Crozier Canyon on the First Cool Evening

The heat does not end on a date out here. It stops meeting you at the door one evening, and in town you do not notice it at all. You notice it about twenty miles east, when it dawns on you that you have quit leaning away from your own engine.

I ran out 66 toward Valentine with a little under two hours of light left. That road empties out fast once the last of the Valle Vista houses are behind you, and by Hackberry the only traffic is whatever freight is moving on the tracks. The trains out there run close enough to the pavement that you feel the second one coming before you hear it. I have ridden that same stretch in July with the air coming off the asphalt like somebody left an oven door open. This time the vents were doing nothing for me at all, and I ended up zipping the jacket back up at a pullout short of Truxton like a man who should have known better.

Past Valentine the road drops into Crozier Canyon, and the canyon is the part worth the ride. The walls come in, the cottonwoods along the wash are still holding green this late, and the railroad takes the same gap you do, close on the right, so for a mile or two the whole world is road, water course and steel. Late September puts the sun behind the west wall before seven and the temperature goes with it inside of ten minutes. The pavement stays warm a good while longer than the air does. You can feel the difference through the boots.

I shut it down at a wide spot where somebody's fence gave up years ago and stood there long enough for the engine to stop ticking. A freight came through eastbound, and once it cleared, the canyon went quieter than it had been before the train showed up. That is the trade out here. Summer hands you long light and air you have to fight the whole way. Fall gives you about two hours of it and hands them over clean.

Truxton was closed by the time I came back through, which is how it usually is. A motel sign that has not been lit in years, gravel where the pumps used to stand, and the hills going flat and dark behind all of it. I rolled through at a speed that felt respectful and did not stop. Some places you visit and some you leave alone.

Back in Kingman the sign on the bank said sixty-eight and I sat in the driveway a minute before going inside. Seven months out of the year the ride ends with me wanting out of the gear. This one ended with me not wanting to get off the bike. That is the whole reason I save this stretch of road for the end of September.