunrise Ride Up Mount Tamalpais

The view from Mount Tamalpais at dawn on Easter 2012.

There’s a long-standing tradition in the San Francisco Bay Area motorcycle community: the annual ride up Mount Tamalpais on Easter morning. The idea is to get to the top before sunrise to catch the view as the sun comes up. It’s a pretty big deal: I’m not sure exactly how many bikes there was, but it was a LOT.

I somehow managed to drag myself out of bed at 4 AM to make it to the meetup point by 5:20 AM. I’m glad I did. It was cold, but worth it to see the sun come up on the Bay Area from Mount Tam. I’m not much of a group rider, but the few I’ve gone on—like the annual Halloween Friday night ride in SF—have been enjoyable and interesting.

I took a lot of photos. Miraculously, a few came out ok.

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I Might Need a Heated Vest

Cow on the road on Del Puerto Canyon Road.

Cow on the road on Del Puerto Canyon Road.It was supposed to rain this afternoon, but I wanted to ride the Mount Hamilton>Del Puerto Canyon>Mines loop I rode last Sunday. I also just installed some Barkbuster S1 handguards and wanted to see how they worked at keeping my hands warm.

Turns out it was a really good thing I installed those handguards: my bike’s thermometer was reading 34 degrees on the front side of Hamilton and my sandwich-grabbers were chilly. I know that’s not cold for you “Yeah, I ride my GSA in the snow, so what?” kind of guys—but that’s pretty cold for us California folks. The good news is between my heated grips and the handguards, I did ok. I did spend a few minutes warming up with a skinny mocha (gotta fit into my leathers!) in Patterson before heading back over Del Puerto Canyon to Mines road.

Unfortunately, I’m not super-happy about the pair of Held Warm ‘n’ Dry gloves I picked up a couple months ago. I had high hopes: the Warm ‘n’ Dries have great reviews and supposedly work well with heated grips. Plus, I love my Held Steve IIs, just as I loved the pair of Steves I wore out before the Twos. But the supposedly Warm (and Dries) don’t transmit heat from the grips very well, and they’re so stiff that I feel very disconnected from the controls. Not good. So, I’m on the hunt for a new pair of winter gloves. Maybe the SF D-store has something for me.

So in summary… I endured near-freezing temps in unsatisfactory gloves, lost count of the cows in the road, and the rear was end stepping out more than a cheatin’ wife in a country song on the dirty roads… but I had a hell of a time. And I made it home before it started raining.

Google Maps route over here, if you’re looking to do this loop yourself.

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Brisk Winter Ride & A Sweet Photo of SF

Treasure Island view of San Francisco + BMW R1200R.
Treasure Island view of San Francisco + BMW R1200R.

I headed out last Sunday for a quick loop over Mount Hamilton, across Del Puerto Canyon Road to Patterson, then back over to Mines and back to San Francisco. Check out my route and for extra points, the Yelp reviews for Del Puerto Canyon Road: “Why is there an option to review a friggen road?”

Good question, but it turns out there are reviews for Mines Road (“Yes it is a HELL OF A RIDE!”), Mount Hamilton (“Amazing views. A drive not for the faint of heart.”), and of course, The Junction (“Awesome, motorcycle haunt in the middle of no where. 10 stars for the food.”).

It was a classically Bay Area-beautiful day for a ride: temps stayed between the high forties and low sixties, and the roads were reasonably clean and dry for the most part. Surprisingly, I only saw a few other riders, including a slow-moving noob on a little dual-purpose bike. High five for your gumption, noobie!

It was clearer than usual, so I stopped off on Treasure Island to snap some photos of the city, where a friendly tourist took this photo of me with my bike. Here’s hoping the weather holds so I can get in another ride this weekend. If not, I can also tinker with my bike—I have some new bits from Touratech and TwistedThrottle to bolt on in the name of adventure via accessory purchases.

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Ride Report: Ebbetts, Monitor & Sonora Passes Before Winter Closure

After I rode Sonora Pass as part of my 4 day California ride a couple weeks ago, I got to thinking it’d be great to head up to Ebbetts Pass before the snow hits and closes things down for the winter. So I put together a loop from San Francisco to Ebbetts Pass to Monitor Pass to Sonora Pass and back to San Francisco and said to my friend Gregg, “Hey man, what do you think about heading up to Ebbetts and Sonora Pass this Saturday?” He responded with an enthusiastic “Hell yes!” so the ride was go.

