Zia Rider Blog

With names like Fairyland Trail, Queens Garden, Thors Hammer, Fairy Castle, The Cathedral and Rainbow Point, Bryce Canyon National Park sounds like an imaginary playground from children’s tales.  In reality its not far from that, the amazing rock windows, spires and grottos look like they’d be more at place in some fantasy land of a Narnia or Lord of the Rings movie.

The highway along the top of the ridge is great for riding, it winds along the top of a mesa through trees and green pastures, these are all along the edge where its eroded away. Most of the tourists stick to the upper third of the highway where the big sections of spires are, we went all the way to the end to avoid the crowds. If here by motorcycle going all the way to Rainbow Point is a must!

We were also reminded just how blessed we were to have an opportunity to travel like this and see such amazing landscapes by a crazy German running, skipping and leaping through one of the packed parking lots.  He was running from car to car and taking pictures of license plates while talking to himself, New York great! Oregon yes yes! Washington very good!  He came to ours and asked “What state?”  When we told him he excitedly exclaims “New Mexico! yes I do not have dis one! So many states! I love America! So beautiful! Freedom to go from everywhere, this is great! I love America!!”  With that he leaped through the air down the street like a ballet dancer to get more pictures, we both laughed hysterically but hes right. The western states are as big as countries in other places and we might need passports to go between them, America truly is great to preserve beautiful places like Bryce Canyon “For the Benefit and Enjoyment of the People”

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Utah 12 is one of the best motorcycle roads I’ve ever been down, I’d rate it 9.8 out of 10. There are several similar ones back home and throughout the Rockies but they tend to be more technical and challenging, rough, torn up by plows, with treacherous sand in the curves.  Not this one, smooth as glass and mostly high speed sweepers.  Combined with the last section of highway 24 its 100 miles of pure motorcycle heaven.

There was loads of motorcycles in Torrey, Utah where we stopped for lunch.  Most were going the other direction than we were and all of them we talked to described 12 as an absolutely phenomenal road and it didn’t disappoint.  One large tour group we got behind for a little ways had all different kinds of bikes from Harley Davidsons to Triumphs to BMWs and even a Ducati. All of them were flying different European flags of where they were from.   They had all come halfway around the world to ride this road.  The tour guide leader bikes all had Alaskan plates, I wonder if that was where they were headed.  If so that’s one killer ride.

First you climb up quite a ways in altitude through mountain sweepers and aspen trees with spectacular views, the temperature drops 10-15 degrees.  Looking over Capitol Reef down below.

Some shots of the road further south in Grand Staircase National Monument where we could pull over,  imagine roads like this for 60 miles:

If you’ve ever lived high up in the mountains you know what happens to anything that was packaged at sea level, like bags of chips exploding all over the back seat when you go skiing.   We had gone up so much in altitude since we packed up at Glen Canyon this morning that our Thermarest sleeping pads were straining at their straps and we had to leave the caps open to let air out as we went higher.

Continue reading Utah 12 – Grand Staircase National Monument

Camping in Glen Canyon on the shores of Lake Powell.     We did learn that fishermen and boaters make terrible campers hehe. You can’t quite see it in this picture with the tree in the way but there was one rain cloud just dumping on the other side of the lake.  We were watching it for a while while we cooked some pasta and got ready for the night, then I noticed that our tent was set up in a bit of a depression.  We pulled up stakes and moved the tent to a slopped spot with better drainage “just in case.”   An hour or two later with it still headed our way we started putting the rain covers on the motorcycle bags and stashing all of our gear under the tent vestibules.

When the rain reached us it was sudden, like someone flipping a switch on a fire hose.  At that moment the 20 or so boaters camping around us all scrambled for cover frantically trying to cover everything.  It was coming down in buckets!  I thought it was hilarious.  Hellooooo?  Giant rain storm slowly coming this way for the past 3 hours….  What did you think was going to happen?

Apparently they’ve been getting huge rain like this for a while.  At the grocery store/marina they said the water level of the whole lake had risen something like 12 feet in the past two weeks.  It had actually put the parking lot under water, we had to park way up the hill on an over flow lot and hike down the road.

Lake Powell is enormous, I never knew there was so much water in the desert.  If I had a boat I would definitely come here and spend a week.  Jet Skis, Fishing, Camping, it would be a blast!

Continue reading Glen Canyon – Lake Powell

Goosenecks State Park, or Goosenecks of the San Juan as I’ve seen on some maps, is a cool place.  If I remember right I think the San Juan river flows through 5 miles of canyons in a 1 mile stretch as the crow flies. Pretty impressive, like a mini grand canyon.  It wasn’t even on our map, its just a little spur off the main road a ways.  The road is fantastic riding too, no traffic, nice pavement, and some nice sweepers.

If you look close you can see a couple of rafts down in the water, there was a lot of them.  Back in Mexican Hat there was parking-lots full of cars of all the people who had gone out rafting earlier in the day. Looks like that’s the thing to do in these parts, it looks like fun.  A good idea for something to do if we come this way again.

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Whats the first thing that comes to mind when you think of Arizona in June? For me, one word HOT! So of course after wearing my super thin clothing and ditching the liner in my motorcycle gear we hit an unexpected cold front and it was down right freezing..

It was overcast and trying to rain much of the way but not doing anything but generate lots of cross winds

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