Zia Rider Blog

Its always been our philosophy to take the road less traveled, to stay off the Interstates and major highways of sameness with a McD’s and Walmart on every corner and experience the Real America along the back roads.  So of course on our first day in the park we made a bee-line for some of  the smaller sideroads within Yellowstone mentioned by our fabulous Frommer’s Yellowstone and Grand Teton Guide.

Firehole Spring

The spectacular Firehole Lake Drive is a small one way loop down the road from Old Faithful and the Midway Geyser Basin.  If you want to escape the crowds and have some beautiful scenery mostly to yourself check it out, its not on the way to any of the major tourist spots and the enterance is easily passed by and missed by those hurridly rushing around to get to the next thing on their must see list.  Like I said earlier, take your time to enjoy and see places in Yellowstone or in your haste to quickly see as much as possible you’ll end up missing everything.

In-fact I was looking for the road and still ended up missing it and had to turn around and go back 😉

White Dome Geyser

Continue reading Firehole Lake Drive

Ok, On to Yellowstone!  Like I always say it’s never an adventure if everything goes according to plan.

Thanks to a tip from our campground neighbor we knew we had to leave super early to beat the road construction near the southern entrance that starts at 8am.  We left early, and they decided to close the road extra early as well.  It was about 40 degrees and we were stuck on the side of the road in the shadows of tall trees on a mountain pass in some light rain,  we froze our butts off!

They held us there shivering for a half hour in the rain. We were so misirible and cold that when they did let us go Cece had us pull over at one of the first campgrounds we came to instead of Norris, one of the better more secluded ones with less people that several people had recommended to us as well as my guide books.  Grant Village campground is still along the mountain ridge on the southern side of the park, and unfortunately for us it stayed under a permanent cloud bank and rained every night and off and on through the days we stayed here.  A few miles north of our campground the rain ended and it stayed mostly sunny. We picked the worst place to camp!  After a few days of never ending rain back at camp we pulled up stakes and fled to a different campground.

Continue reading On to Yellowstone

Emily had graciously let us crash with them for a night but unfortunately Mother-in-law was coming that weekend and we got the boot.  Cant have those unsavory bikers hanging around.

Went to get a camp site and this is what they gave us. We couldnt figure out how exactly you’re supposed to lock this bear box, it was the only one like this that we saw, and ontop of that theres a big fresh bear print right on the side that hadnt been washed away by all the rain.  Uhh no thanks!   We went back and complained and they kindly gave us another spot.

Our new site next door was much nicer, with a bear box that actually works!  I was a bit concerned that we were supposed to leave all our stuff in here and it didnt actually lock to keep other people out.  More on this later.

Like most other campgrounds almost everyone was friendly. Our neighbor for two days was a retired technology consultant for the pharmaceutical industry now living just outside the park in Idaho and here for some photography for a book he was working on. We’d talk and laugh and chat for hours of each others travels around our lantern, in fact it was hard to politely tell him we needed to get some sleep. Thats the great thing about these national park campgrounds, you never know who you’ll meet.

We talked to everyone in our loop of the campground, everyone was curious about the motorcycle with the strange yellow plate and how we ever fit so much stuff on it when it takes an SUV to carry the same for them.  Everywhere we’ve been so far people have come right up to talk to us, I suppose with a little girl in pink we arent as threatening as a bunch of pirates on loud Harlies 😉 Everyone except the campers on the other side of us that is who didn’t talk to a soul and never looked at anyone and only rarely seen outside their tent.

Continue reading Robbed

Not so much from our day across Wyoming, not a whole lot to see except rolling hills till we got into the mountains.  I will say that Wyoming has the nicest smoothest pavement I’ve ever been on.  They even had warning signs:  40MPH Caution Road Damage Ahead.  The first couple of them we’d slam on the brakes to see one or two grapefruit sized pot holes..  That’s it? That’s what I had to slow down for?

Fossil Butte was barely a speck on the map and we only found out about it a day or two earlier,  its tiny, hours from anything, and ended up being pretty darn cool.

I made the mistake AGAIN of believing that just because there’s dots on the map that one of these places must be big enough to have a gas station.  We almost didn’t go to Fossil Butte, by the time we got there we passed through several non existent towns, not even a scrap of wood or foundation to show there had even been something there and we were way low on fuel.  Fossil Butte was 4 miles off the road, or 8 total, it’d be close..  a coin toss decided that we’ll never be this way again we might as well go and deal with running out of gas later.  I’m glad we went, its an amazing place.

They had a timeline of earth’s history spread out along the four mile road and up the railing to the building.  Pretty cool to get a grasp of just how long a geologic age is and how short of an eye-blink of geologic time humans have been around.

Continue reading Fossile Butte National Monument

In order to get from Moab to Flaming Gorge we had to go into Colorado and catch highway 139 north past Dinosaur National Monument.  A quick stop on the way should get us another stamp or two for our National Parks Passport! or so we thought.

I only took Utah 128 out of Moab because I didn’t want to backtrack the way I had come to get back to the Interstate to CO. My GPS, Google, and MS Streets and Trips all routed around it cause it would add 1/2 hr despite being much shorter. Stupid GPS, I’m going this way anyway!

Unfreaking believable!  The first 15 miles of this are the most outstanding riding ever, 11 out of 10, too bad its not longer.  It twists through steep walled canyons along the side of a wide river with rafters, through the Canyonlands and Arches rock formations. Unreal!  They have markers in many places where the rocks overhang the road for cages and trailers, extremely narrow.  What a hidden gem.  Ignore whatever Garmin says and go the other way 😉

Others photos, it was just too much fun to stop, not to mention nowhere to pull over to dig out the camera.

Continue reading In Search of Dinosaurs