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By Lynx, on June 17th, 2010 
Utah 24 into Capitol Reef National Park is AWESOME! The road is a lot of sweepers and twisties through the bottom of the canyons with all these rock-faces high high overhead. Its hard to get a sense of scale from the pics, these cliffs are 1000 ft up.
Once further in theres lots of overhanging trees with glimpses of the cliffs between them. Spectacularly good smooth pavement the whole way.
I’d heard from many people including total strangers when we mentioned roughly where we were going that the Burr Trail from Bullfrog to Capitol Reef was one of the most spectacular roads ever. Unfortunately its not paved much of the way and pretty rough going through spots. From what we’d already experienced with the area dirt roads from recent rains this adventure was not to be on an overloaded cruiser motorcycle two up. One day I want to see it, especially now after going on the pavement. You can just make it out on this map, the grey line along the ridge.
Continue reading Capitol Reef National Park
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By Lynx, on June 16th, 2010 
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
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By Lynx, on June 15th, 2010 
Next stop, Natural Bridges National Monument. The weathered canyons and arches here are beautiful. Best of all, since theres not much around in any direction to get here theres virtually no people! Our private little National Park.
Taking a break from the road and doing our daily hiking. We were doing 3-4 miles of hiking a day through all the national parks we stopped at. We learned its critical to stay along the (vaguely) marked trails and not wander off on your own. Much of the surface is coated with a living bacterial soil crust that gives nutrients to the plants and important in the control of erosion with its soil binding properties. One false step can destroy 100’s or 1000’s of years of growth.
Continue reading Natural Bridges National Monument
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By Lynx, on June 14th, 2010 
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.
Continue reading Goosenecks State Park
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By Lynx, on June 13th, 2010 
We left bright and early and headed to Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park. Remember this is a park on the Navajo Nation and not part of the US Parks system. Our parks pass doesnt count out here and they didn’t seem to care that one of us was Navajo either, oh well it was worth a shot to save a few bucks 🙂
All I can say is Wow! the landscape out here along the roadways is amazing!
Its hard to describe how we’ve already blasted through a 400 miles and only now is the trip starting to get exciting, you know that feeling you get when you’re the furthest away from home you’ve ever been and everything from that point on is new ground? The real journey begins here, everything up until now has been to get to this this starting point. From here on we don’t know what the road up ahead will bring us. Its like that moment in the Lord of the Rings where Samwise realizes that everything from this spot on is someplace he’s never been before. Up until now its been the same old stuff we’ve seen before but now its starting to sink in that you’re on an epic adventure and this is just the beginning.
Continue reading Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park
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By Lynx, on June 12th, 2010 
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
Continue reading Arizona
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By Lynx, on May 28th, 2010 
A Run Turn Brake module or RTB module is an easy addition for greater visibility and allows your motorcycle’s turn signals to operate like the tail lights in some older sports cars. They’ll stay on constantly at 1/2 or 3/4 power (running lights) and go to full brightness when you hit the brakes or use the turn signals. Many chopper guys with the super wide rear tires don’t have space for a traditional dedicated brake light and only have turn signals. Together with the addition of the RTB module the two turn signals work together as the brake lights.
NOTE: By law any rear running lights have to be red. If your turn signals are amber, you’ll need to fix that with red bulbs or red lenses. Mine were already red so I didn’t have to change anything.
Hopefully the additional lighting from the rear will make me a little more visible, especially when loaded down with a tour pack and all the luggage we’ll have during our up coming trip.
Continue reading Run Turn Brake Module
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By Lynx, on May 20th, 2010 
One of the drawbacks to owning a shaft driven bike is that if your final drive fails it is EXPENSIVE! Unlike a chain, the only way to fix a final drive failure is with a new one or replacement parts which usually need to be ordered. That is one bad way to end a road trip. However, properly maintained they should last the life of your motorcycle.
One reason I like shaft driven bikes is that the drive train doesn’t need a whole lot of maintenance, much less than chains. That does not mean they need 0 maintenance, however. On a V Star 650 there are several sets of splines that need to be lubed with a high moly content grease.
With an 8000ish mile trip coming up I decided it would be best to check and lube all the splines so I wouldn’t have any surprises and have a catastrophic breakdown 1000’s of miles from home.
Continue reading V Star 650 Spline Lube
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By Lynx, on May 19th, 2010 
Needed to get the final drive out this weekend and unfortunately like most crusers the V Star doesnt have a center stand and I dont have $100 for a bike jack.
Whats a guy to do? Make his own lift MacGyver style out of stuff lying around the house of course!
Continue reading Poor Man’s Bike Lift
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By Lynx, on May 14th, 2010 Its almost that time again.. Time to get out of town and hit the road on another epic road trip!
The plan this year is 4 weeks and 11 states.
( Google cant handle this many points and I’ve had to break up the map into 2 parts )
For those who’ve been wondering where I’ve been and why I’ve not been posting for the last several months getting ready for this trip is why. Because I’m the only systems administrator for my company and built much of the infrastructure for everything I’m the only one who knows how everything works. So over the course of this entire year I’ve been trying to document, train others, automate and make things as robust as possible so the company doesn’t fall apart while I’m gone.
Anyway, the plan is 1 week through Utah to check out all the awesome National parks through there that we haven’t seen yet. Then 1 week in the Tetons and Yellowstone, another week from there through Glacier to Seattle. Leaving us with one week to get home. This’ll be one of those trips of a lifetime that I’ve been wanting to go on since I first got the Yamaha 3 years ago.
We learned a lot on last years trip, as far as packing, comfortable distances, and realistic expense budgeting. Plus we already have much of the gear needed thats been slowly pieced together from the last trips so I wont have as much of an upfront equipment cost.
For this years shakedown runs: next weekend we’re going to the AspenCash Spring Rally in Ruidoso, NM and the week after that we’re spending three nights in Mesa Verde National Park over Memorial Day weekend and doing the San Juan Skyway and Million Dollar Highway, one of the top rides in the US. Its better to always do some sort of short, or in our case long, shakedown runs to make sure everythings working as planned so you don’t have those unexpected breakdowns half a country away.
Riding season is finally here! Stay tuned.
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