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We made it!  I wasn’t sure if we would have time with all the dentist appts and the likes and stuff…but the dentist got us in a day early, and I went FULL crackhead and smashed out 600 miles in one night to get us into New Mexico. Yesss! *Napolean Dynamite fist pump*

We drove up Highway 15 just past Pinos Altos in the RV and stayed the night in the woods.

gila cliff dwelling hwy 15
Check out that sweet articulation!

Today, we unloaded the bike and rode up Highway 15 all the way to the end and visited the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Park. For those of you not in the know, btw, it’s pronounced “Hee-lah”. People will be snarky at you if you get it wrong. ;) Anyhow, Bribri and I have an annual national parks pass, so we just strolled on in. If you don’t have a pass, it’s $15 per person 16 or older.

Also today…and kind of as an aside…I created a Patreon page. It’ll have the same content on it as I post on my blog…but it will also have EXTRAS that won’t be on my blog. ;) If you want to check it out, here’s the link: https://www.patreon.com/4theriders

gila cliff dwellings
The road in through Pinos Altos is quite nice!
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At the end of February, Rawhyde Adventures—A BMW GS training facility located in Castaic, CA—hosted a grand opening of their newest facility in California City, CA called Zakar. Brianna and I were fortunate enough to be able to attend the 2019 Adventure Days event. I’ve been to Rawhyde Adventures a bunch of times covering the GS Trophy qualifiers over the years. I love the facility there and even more importantly, I love the people there. Rawhyde attracts people from all over the country and even the world.

It’s the kinda place where you go and hear non-stop stories from people who have ridden all the places you’d ever dreamed of going and riding; Patagonia, Egypt, Sri Lanka, Colombia, Mongolia, etc etc etc…It never ends! And I never grow tired of it. I aspire to do these things and the wealth of experience and knowledge is pretty much priceless.

rawhyde adventure days zakar california city
Stacked connex boxes makes me happy for some reason. The main dining tent is in the middle.

It’s not your typical Starbucks meetup of GS riders either. Most of the attendees to the Zakar grand opening rode their bikes to the facility loaded up with tents and sleeping bags. When I arrived in my fancy RV with my fancy trailer with my [not so] fancy bike nestled inside, it was snowing pretty fierce. It was COLD. I waited in line for registration behind a spattering of Sportsmobiles, RV’s, and GS’s loaded to the gills.

rawhyde adventure days 2019 zakar
Like, brrr, Shaggy.
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Brianna and I stayed just up above Lake Castaic last night with the thoughts of getting up early to go for a ride up towards Neenach, CA to see if we could catch some super bloom action. Our original plan was to have done it last week, but after a sudden emergency—and costly—trip to the dentist on Tuesday, everything got pushed way back.

I woke up excited at 8:15am. I knew we weren’t going to the epitome of the super bloom, but I knew that we’d be able to catch some pretty sweet poppies, for sure. We were out the door by 10am. by 10:00:38am, we were already doing wheelies and hitting some sweet twisties. We took Hughes Rd up towards the Lake Elizabeth split and went north towards hwy 138. We rode west on 138 for a few miles before turning north again, and beginning our adventure.

california super bloom poppies
We were so close, we could almost taste them.
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I’d heard about Mt Lemmon and I’ve been wanting to go up there for about a year or so. Today was the day.

We were running a day ahead of schedule to get to Inde Motorsports Ranch, so we stopped at a friend’s house in Tucson to stage for a ride out to Mt Lemmon.

A quick summary: don’t go up there on the weekend if you wanna rip and have some fun. I’m pretty sure we saw every single license plate from all 50 states about 6 times each. However, the views are breathtaking. I wasn’t mad about the 35 mph speed limits or all the quacks in cages doing 27 mph because soaking it all in is well worth it.

If there was less traffic and less law enforcement, it’d be a decent run. It’s only about 25 miles of fun and there’s no outlet. It’s a there-and-back kinda ride. I don’t know of any other fun twisties in the Tucson area though.

mt lemmon aerostich
All about that ‘stich life.
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