#enchantedcircle

Previous: Part I - http://beneaththewesternsky.tumblr.com/post/125729948570/western-us-tour-2015-part-1

17 May 2015

Day 3′s route

I awoke on Sunday morning to beautiful, clear, blue skies with a few puffy white clouds. Quite a change from the hellstorm I sat through late last night. I packed up my tent and gear at the track while my dad made his way up to the track from his hotel in Stroud. We headed out late that morning, taking the turnpike West through a large portion of Oklahoma. It was a beautiful day. I love the mountains, so Oklahoma scenery doesn’t quite do it for me, but the rolling green pastures were still pretty in their own way.

I was pretty convinced that the rest of the trip would look like this. Forever.

It got pretty monotonous pretty quickly though. The panhandle was hot, flat, and boring. We were pounding into a vicious headwind, which cut into our fuel mileage, made it nearly impossible to hear each other the headsets above 55mph, and simply just wore us slap out. I nearly ran out of gas near the small community of Balko, OK around 2pm. We stopped for a break in the convenience store to stretch our legs and get some food and water. We hadn’t stopped since we started that morning. My exhaustion is reflected in my handwritten notes in my ride journal. I wrote a single paragraph of short, choppy sentences with no expressiveness or emotion. Even now, reading my notes, I can feel the mental shortness of breath I felt then. It seemed we would never escape the endless farmland.

But at long last the New Mexico border came. It was like a switch flipped. Quickly the green flatland gave way to distant hills and the road began to curve slightly. The ground changed color and mountains appeared on the horizon. Soon the highway began to sweep along the base of snow-capped peaks. I fired up the intercom and shared my unashamed child-like excitement with my dad, realizing that I had never seen snow-topped mountains in person before.

Ok, so it wasn’t much snow, but there’d be plenty to come later...

In contrast to the green, well-watered pastures of Oklahoma, the ground here was dry and brown, closer to what I was used to in dryer parts of Texas. In an abstract sense, that kind of land seems to imply a certain harshness, that agriculture is not a trivial affair, that the plants, animals, and people must be hardy to subsist there. It felt frontier-like. It felt like I had come home.

We stopped to gas up in Springer, NM before our final push to the ski resort town of Taos. When we stepped off the bikes, I was still physically tired, but mentally I felt rejuvenated. We had started to gain altitude and the air had begun to thin a bit. It felt cold and pure. I took deep breath after deep breath, feeling as if I came alive more with every one. Springer was a nice little town. We had a friendly conversation with the clerk at the gas station. He tipped us off on some good backroads we could take from there to Taos instead of taking the highway. It did not disappoint.

Lakes and streams guided the road while small mountains loomed around us on the not-so-distant horizon. The road really began to curve and tighten. We were celebrating on the intercoms. The fun had really started.

We reached Cimarron and turned West on US64 through Cimarron Canyon State Park. The road began to switch back and forth as it climbed and and dipped over and around mountain passes. This was my first experience riding on a true mountain road. It was more fun than I imagined I could have riding on the street. The icing on the cake of that road was coming out of the forest and looking down at least several hundred feet into the valley containing Eagle Nest and Eagle Nest Lake. It was a phenomenal scene and feeling.

The drop into the basin on the steep, guardrailed road. Of course, the video doesn’t quite do it justice, but you can get idea.

If that had been the end of the great riding for the day, it would have been fantastic. But the so called “Enchanted Circle” (the ring of mountains along with the towns of Eagle Nest, Taos, Angel Fire, Red River, and Questa) wasn’t done with us yet. 

It got better.

After leaving Eagle Nest, we headed into a stretch of the Carson National Forest that led us to our destination for the night, Taos, NM. The road through Carson was absolutely breathtaking. The scenery was great and the curves were an absolute blast. We stayed on the intercom almost constantly, exclaiming frequently about how fun each corner was. This road was even more fun than the stretch of US64 earlier.

We rolled into Taos before dark, found a hotel, and, thanks to TripAdvisor, found a restaurant called “Orlando’s New Mexican Cafe”, which turned out to excellent. I felt completely at ease. The bike was great, the roads were great, and I couldn’t have asked for a better first real day on the road.

The view from our hotel the next morning