Riding in paradise

My friends and I did a little 180-mile loop today.
We set out about 10 a.m. from their home above Alma, Colo., and headed down Colo. 9 to Fairplay where we gassed the bikes.
Tim and Linda have yellow BMW F650 GS bikes with big stainless steel Jesse saddlebags. Their bikes are perfectly suited to where they live and are equally at home on the Interstate and up a rocky fire road. My dark blue K1200GT is what BMW calls a luxury sport-touring motorcycle. It's more of a one-trick pony, designed to gobble up huge stretches of highway at Autobahn speeds with some twisties thrown in for added excitement.
Since I'm not equipped to tackle rugged mountain gravel and dirt roads, my friends took pity on me and we did an easy ride on pavement.
The gas station was full of Harleys and their riders, fuelling up for the putt back down to Denver after the annual Fairplay Ladies' Run. The event started out as a fund-raising outing for female motorcyclists, but has turned into a tiny preview of the Black Hills Motorcycle Classic at Sturgis, S.D.
We definitely looked out of place with our helmets, high-tech armored textile riding gear and European bikes. The fact that we use earplugs, even though the baffles are still in our mufflers, must be completely incomprehensible to these folks.
While we saw a few helmets, most of the H-D riders and passengers we saw apparently think looking cool is more important than surviving a crash - headbands and bandanas for head protection, lots of fringe and loud exhaust. (The first time I saw a "Loud Pipes Save Lives" sticker in Daytona I thought it was a joke. It's not. They actually believe it.)
Tanks filled, we rode south to Buena Vista where we picked up the road up Cottonwood Pass. The Cottonwood summit is more than 12,000 feet above sea level and the air is thin, clear and cold at the top. There are also a few patches of snow, slowly sublimating in the brilliant July sun.
Cottonwood Pass is a fun ride, with sweeping curves and a few hairpin switchbacks just to keep you alert. The road over the pass is only paved on the Buena Vista side, which means there isn't a lot of through-traffic and even on a sunny Sunday in July we had the road mostly to ourselves.
After admiring the view from the summit for a few minutes, we rode back down to Buena Vista where I led the way to a Subway restaurant at the edge of town.
One of the day's goals was to visit a Wal-Mart so Tim and Linda could stock up on a few kitchen items and I could buy them a copy of Kevin Costner's Open Range on DVD. It's one of my favorite westerns, partially because my younger son was best buds in high school with Abraham Benrubi, who has a supporting role in the film.
Oh, yeah. That gives me 2 degrees of separation from Kevin Costner and Robert Duvall. (See earlier post.)
Our choices were Salida, which meant going home the way we had come, or Frisco, which called for a ride up U.S. 24 through Leadville to I-70, thence east to Frisco and from there, south on Colo. 9 through Breckenridge to Alma and home.
Frisco won and we had a splendid ride north along the Arkansas River where I once panned for gold (with microscopic success) several summers ago.
We saw an unusually large number of BMW motorcycles on the ride, suggestive of a big turnout next week at the BMW Motorcycle Owners of America International Rally in Spokane, Wash. The West is usually full of BMWs in the days preceding an 'MOA rally out this way because a lot of us love a good excuse to leave our lush green eastern homes to go bashing around the mountains and deserts of the Great American West. I expect there will be about 5,000 of us at Spokane.