3 Kaboom's, 3 Dudes, and a Chick ride Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho, Montana

[chrish4ku]

Originally Posted by zeegman

Hi Kelly,

thanks for the motivation.
This last day report was extremely frustrating since it took three tries to enter it.
Lost about 4 hours doing it.
The website logged me out twice in the middle of entering the pictures.
The timeout period must be way too short or it is not recognizing I am working on a report or something like that.
It takes time to enter a lot of pictures and text and embed video.

Anyways I will continue till the whole thing is done but about 1 day per week.

Mike Z

Mike - I got punked too with a timeout one time. I always just do my reports in a TXT document, then copy the whole damn thing into the post. I spent over an hour at work reading this update on Friday....good job.

[rider1150gsadv]

Very nice RR! I have done some of the same roads as you guys and the history is truly amazing in the Old West. Love the pics and vids too!

[Av8rPaul]

Wow, what a great trip! Thanks for putting forth all the effort to document so well and share!

[Just Paul]

Mike,

I have a program called CLIPMATE

if you have a smugmug account you can just copy copy copy copy copy all your photos that you want in your report .. then inside clipmate glue then post ... that will take all the pics and put them in place... then hit submit... once your photos are uploaded you can open your text document and paste the txt to match the pics.. its easy and fast... and you wil never hit a timeout

next time you are over here let me show you.. I can post 30 pics in about 3 min.. then paste in the txt is another 12 or so seconds per pic..

[zeegman]

Day 7 Aug 27





Day 7 would see us riding across the vast emptiness of Wyoming, chasing Pronghorn, visiting Parting of the Ways, Farson, home of the big Cone,
Oregon Buttes, Twin Mounds , and getting slightly lost. The distance was just over 200 miles.

After breakfast at our hotel in Dubois, Jeremy and I sped West to join Paul and Jill at their camping spot on the Union Pass.
We zipped by this place just on the start of the Union road dirt.


Some video of the Union pass road




Here are Paul/Jill at the campsite all packed up and ready to leave.
Some of the cows were moving around them during the night but they got a good rest anyways.

A video of the exit from the campsite:

Once on the Union pass again we were heading West in full sunshine there awesome forestry road.

And passed over nice quiet streams



We zipped along until we saw this sign on the Green river


It describes the usage of the Green river to float railroad Ties down stream to the building sites of the Transcontinental Railroad.
Since timber was scarce down there in Utah so they logged it here in Wyoming for use down there.
As we go further South on our trip this day you will see why they picked this spot for timber.
Later we popped out of the forest and headed into the town of Pinedale for fuel at our favorite Wyoming gas stop – Sinclair




When in Wyoming and you need Dinojuice just look for the big Green Dinosaur on the top and your good!

We caught some good views of the continental Divide ridge mountains out of Pinedale.



There was a convenient sign there to remind us just in case we forgot

A little ways after Pinedale we hit the dirt again and made our way on the Big Sandy Elkhorn cutoff and over to the Lander cutoff.
The scenery started to change to more barren desert and scrub bush terrain.
We saw some interesting layered rocks in a cutaway.


We were heading to the hills ahead

The roads were fast and we were making good time

Until we had a little mixup

The GPS unit Paul and Jeremy use is a Garmin Zumo 660, and I use an ancient Garmin 276c.
They use routes and I normally use tracks. But this particular time I used routes.
The only bad thing about routes is that the computer needs to find roads to create the route whereas
tracks do not change if there is a road or not (which can also be good or bad).
I was following behind Jeremy and Paul was further ahead.
I had to stop for a wizz and I wanted to put my Gopro video camera on my helmet to capture some good video.
I stopped, wizzed, and started to put my camera on when the screw bolt holding it on fell out and rolled off the road into the ditch, I thought.
But I could not find it. I frantically search for 10 minutes and could not find it. So I gave up and started to roll the bike forward when I saw a
shiney object under where my wheel was. I found it! I mounted the camera turned it on and took off.
The problem was that Jeremy and Paul/Jill did not see me for 15 minutes and thought I might be in trouble.
So Paul stayed put and Jeremy roared back to see if he could find me.
I sped towards Jeremy and followed the route, however my GPS routed differently than Jeremy’s GPS and as you will
see in the next video I went off the road into someone’s private ranch, and road got worse and worse until it finally went back on the road again.
Jeremy was on the road and went past exactly when I was off the road and we missed each other.
I kept cruising on until I met Paul and he asked me if I saw Jeremy – I said I did not. So we sat and waited for Jeremy.
Sure enough he comes by and is a little flustered as he had to double back and forward again, wasting gas, to find me.
All in all everybody was OK but it illustrated a point that one can trust the technology a bit too much at times and it also
brings up the question “how long do you wait for someone, before going back to find them?”
Off-course video




