1200 miles in Colorado

I'm going to get a WR250r in a week and a half, but thought I would show people here a ride I did this August. I've had this KLR for about 5 years and have put about 43,000 miles on it.

OK

Luke my bikes on Berthoud pass at the begging of the ride.



Dunkley pass North of the Flattops.




Norm on Dunkley



BLM land on the way to Maybel



Luke taking a pic.



Where the boat take out used to be downriver of Split Rock.



Norm and Luke at Split Rock




Me

Luke just entering Dinosaur national monument.



On the Bench road in Dinosaur riding towards Echo Park Campground.




Norm checking out the view.







Luke and Norm







Just beautiful.




Luke ya gotta remember to put your kickstand down.




Especially when somebody already has their camera out.



Its a long way down to the river.




Me again.




Norm pointing at something.











Luke is scared of high places so it was fun doing this.









Luke used this fine piece of equipment to fix his XR650r.




Seems his muffler heat shield wasn't doing its job, and he had to relocate it.












He had his butane cartridge right next to his muffler. It could have been bad.

This is Steamboat Rock over the Green River.




Sunrise at Echo Park.















Looking down after riding south out of Echo Park.

So that next day we road out of Echo Park to the metropolis of Dinosaur, CO. This is were we said "see ya" to Norm. Thanks again Norm. And We Road down through Rangely to the Roan Plateau. It was very beautiful, and our first foray out on to dirt roads there was entirely successful, but I didn't take any pics. On National Geographic Topo Colorado it showed roads going over the Roan to Debeque, but Exxon Mobile now owns the land and will not let us have access. While we were trying to find a way through off of Highway 13 we talked to a guy from Exxon about a way over the roan on dirt to I70. He told us to hang a right at mile marker 3 and go up Cow Creek to Rifle. It was very cool. I think Luke has a couple of videos of the ride over, but I have some pics as well.

Top of the Roan North of Rifle











We got to an intersection and asked a old rancher up there how to get down to Rifle. There was a turn that looked like it went down a cliff and had a sign that didn't say Hazardous conditions MAY exist, but said hazardous conditions exist. We thought cool this looks great.











We went down into Rifle and had a good lunch and took off south to Grand Mesa. It was a great ride up to the top. Luke scared a black bear off the road into the bushes. I did not take one picture of the Grand Mesa. How could I have done that?? It was beautiful, with wild flowers everywhere. On top of the grand mesa is where I discovered my radiator fan had quit. So I was kind of worried about that. There was one spot where we had a bit of navigational difficulty, but we figured our way through. We had to take a sorta gnarly quad track to link back up with the road. It started thundering, lightning, and raining while we were on top of the mesa and downpoured with close lightning almost all the way over Kebler pass to Crested Butte.

Here is Luke almost at the Butte.



From Crested Butte we ran down to Gunnison and rented a motel room for the night. We had ridden through rain for about 6 hours and it was about 8 o'clock. This is the hotel we stayed in.



I'll tell you that story a bit later.