Walsenburg, CO. 7939 miles.

I woke up this morning in Monticello feeling tired and stiff. The trucker diet I’ve been living on for the past 3 weeks is starting to catch up with me and I drank a half gallon of orange juice at the Shell station just to feel like I wasn’t getting scurvy.

The morning run was long and lonely. Psst the Colorado state line I was soon on a very remote county road and dint see another car for 100 miles. I have noticed that animals are scarce when you ride a loud motorcycle but apparently there is an exception: Wolves in rural Colorado do not care and they will sit on the side of the road and watch you like they ordered you for breakfast. I did not stop for pictures.

As the high grassy plains descend down into the valley you get your first view of the Rockies. It was eerie to remember this sight from the opposite direction weeks ago. The rest of the morning was spent barreling towards the range and knowing I had a long crossing to come.

I finally rejoined civilization in Norwood and took a long morning break to shake the dust loose. The temperature was fluctuating 20 degrees every few miles with the elevation changes and I still felt half asleep. A long sit in the sun helped things and the next leg of the ride was incredible.

A straight ride down from the high farmlands of Norwood rakes you onto an incredible stretch of 145 that snakes along the banks of the San Miguel River. Just a phenomenally fun twisty motorcycle road through the gorge with breathtaking views of Colorado Pines and red rock on both sides as the white water rapids of the river cut through the countryside. The road rides so fast and so curvy that almost with no warning you look up and realize that the snow covered Rockies are right in front of you.

At Ridgeway you turn onto CO 550, also known as the Million Dollar Highway. There are a couple stories behind the name. One says that it cost a million dollars for each miles when they built it in 1920. Another says there is a million dollars worth of gold ore in the pack sand under its curves. Regardless, it has some of the greatest views of any road in America and some of the most terrifying drops. The guardrails stop at Ouray and don’t reappear for about 30 miles past Silvertown and the south pass up Red Mountain includes more than a few hairpin curves straight to the edge of the cliffs. The road is carved into the side of the mountain and has become enough of a tourist attraction that there are plenty of turnouts, but that doesn’t make you feel much better when taking a curve over a 1000 foot drop with no margin for error.

The Red Mountain Pass is just the first of three summits you crest on your way down 550 to Durango. It is one stunning Coors Light commercial of a view after another, up and down through deserted mining towns. Up and down from 11,00 feet to the valley and back again the air heats and cools quickly and the change in oxygen gave me a splitting headache. But it was hard to complain because this was the Rocky crossing I missed on my way West. From here on out I probably won’t see so much as a hill so I savored all of the views and curves.



It was around this time I started getting a feeling I first felt a few days ago in Utah. The pace of this trip is quick. 5-6 weeks on the road is a long time, even for this number of miles, but seeing the change of scenery so quickly day after day after day has started to give me a certain sense of panic. It is why I have started taking so many more pictures recently. With every curve in this part of the country comes some new life changing sight and somewhere in my brain is an intense anxiety that I won’t remember it. That I won’t be able to hold onto all of the images that are flying into my eyeballs at 90 mph. I could spend a month in each of these days and still not see everything I wanted to see. The sheer velocity at which the country shifts and changes under the tires is alarming. This journal is the one thing I can do to try and keep it all in perspective and feel at least a little bit in control of the memories because otherwise I would be terrified they would just blow through my head in the next mile.

So after my final mountain crossing I stopped for lunch in Durango where the low desert heat returned. The afternoon ride was not much fun as the first half was spent in sweltering heat and terrible construction traffic along 160. As soon as the traffic cleared some very intimidating thunder heads appeared over top of San Juan, where I was about to make a long run. The radar reports showed things staying to the north so I soldiered on. Sure enough, I didn’t hit a drop of rain but the clouds were black on top of the mountain directly overhead with giant shocks of lightning crackling along the rim just a few hundred feet above. It is a beautiful forest that is everything you would want to see in a Colorado landscape, but all I wanted to do was reach the other side which took entirely too long.

Once there I was thanking the motorcycle gods for sparing me another mountaintop downpour when I reached Alamosa for gas. I was 75 miles from Walsenburg, where I had planned on crashing for the night, but there was an even more sinister storm front looming across the entire horizon to the east. Again I checked the radar and somehow it seemed that two enormous storms were straddling 160 along the last leg and I could get through unscathed. I spent a good long while at the gas station considering turning south for New Mexico but decided I could make it through. After all, 75 miles isn’t that long of a run even in rain.

Riding across the plain towards Rough Mountain the storm heads over the Blanca Peak were downright terrifying. It was a black hole that swallowed the entire mountain range in darkness. I knew I wasn’t going through that so it was a beautiful thing to see from 3 or 4 miles to the south. But as much as the route promised to stay south, the road stubbornly bent north again and again and soon the black clouds were surrounding me. There is a certain kind of anxiety that comes with riding a motorcycle under black skies in the middle of a remote expanse. You see the drivers in their cars along the way drinking coffee and chatting and listening to the radio, but your eyes are peeled to the sky for hints of lightening clouds and the curves in the road to tell you if you’re heading for better or worse conditions.

Somehow I managed to split the storm heads right down the middle and shot out the other side of the hills with 10 miles to Walsenburg. I have never shot a hole in one but I imagine that is what it feels like and I was whooping it up as I crossed the final few miles into town with lightning shooting down into the valleys on either side.

A longer day than I had thought it would be, it does feel like the end of the West as now it is a straight shot to the Gulf and back up the east coast where the extreme terrain of Utah and Colorado will be distant memories. Tomorrow starts the long trek across Texas.

Wyatt Neumann was a phenomenally talented photographer and director, a loving husband and father, and a passionate motorcyclist. On June 11th he was doing what he loved riding in Delaware when he suffered a brain aneurysm which caused him to lose control of his motorcycle. He died shortly after. Wyatt was instrumental in both inspiring this trip and planning many of its routes and logistics. The title of this site was unapologetically stolen from his series of photographs from his own travels. He leaves behind a wife and two young children. A memorial fund has been established to help his family in this very trying time. Please consider donating. Any amount will help. Thank you.

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