1000 Miles, 24 Hours, 1 Motorcycle, 2 Up

On Saturday, June 20, 2009, the Colorado BMW Motorcycle Club hosted the Colorado Classic 1000 ride. The route was challenging as it was non-interstate and covered a number of great mountain roads in Colorado. Several of them I hadn’t ridden before, but they are on my “great roads to revisit” list. I attached a map of the route.

2009 Colorado Classic 1000 Route

Jim Bay and John Johnston (IBA members), a friend of mine, Pete Mathews, and my wife (as passenger) all partook. Neither Pete nor my wife had done an Iron Butt ride before.

Unfortunately Jim had to drop out due to some electrical malfunction on his bike part way through the trip. A loose wiring harness connector was the problem forcing him to head for the garage before night fall hit. He managed to get it back to the garage without major incident.

The weather was “not the best”, cloudy, rain, and at times down right cold, so this added additional challenges to the ride. Wolf Creek pass was challenging with hard rain, fog and quite cold.

We departed at 5:02 am from the start at the Holiday Inn in Lakewood, Colorado and arrived at the finish in Crested Butte, Colorado at 12:20 am. The GPS distance was about 1024 miles. My wife got very cold, but hung in there to complete the ride. Those that finished later said it was snowing/raining as the rode from Gunnison to Crested Butte … typical summer weather in the Colorado mountains 🙂

This is my third IBA ride certificate. I did not expect my wife to want to come on this ride, and she certainly surprised my by saying “Sure, I’ll go with you.” She rides, but her night vision is not great and she didn’t want to take her bike. I think riding passenger for 1000 miles is actually physically harder to do that driving the bike. So, my hat is off to her for accomplishing something I don’t think I could do.

Here are some pictures from the ride.