Day 3: Tuesday, June 17, 2003

Riding eastward from Vernal, Utah, into Colorado on US 40, I soon entered Dinosaur National Monument. I now understood why there were so many dinosaur statues in Vernal.

I did not see any dinosaurs, but the National Monument looks like a place with impressive natural rock formations and probably lots of good hiking. I didn't have time for hiking this day, but as I traveled the 40 miles or so through Dinosaur National Monument, two phenomena had my interest.

One was prairie dogs. Lots of them. They are very cute. In one stretch that spanned 15 miles or so, I continually saw prairie dogs standing erect beside the highway. When they saw my motorcycle approaching they generally would turn and run quickly away from the roadway into the prairie brush. Looking ahead, I would often see them running pell-mell, their little feet going like crazy, directly across the roadway. They clearly seemed to know the highway was a dangerous place, perhaps only because it is an open area where they are not camouflaged and protected from predators by sagebrush and grass, or because it is not perforated with burrows they might dive into under imminent attack. In spite of their rapid crossings, however, many had been squished on the road. Occasionally I would see a prairie dog standing in the road as I approached, and I would hit the brakes. On many occasions this would cause the creature to run away from my path toward the brush, but just as often it seemed the animal would get confused and run directly into my path. Fortunately, I managed to brake and dodge and did not hit any of them. But I had to reflect on the fact that birds are much better than land animals at judging motion. Birds that fly into the path of a moving vehicle almost always succeed in swerving properly and making successful evasive maneuvers, whereas a prairie dog will sometimes run directly into the path of the vehicle. This is also true for deer, I hear, and it's a good thing for bikers that deer are not as plentiful as prairie dogs. Given the choice of hitting a deer or a prairie dog, although I would prefer to hit neither, I would choose the prairie dog.

I started to think as I rode along: it took Mother Nature millions of years to design a prairie dog, it takes her a year or two to build a good one, but it only takes one of man's modern traveling machines only a split second to destroy one. I wondered what goes through a prairie dog's mind as the rolling wheel is about to crush his little guts out. Does his whole life flash before his eyes? Does he regret all the fun things he didn't do because he was too busy digging burrows or gathering up seeds for the winter? Or does it all happen so fast he only has time to think, "Oh, Shit!" I took some comfort in the fact that, riding a motorcycle, I have only half as much chance of squishing one as if I were driving a car or other four-wheeled vehicle.

A few miles farther along I began to see other critters moving across the road. Smaller and slower, but some still perceptibly moving. I stopped to look more closely, and they appeared to be large brown crickets, each about three inches long. In a couple of spots the ones that had stopped moving because they had been crushed by traffic formed a layer that completely covered the roadway. I learned from a TV news report later in the evening that these were flightless insects called Mormon Crickets, and in parts of Utah a major infestation was under way. In some places they had covered highways with a layer so thick they had to be scooped away with snow plows to mitigate a slippery and potentially hazardous condition.

The weather remained clear along US 40 in western Colorado as I passed through the Steamboat Springs and Hot Sulphur Springs resort areas. As I entered Winter Park, however, rocky snowcapped peaks appeared and I could see storms brewing in the mountains ahead. I pulled over in an area where several new houses were under construction, a residential area with breathtaking views of the Rocky Mountains, put on my gaiters and stashed my overgloves at the ready in the front pocket of my Aerostich jacket.

A few miles out of Winter Park the road began to rise quickly through switchbacks, and shortly after that rain began to fall. I pulled over on the paved shoulder and put on the overgloves. It was a steady, driving rain, but I stayed dry inside my gear. I don't know the name of this pass, but US 40 climbs up through several thousand feet and then descends again between Winter Park and the junction with Interstate 70. The air temperature indicated by the computer on my BMW dropped from 70 degrees in Winter Park to 47 degrees at the summit. Applying the rule of 5 degrees Fahrenheit for every 1000 feet in elevation, this would indicate a climb of over 4000 feet, but part of the drop in temperature may have been due to the rain. The rain was cold. I was wearing my Aerostich jacket over just a lightweight T-shirt, and I thought perhaps I should have layered up by adding a sweatshirt under the jacket. But I didn't want to stop along the highway in the rain and be fussing with unpacking a saddle bag and changing clothing. About halfway up and getting colder, I turned the heated grips and heated seat on high. This helped cut the effect of the cold, and I was reasonably comfortable going over the pass. Sometimes people ask how one can see when riding a motorcycle in the rain, because of the lack of windshield wipers. The answer is, when wearing a full-face helmet, the water droplets on the helmet face shield are so close to your eyes that you can see between them, and one typically looks over the windscreen at the road ahead, so water on the windshield is not a problem. The rain moderated and then stopped on the way down the grade beyond the pass.

