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DinerGlide

📅 7 napja 👁 1 👍 1

Walking the Last Mile to the Chloride Murals

Solo Ride Night Ride Desert Autumn Golden Hour +3

Twenty miles north of Kingman, 93 is all business. Four lanes, trucks running for Vegas, and on a Saturday a steady line of pickups with boat trailers and out-of-state plates headed for the casinos. Nobody on that road is looking at the hills. I wasn't either, the first dozen times.The turn for Chloride comes up on the right with almost no warning, and four miles of county road later you are in a town that has decided, as far as I can tell, to keep its own hours. A couple hundred people, maybe. Dogs that come out to look at you and then go back to the shade. Old mining iron in the front yards, painted up or left to rust, depending on who lives there. It was a silver town once. It still looks like it is waiting to hear whether the price is coming back.What I came for is about a mile and a h...

DinerGlide

📅 27 napja 👁 2

Crozier Canyon on the First Cool Evening

Solo Ride Desert Sunset Route 66 Autumn +2

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 a...

DinerGlide

📅 1 hónapja 👁 6 👍 1

Hualapai Mountain Road, Where the Desert Quits

Solo Ride Desert Sunset Hot Weather Story Time +1

Fourteen miles out of town the desert quits. That is the only way I have ever been able to explain Hualapai Mountain Road to anybody who has not been up it. You leave Kingman at the light by the tracks with the heat still coming up off the asphalt, you start climbing, and somewhere around five thousand feet the creosote gives out and there are pines standing where no pine has any business standing. Same county. Same tank of gas. Twenty minutes.I went up late in the day with the light already going long across the valley. The Glide is not built for that road and I am not going to pretend otherwise. It is fourteen miles of switchbacks with a wall on one side and air on the other, and a bagger wants a wider line than the road is willing to give. Second gear most of the way, the big twin luggi...

DinerGlide

📅 1 hónapja 👁 14

The Long Way Up Stockton Hill

Solo Ride Night Ride Desert Sunset Road Therapy

There is a road out of Kingman that most people only use to get somewhere else. Stockton Hill runs north out of town, past the last of the houses and the last of the streetlights, and then it just goes, straight and patient, up toward Dolan Springs and the Joshua trees.I took it Sunday evening with no plan beyond seeing how far the light would hold. The town quits all at once out that way. One minute there are mailboxes and a feed store, the next there is nothing but creosote and the road running out ahead of you like somebody unrolled it and forgot to come back for it.The Joshua trees start about fifteen miles up. People call it a forest and it does not look like one at first, just a few of them standing off at odd angles like they wandered out and got lost. Then there are a hundred. Then...

DinerGlide

📅 1 hónapja 👁 8 👍 1

Two From Chicago and an Empty Tank on Gold Road

Solo Ride Desert Switchbacks Sunset Hot Weather +5

There is a stretch of the old road west of Kingman that most people drive once, take a photograph of, and never come back to. It runs out past Cool Springs and then starts climbing into the Black Mountains toward Sitgreaves Pass, and by the time you are up in the switchbacks there is no shoulder worth the name and a drop off the right side that puts rental cars down to fifteen miles an hour and keeps them there. I ride it a couple times a month, always late in the day, once the heat has let go and the light starts coming in sideways across the rock.Thursday I went out around six with no plan past Oatman and back. Stopped at Cool Springs the way I always do, that rebuilt station with the stone pillars where the tour vans line up at noon and nobody at all stops at supper time. Sat there a wh...