Reporting Live from the Colorado Rocky Mountains on a Dual-Sport Ride

Just a moment to check in from Lake City where Sam Correro (transamtrail.com) Chris and Spice (rtw101.com), and I are fresh from a blue sky alpine backroads and trails tour of the Rockies. The first day we climbed Mount Princeton, part of the Collegiate Mountain chain (Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton), then visited St. Elmo, a revived ghost town way out in the woods that’s popular with ATV and 4-wheel drive folks as well as motorcyclists. We followed that with some nice smooth rides the next day with spectacular sweeping views of the mountains across fields of wildflowers so prolific you’d think they were planted — black-eyed susans crowd the road in bouquets. Yesterday we crossed the Continential Divide — moved the trucks over to the West side of the country — here to Lake City, for truly high alpine riding. This is a beautiful (quaint) little victorian town in the middle of the Rockies with lots of small hotels/resorts, restaurants, and I’m here at Guatamala Mike’s general store and Internet cafe. So far the Kawasaki 400 XLR has been great though it took a while to get used to the squirrly feel of a dual-sport bike after all of the heavy road bike riding I’ve been doing all these years. I have taken a couple of minor tumbles but then so have other members of the group. Gotta run now – getting high-speed Internet access is pretty difficult here so I will likely not post anything else until I get home this weekend. — Carla