As the week progressed, the weather predictions ranged from really good to “uh oh…” with rain and snow up in the mountains. The passes gets up to almost ten thousand feet in several places, so the weather can be pretty intense and there has already been significant snow. But according to CalTrans, the roads were still open and as the week progressed the weather looked more and more amazing: sunny and not raining or snowing. At the end of the week, I heard from a couple guys who’d been up to Ebbetts during the week and road conditions were good. So Saturday morning, we headed out around 7:30 AM and rode across the valley. We stopped to gas up in Murphys and then the real riding began.

Highway 4 up to Ebbetts was amazing. New, clean pavement and not much traffic. We stopped to take photos here and there, but it was hard to not stop about every ten feet – it’s just so damn beautiful everywhere up there. As the day progressed my threshold of “Wow, I should take a picture of that” got a lot higher – we had almost five hundred miles to cover.

We grabbed lunch somewhere along 395 as we cut over from Monitor to Sonora Pass, and struggled a bit to avoid a food coma-induced slowdown as we headed out for Sonora. Since I just rode this Sonora (the other direction) a couple weeks ago, it felt amazing and familiar. For Gregg, who’d never ridden any of these roads, it felt amazing but also a little sketchy. These are not easy roads – lots of blind turns and up-down, off-camber madness. Awesome fun once you find your rhythm.

We stopped off in Jamestown on the other side of Sonora Pass. We gassed up the bikes (and gassed up ourselves with espresso and ice cream cones) for the 140 mile freeway death march back to SF. Total saddle time for the day: about 12 hours, minus photo stops and lunch.

The R1200R continues to prove its mettle – it’s just an amazingly composed, rideable bike. Twelve hour days in the saddle? No problem! I’ve had it about 6 weeks now and I’ve turned over 3,000 miles on it already.

So here are some photos – mostly mine, but there are a few of Gregg’s shots in here too.

And here’s the trip on Spotwalla, as tracked by my Spot Satellite Messenger.

Google Maps route over here, if you’re looking for an awesome day-long ride.

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Ride Report: 4 Days Across California On My New R1200R

Bridge over not-so-troubled waters at Redinger Lake.A little over a month ago, I broke down and bought a new bike – a BMW R1200R Classic – yeah, that one. The Gentleman’s Hooligan Bike. I’ve had it just over five weeks, and it’s already got almost 2,500 miles on it. I put about 1,000 miles of that on it in the last 4 days.

My route was something like this:

Day 1: South out of San Francisco to San Jose, over to Mount Hamilton and across the valley through Patterson to the covered bridge in Knight’s Landing, through Chinese Camp and across Don Pedro Reservoir, through Tuolumne City and into the mountains headed towards Strawberry via Deadwood. Yes, there’s a Deadwood in California too, or at least there’s the word “Deadwood” on a map. Turns out there’s nothing there – as I found out after miles of dirt fire trails. Video to come. After about ten more miles of gnarly fire roads, I headed up through Strawberry and over Sonora Pass in time to see some beautiful sunset scenery, down 395 and into Lee Vining/Mono Lake. I made camp (got a hotel room) in Lee Vining and crashed out for the night.

Day 2: I grabbed breakfast at Nicely’s (who weren’t especially nice to me) and headed out for an early walk around Mono Lake. No, not all the way around. I then saddled up and headed up and over Tioga Pass, and down through Yosemite where they were doing a maintenance burn – lots of smoke. Video of that to come, too. From there, I rode down 41 out of Yosemite to Fish camp and Sugar Pine and then along Bass Lake. I then headed down Italian Bar Road, which turned out to be a crazy goat trail descending to Redinger Lake and then rode back up the other side. I had routed another hundred plus miles of this goat trail stuff but when the roads started turning to dirt trails again I gave up and made my way back out to some pavement and rode down out of the hills towards Visalia where I crashed for the night.

