High Plains Drifting

There are a lot of bikers on the road. Believe it or not; there’s a lot of guys doing the same thing I’m doing (solo cross countries and camping). Maybe this is the new thing to do when you reach middle age; jump on a bike and go cross country.


Besides the independent near-do-wells like myself, there appears to be two great biker migrations going on this week. Harley guys from all over North America are making their way to Milwaukee for the Harley 105 year anniversary. I’m running into bands of them everywhere making the track to Wisconsin. It’s like some irresistible hog call has gone out and thousands of them are responding.


The other group of bikers- on-the-move are beamers. There’s a big BMW Rally in Salt Lake City Utah. I’m seeing KT1200’s everywhere. I ran into one couple at the camp site who pulled a popup tent trailer with theirs. They pulled in and poof they had an instant camp setup in minutes.




I met another KT1200 owner heading to the same rally. He was camping alone like me. We talked for a bit. He has a Triumph too. He told me this was his second cross country trip this year. In June he road another bike to Puget Bay Alaska (and he was disappointed half the roads were paved).


It rained hard last night. Luckily, I thought it might, and I made sure the roof flap of the tent was closed before I went to sleep. The tent kept me dry and I slept through most of the thunder and lightning. It was still coming down when I woke up. I put on my rain gear and broke camp in the rain.

I did not want to ride in the rain. I hovered around the camp ground for an hour waiting for the rain to stop, but there was no sign that it would so I headed out. The storm stretched for over 100 miles. I was pelted by heavy rain and buffeted by strong wind. Every now and again lightning bolts would leap from cloud to cloud. As bad as it was, I’m pretty sure it was tame by prairie thunderstorm standards.


The hardest part about riding in the storm was keeping control of the bike when the semis past me. I kept my speed down to about 60. I couldn’t see all that well out of the face mask and I was worried about hitting a deep puddle and hydro planing off the road. Luckily the road is straight as an arrow for hundreds of miles. In my mirror could see the semis approach, and I would brace myself – inching the bike to the right side of the road. They’d wiz by pushing a wall of wind and rain that enveloped me and the bike. As they passed, and for a few moments after, I could not see a thing. I just hung on and tried to keep the bike straight.


I passed hundreds of giant windmills. It was raining too hard to stop and take pictures. The strong wind had many of them turning faster than I’d ever seen the big ones turn.

The world may not be flat, but large parts of Kansas sure are...

I broke out of the rain in a place called Hays Kansas where I stopped to grab breakfast. It was cold. I had to dig out a sweater. After I warmed up, I jumped back on the bike and sped toward Colorado. After a few minutes, the guy on the KT1200 who I spoke to the night before passed me. I followed him for 150 miles across the Great Plains of Kansas and into Colorado. Another guy joined in our little cat and mouse game and the three of us hurdled up into the high plains at 90 miles per hour.

I picked up another hour today when I crossed into Mountain Time. I arrived at my campground in Strasburg early. It was only three. I checked in and headed to my site to pitch my tent. When I got there I discovered my neighbors had several dogs that barked and growled every time I moved. One big black one nearly got me. They had an elaborate tent setup and I got the impression they had been camping there for a while. The dogs had crapped all over my site. I decided to trade my tent in for a cabin away from the dogs and perma-campers.



After I got situated in my cabin, I realized I had rode 500 miles today, and I had not seen the Rockies. I had imagined them covering Colorado. I thought I’d cross from the flat plains of Kansas right into the mountains. Before today, I did not know there are 200 miles of high plains that rise out of the prairie to over a mile high (hence the name mile-high city) before the mountains even begin. It was still early. I decided to ride to Denver and see the mountains.

On my way to Denver I spotted two large thunderstorms on either side of me. The flat open plains make it possible to see these storms clearly from miles away. I kept my eyes on them and continued to race toward Denver. Just when I spotted the Rockies (and the Denver Skyline), I realized one of the storms was closing in fast, and it looked severe. I had all I could take of riding in the rain for one day, and the thought of doing it in city traffic was not appealing. I turned the bike around and raced back toward the campground.

That’s when I noticed the other storm had made a flanking move and was threatening to cut off my retreat. I rolled on power and sped back. The storm was building on my right, and it was like nothing I had ever seen before. I knew I was in trouble when the sky turned that eerie green color.

I was four miles from the campground when I noticed cars pulled over and people out watching the storm. Out in the fields, under the black and green sky, I could see a big cloud of dust. The dust was turning and it rose into a tall brown column. Viola – my first Tornado (as viewed from the back of speeding motorcycle). It wasn’t a big tornado, but it was a tornado!!!

For all you meteorologists out there, this is not the tornado, it's a picture of the storm dissipating. I contemplated stopping to take a picture of the tornado, but fear trumped compelling blog photo.