Sunday morning motorcycle ride

 We love going on weeks-long motorcycle trips where we explore new areas and are never quite sure what might be around the next corner. Short rides through familiar areas have a completely different feel, where we're out simply for the joy of being on the BMW, enjoying the sun on our face and the wind at our back. Today we rode 128 miles to Wickenburg, Arizona and back. We didn't actually get to downtown Wickenburg, and instead rode into the Wickenburg Ranch development, turned around, and headed home.

We rode out of Prescott southeast on Iron Springs Road/Yavapai County route 10 through Skull Valley, a small ranching community that used to have a fantastic diner, which unfortunately is now closed. The post office seems to be the most thriving spot in town. We continued on AZ 89S through Peeples Valley, another ranching community and home to Maughn Ranches that spans over 512,000 acres. 

Just past Peeples Valley we rode through Yarnell, site of the Granite Mountain Hotshots Memorial State Park commemorating the 19 firefighters who died here in June 2013 fighting the Yarnell Hill Fire. It's a rocky, remote, forbidding area and the hike itself is quite strenuous, reinforcing the extremely difficult and hazardous task our forest firefighters face every day. 89S descends 1300' in four miles on a twisting road that snakes down the mountain into the valley.

The haze in the valley is due to the smoke from the wildfires in California, a sobering reminder of the high fire risk this very dry summer. We rode a few miles in the valley, then turned around at Wickenburg Ranch and headed back up the mountains into the cooler air in Yarnell, passing several saguaro cactus that thrive in the hot, dry, lower elevations in Arizona.

A sunny day, bright blue skies, cooler temperatures and twisty roads make this one of our favorite short motorcycle rides and lead to dreaming about longer rides to come.

The last day of our 2120 mile trip from Arizona to Boise and back on our BMW motorcycle

Today was our last day of a 2120 mile trip from our home in Prescott, AZ to Boise, ID and back. It's been windy most of the way, but today the weather forecast was for wind gusts up to 47 mph, so we started the 2.5 hour ride early to beat the worst of the wind.

We started in Kingman, AZ in the Mojave Desert with views of the Hualapai Mountains which range over 8,000'. Kingman is at 3336' elevation, and we wound our way through the Mojave and Sonoran Deserts with views of the shorter Aquarius Mountains at a little over 5,000'. We've been on US Route 93 since early yesterday, starting in Ely, NV. The section from Wickieup to Wickenburg is called the Joshua Tree Parkway of Arizona, and we saw fields of this gnarly, scrubby tree that Territorial Governor John Fremont called "the most repulsive tree in the vegetable kingdom" when he first saw them on a trip through the desert in 1844.

US Route 93 from Kingman to Congress

We turned north off Route 93 and headed on a winding trip up Route 89 toward home. It really is "up" because we climbed in elevation from 3000' in Congress to 4,700' in Yarnell and then even higher to over 6,000' as we rode through the Weaver Mountains into Prescott.

from Congress toward Yarnell

These are favorite roads for motorcycle riders, and we passed two groups of riders today as we twisted and curved our way through the mountains.

The wind picked up as we turned into our street, and by the time we had the bike unpacked I could hear the wind howling through the trees and around the house.

We celebrated as we saw the BMW odometer roll over to 20,000 miles on the first day of our trip. The last week runs together:  did we ride up the unexpected mountain pass on the first or second day? Why does the time zone change from Mountain in Utah and Idaho to Pacific in Nevada? Is today really Tuesday? I have vivid pictures in my mind of long stretches of lonely desert with snowy mountain peaks towering over windmills in the valley, lush green parks in Boise, and friendly people in small towns when we stopped for gas or lunch. I remember the feel of the hot wind as we rode through 90 degree temperatures on a bright sunny day around Lake Mead, and the cold wind that snaked under my jacket when we crossed the snow covered mountain passes in Utah.

John Muir, one of the first promoters of preserving wilderness areas, said that "The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness." I feel he would agree with me that a desert or mountain wilderness also qualifies.