Reaching Interstate 70 about 5 PM, I decided to ride to Evergreen and look up my aunt and uncle whom I had visited in 1996 when riding my Harley-Davidson back from another cross-country trip. I vaguely remembered how to find their house, but when I reached the center of Evergreen the roads did not look familiar to me. Also, there was constant traffic at this hour -- commuters returning home, I suppose -- worse than anything I had seen in California. This made cruising around looking for familiar intersections difficult. I stopped in the driveway of some sort of laboratory building next to a dam holding back a small lake. I turned on my Garmin GPS and looked at the map of the Evergreen area, but there was not sufficient detail to show the minor residential streets. I took out my iBook computer and tried to bring up the Garmin US map software that I had brought along, but the Insignia Virtual PC program necessary to run the map software would not come up properly and insisted on crashing every time I tried to open it. Finally, I stuffed all this high-tech gear back in the saddlebag, rode to a nearby gas station, and asked directions. About fifteen minutes later I was riding up Kilimanjaro Street to my uncle's house.

There was a young man in the driveway playing ball with a child. I did not recognize him. I told him I was looking for my aunt and uncle. He told me he had bought the house from them a year earlier, and they had bought another house and moved somewhere closer to Denver. He was very helpful. He called his wife's cell phone to see if she had a phone number or address for my uncle. She did not, but he was able to find an email address on his computer, which unfortunately turned out to be obsolete. He said my aunt and uncle had been back in Evergreen the previous Saturday for a neighborhood party. There were a couple of neighbors with whom they appeared to be especially friendly. He called one of these who turned out to have a telephone number for my uncle. After all this, we finally reached my Uncle Calvin by telephone. He provided instructions for me to find his new house in southwest Denver. I arranged to stop by and visit with him the next day.

Meanwhile, I rode to Colorado Springs on Tuesday evening. I had plans to visit a company located there and order some new cabinet doors for my kitchen back in California. I found this company on the internet, but hadn't had time to place the order before leaving on my trip. I brought all the information with me. I knew I would probably be passing through Colorado. Equipped with the company address in Colorado Springs, I planned to drop in and place the order in person at their factory. Plus, the lady with her picture on the website, Crystal, who takes telephone orders looked like a pretty cute blonde, so there were other reasons to expect visiting this company to be a pleasant experience.

The road south from Denver to Colorado Springs, Interstate 25, was heavy with traffic. Although the speed limit is 75 miles per hour, most of the traffic was moving at close to 90. There were many large vehicles -- pickup trucks and large SUVs -- confirming my suspicion that America's favorite pastime is burning up as much gasoline as possible. There appeared to be virtually no speed enforcement on this highway. Earlier in the day, I had seen a fellow in a Porsche 924 get pulled over by two state highway patrol cars for speeding on a desolate portion of US 40 near Dinosaur National Monument where there was absolutely no other traffic. But here on an extremely busy stretch of interstate highway not a highway patrol was visible. I guess it's easier and safer to cherry-pick speeders out the the boonies than to enforce the law on a busy freeway where they might actually endanger someone.

I drove around Colorado Springs. The town had sprawled a bit since my last trip through in 1996. There were many recently constructed new office buildings and retail establishments on the outskirts, and much more traffic than I remembered. I finally located a Motel 6 with a reasonable room rate of $40 per night and stopped there a little after 9 PM. Down the road was an Applebee's restaurant. After unpacking a few things from my bike, I rode over there and had a beer and chicken Caesar salad in the bar. I then went looking for one of the two Borders Books stores in town. But even though I had the address and looked at a map in the phone book in my motel room, I became hopelessly lost. Approaching 11 PM, when I assumed Borders would be closing for the night, I rode back to my motel. On the way I stopped to fill the bike with gas, and then turned in for the night.