South Colorado

19 & 20  March 2024

I really wasn’t sorry to leave New Mexico. Although it had its moments, it’s a tough, gritty place with an undercurrent of unease across too much of it.

Colerado seems altogether more folksy, strangers wishing you good morning in the fastidiously clean motel at breakfast, commenting on what a ‘fahne’ day it is. And it really is: cold again, but brilliantly bright sunshine in the crystalline air against the deepest blue sky.

Northeast is the Great Dunes National Park, easily visible from 30-miles away from two dead-straight roads across the open plain that lead to it. Over millions of years, the sand has been blown across the plain, where it accumulated at the foot of the Rockies.

It’s the largest beach you’ve ever seen, with the softest sand, but no sea. Visiting families have what look like small snowboards they will carry across a mile over Medano Creek to where the dunes rise. They will then trudge up and then surf down, reaching speeds of up to 40 MPH, comparable with snowboarding itself. It must be exhausting as even staggering for five minutes through it is hard work. But I am getting on and in full touring garb. And the altitude is about 7,500 feet, so the air is noticeably thinner.

Going east, the roads are mainly straight and deserted until South Fork. It then rises to over 10,500 feet and so attracts raining sleet and a vertiginous reduction in temperature. West of this, the gradient flattens but the road flows like a carelessly discarded ribbon, allowing fast, satisfying progress.

Durango sounds like a town from a Tarantino movie where all the characters meet a grisly end. It looks like one too. Main Street is dominated by buildings of the false-front Western vernacular, a decorative vertical facade, concealing a more humdrum structure behind.

But today’s reality is more genteel. The shops are selling artisanal soaps, and distressed leather jackets along with locally-inspired jewellery and rugs. A decent number have been turned into inviting-looking bars, none more so than the ‘Derailed Pour House’, where I’m sipping a local Double IPA, checking the weather forecasts for Silvertown, Ouray, Ridgeway, Telluride & Rico. These are waypoints for a route that includes the San Juan Mountain Skyway, Red Mountain Pass and Million Dollar Road.

Two days earlier, In Santa Fe, Mr X had given me exactly the clear advice a visitor needs: “Check the forecasts for EACH of these towns on the day at 07:00 and if the forecast is clear for ALL, go for it. If ANYWHERE is showing a chance of rain or snow. Don’t.”

The reason for the caution is Red Mountain Pass is regularly singled out as the most dangerous road in the USA, albeit one of the most spectacular. The ‘Million Dollar Road’ is so-called as it allegedly cost a million dollars to build in the 1880’s (about £30 million today, but that doesn’t sound like enough), or because a businessman once bragged to a bar in Silverton that he'd willingly pay a million dollars never to drive on it again.

I check the forecasts as advised and they are all clear until late afternoon so I’m gone by 08:30 morning. By 10:30, I’ve covered the most challenging parts and having a breakfast burrito in Ouray, another cowboy movie set town. A couple, older than me by about ten years but both looking fabulously vital and healthy, ask what en Englishman is doing here. I tell them about my trip and the hand-shakes, back-slapping and ‘must-see’ recommendations commence. The open-heartedness, intelligence and eloquence of well-off Americans are becoming predictable, but never over-bearing.

Mr X’s guidance was spot-on, as the route would be treacherous in poor conditions. Even though the temperature drops to -9 Celsius (the lowest I’ve ever ridden in) it was manageable, mainly because the roads are scrupulously well looked after. The surface is quite abrasive but that means, even with a sheen of black ice in some places, there was no loss of grip.

But it’s far from the most dangerous road I’ve ever been on. That honour must go to the UK’s very own Hardnott & Wrynose Pass in Cumbria, where a combination of minimal maintenance and timid, incompetent driving makes that much, much worse.

Regardless, the route is an exhilarating 200 miles. There’s no point trying to describe it as I’d just run out of every simile, metaphor and adjective I know within a couple of paragraphs. If you ride a bike, you need to do it. At least once.

It even includes evidence that heaven, may indeed, exist on Earth. Telluride is an upmarket ski resort, the chicest of all the faux Cowboy towns and surrounded by monumental mountains. It has a Main Street jammed with bustling shops, art galleries, bars and restaurants, all teeming with glowing, healthy people, enjoying life to the full, as well they might.