Day 3: I was exhausted from all the hairball goaty stuff, so I slept in and then relaxed a bit and sipped coffee. Once I got rolling, I headed across the valley, up through Atascadero and into Los Osos where I met the nice folks from Elemental Herbs (and scored some awesome lip balm!) and enjoyed the best damn roasted veggie sammich I’ve ever had at the BeLoved Cafe. From Los Osos, I headed up through Morro Bay and on up Highway 1, hoping to make Monterey before the rain hit. No such luck – I had to suit up in my raingear a couple hours from Monterey and ended up riding up the last leg of Highway 1 through Big Sur after dark, in the rain. Not so much fun.

Day 4: While reviewing my maps in the breakfast room at my hotel, I discovered that Wunderlich’s US office is in Watsonville – gotta stop there. In the parking lot of the hotel, I met some of the folks from MCi Tours – they were just wrapping up three weeks on the road. And here I thought I was pretty bad ass with my four days of riding. Eventually I got enough coffee in me and the roads had started drying out, so I headed for Watsonville to check out the Wunderlich shop. After that I stopped in La Selva Beach for a surprise visit with my Grandma. After hanging with Grams for a bit, I headed through Santa Cruz and up the last leg of Highway 1, home to San Francisco. Thankfully, I only ran into a light rain here and there and made it home nice and dry.

More to come, but a few things to note:

  1. The R1200R is the greatest bike that has ever existed. Solid, predictable handling and plenty of guts – it handled everything I threw at it with impeccable composure, including 15 miles or so of off-roading. Fabulous bike!
  2. I ran a GoPro Hero video camera on my handlebars and captured about 60 gigs of video. I’ll post the tasty bits once I’ve dredged through it all – including my visit to legendary Deadwood.
  3. I need to plan more of these long rides. I want to ride the Cal 24 in 2013, and I need to do lots of “training” for that. ;)
  4. The R1200R is the greatest motorcycle that has ever existed.

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Dirtbag Challenge 2011 Photos

Headed out to my favorite San Francisco motorbike event today – the Dirtbag Challenge. If you’re not familiar, basically it’s a loosely “organized” annual contest where folks build crazy-ridiculous bikes for less than $1000 (including the cost of the bike) in thirty days or less. Good clean American fun, in a “Wow, I can’t believe the cops still haven’t shown up” kind of way.

The entries are always very interesting, and the bonus is all the cool bikes people ride to the event. Pretty sure that I lost the last remaining bits of hearing I had during a particular smokey burnout session. Never mind the chunks of burned-up tires in my lungs.

Quote of the day that pretty much sums up the event : while waiting for the bikes to come in from the required ride – the bikes have to be rideable – we overheard two dudes talking. “Oh, maybe this is them coming in now… no, wait – those don’t sound sketchy enough.” Someone else pointed out that the headlights seemed too bright, to which I responded “That, and they have headlights.” Seriously, some of these bikes are amazing pieces of work and some of them are just plain dangerous.

Anyways… super fun as always. Check out the pics – maybe by next year I’ll learn how to use my camera. Or maybe I’ll build a bike instead.

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2011 BMW R1200R Classic: The Gentleman’s Hooligan Bike

My taste in motorbikes often runs towards the hooligan side of the street – such as my ’07 Speed Triple SE – but I also have a long-running love affair with comparatively “sensible” Boxer-engined Beemers, ever since I rode a buddy’s yellow R90S cafe racer many years ago. Lately, I’ve had my eye on a black and green Rockster around the corner at MotoJava – seems like it’d be a perfect 2-up city bike.

2011 BMW R1200R Classic
2011 BMW R1200R Classic

I wasn’t too excited when I heard there were mild updates to the R1200R for 2011, until I got a load of the R1200R Classic over on Hell For Leather. That’s right – chrome spoked wheels and black paint with white accents gets me every time. And the bike has had decent real world horsepower (110 hp and 88 ft.lb of torque) for a couple years or so now, although I have heard some significant complaints about the reliability of the 1200 engine. Very un-BMW!

I disagree, though, with Hell For Leather’s characterization of the BMW roadster rider as a slipper-wearing, pipe-smoking traditionalist, complete with monocle. Granted, this isn’t the bike for popping block-long wheelies and screaming from stoplight to stoplight with the back tire in flames, but I think it’d make a perfect San Francisco urban assault vehicle. Throw some heated grips and a top box on there, and you’re good to go. Tractable power and a reasonably slim albeit not-so-girlish figure make for an awesome lane splitter, and it should handle well enough to make weekend jaunts down the coast plenty of fun. Yes, please.