At this point we had stopped at a high point overlooking the vast empty open desert which I believe is the “Big Empty”.


Panarama video of the Big Empty


I was telling Paul that I think I could see my house from here

Video on the Big Empty



Jill chillin out and having a break on the Big Empty.

Paul was digging it on the open roads



Paul and Jill came up on a small herd of Pronghorn which decided to stay in front of them for quite a while




It was pretty hot and dry out there and you had to keep hydrated and watch out to the odd deeper sandy spot or you might end up like this guy.


We made our way south until we hit the historic Oregon trail


Actually we hit a spot where four different trails converged – Jeremy is trying to figure out which one to take.

There is a concrete marker there with four trails marked on the four different sided on the marker:
California trail


Oregon trail

Mormon trail

Pony Express trail


We made our way down to the famous “Parting of the Ways” fork in the road where early settlers had to decide which path to choose.
Picking the wrong one might mean the end!
We had a little drama leading up to this spot as there was one deep sand pit that was deep and soft as you rounded a corner and Jeremy and I
almost lost it there. luckly no one went down.




Jeremy makes his choice – fortunately it was a good one.

This picture shows it is a little rougher in this spot

Jeremy had a little tip over in this sandy rut

We visited Little Sandy Crossing which is a bridge over a little stream and was a camping and resting place for immigrants and their livestock
headed to Oregon, California, or Utah. It was also where George Donner was elected to lead the Donner Party which had a tragic end in California


It was hot out and there was no shade so we were glad to head into Farson city for a break.

We stopped in at Farson mercantile “home of the Big Cone”

Paul found out how big a Big Cone really is


After a brief stop in Farson we headed East on hwy 28 until the Lander cutoff and Oregon Buttes trails
We saw some big buttes like this one that looks like a Battleship


We saw Twin Mounds – early immigrants used landscapes like this to figure out if they were on the right trail or not

And finally Oregon Buttes, significant landmark to early settlers marking the beginning of Oregon territory

At this point we started looking for a place to camp.
The best place to camp is a little site on BLM land at N42.38815 W108.62068.
These are primitive campsites so one needs to bring your own supplies and pack out garbage which is normal for the camping we do.
There is a lot of private land along the route in this area so it is best to avoid disturbing it to ensure that we continue to have access to these great historic old trails.

Another great day on the historic trails of the Big Empty West.
Tomorrow would see us riding more Big Empty, cruising through oil and gas fields, Paul getting his first Flat In Wamsutter,
cruising into the Medicine Bow forests, Aspen Alley, torrential rain and hail at Battle Pass and relief in Encampment

[byways]

This is an amazing report. Curious about your videos: Do you edit them much, or at all? Any particular program?

[zeegman]

Hi Tony,

no editting was done.
Raw video from GoPro HD straight to Youtube.

I have a GoPro 2 now which is even better so the vidoes will be clearer for this summers off road advetures.

MZ

Originally Posted by byways

This is an amazing report. Curious about your videos: Do you edit them much, or at all? Any particular program?

[rckt grl]

Nice report! I am hopeful to see the Tetons someday and love seeing photos. It looks like you all had a fantastic trip!

[DARKRYDER]

Great write-up Mike. Here are a few more pics from that long hot day of riding

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