Despite checking the forecast mid-journey, 70 miles from my overnight stop and beyond the point of no return, snow appears out of a clear blue sky in Rico, only to dissipate five minutes later. I roll into Cortez just as the first rumbles of thunder can be heard and look back at the San Juan mountains, now shrouded in black cloud.

It’s been a truly great ride. While other, specific routes like the B500 Schwarzwaldhochstraße north of Kniebis (before the petty speed restrictions came in) and the Fluela Pass out of Davos might be superior individual stretches but they’re 30 miles or so each, not an entire day.

Later, at Shiro’s Steakhouse, (great steaks but not as photogenic as Denny’s next door) I get my imperial metric conversions arse-about-face and end up chowing on a 300g New York Strip. A Breckenridge Bourbon is prescribed by the waitress to aid digestion. I submit meekly and think back to twenty-four hours ago when trying to decide to take the route I did today versus the more direct, ‘safer’ route.

I’m acutely conscious of the risks involved in riding a motorcycle 16,000 miles over three months, across some unknown territory. At a base actuarial level, this is amplifying exposure by a factor of over 20x as UK bikers only cover about 2,000 miles a year on average. And it’s not like riding a bike, as an activity, is like walking the dog… Factor in staying in places like the scuzzier bits of New Mexico and Mississippi is only going to turn the dial up. So logically, I should have set the course straight to Cortez and had done with it.

My internal compass is calibrated by two poles of risk management thinking. One is “you regret more the things you don’t do”. The other is depicted in Andrew Freeman’s book, ‘Seeing Tomorrow’ where he suggests the correct approach is to assess in accepting a risk, what your ‘sense of regret’ would be through making the wrong choice.

As you might expect from an academic who also wrote for ‘The Economist’, this approach is borderline useless in many day-to-day situations, particularly where you can’t soberly assess the outcome, after having called it wrong. As you plunge, helplessly, into the 800-foot void over the edge of the Red Mountain Pass after being hit by a rogue rock-fall, you would have about seven seconds to contemplate Freeman’s pearls of wisdom and nod sagely at his, well, sagacity. Probably less if you’re an amply proportioned jockey aboard a saddled-up K1600, as terminal velocity would be reached more or less instantly. And even then, nobody would ever know that Andrew was indeed, right all along. So no lessons could or would be learned.

No, the first of these approaches is the one for me. Had I been sat here, taken the ‘safe’ route from Durango to Cortez, I would have no idea of what I missed, so no ‘sense of regret’. But I would have missed out, big time. To see the Colorado mountainscape, colossal, emerging from winter, deserted, almost colourless in blindingly clear light is priceless. A park ranger told me in Ouvray that I was the first motorcycle he’d seen this year. This was a unique experience and a privilege.

The homespun homily is the one that wins for me, Just Do it,  but mitigate the risks by having the best equipment and the best intelligence and information you can find. There’s a note for bikers at the end of this about the kit and how well it worked but had the weather forecast been poor, I would have heeded the excellent advice I was given and there is no way I would have ‘done it.’

But I did. And it was the right decision. Some days are just perfect and this has been one.

PS: Note for bikers…Although I’ve had a few run-ins with the UK importer of Rukka motorcycling gear over some quality niggles, spares availability (or lack of…) and their generally tardy approach to customer relations, their stuff absolutely works. Wearing a Dainese base-layer but topped with a Rukka Outlast micro-fleece and Nivala jacket with inner, and paired with their Apollo gloves, I was actually warm…The bike’s heated seat & grips helped, of course, and being shod in Daytona Roadstar GTX boots paired with  ‘Danish Endurance’ socks meant no numb toes. I realise the socks sound like a title of a porn film but they are super comfortable and regulate heat well for all-round use. While we’re on the subject of kit, my helmet is a Shoe Neotec II with the Harmon-Kardon comms system. It’s the most comfortable helmet I’ve owned and has stood up well so far. It keeps the warm in although the ventilation could be better. I was listening to Trisha Yearwood croon about ‘Rolling through the Rockies; High above the clouds’ from ‘The Sound Remembers When’ through it today. This song has never sounded so good.

PPS: I’m posting a few more photos below, not specifically to garnish the article as some people have said how much they like them, but why so few? I’ll try and go back and do the same with previous posts also.