Yesterday, Friday, was our last full day in Sturgis. We missed seeing the Slash concert but heard it from our tents because it rained quite steadily until the wee hours of the morning. When I got out of my tent just after 7 a.m. the fly was still wet but there was a breeze and despite the cloud cover it began to dry. We began to pack our stuff; it's amazing the amount of stuff that can be strewn around a small tent in just five days and just as amazing that most of it can go back where it is supposed to. You have to travel light on a motorcycle so there's no room for extra stuff, although on every trip I find something that I could and should have left at home.
The wind last night toook a toll on the big flag hanging at the entrance to the chip. it seemed to be whole yesterday but was ripped in half this morning.
The ripped flag at the entrance to the 'Chip'.
The sun finally came out in patches so I was able to dry the tent and fly by hanging them on two small nearby trees. While I was waiting for this to happen we spent some time chatting with the people in the next campite over. Jeremy and Doug trailered up their bikes last night and were heading back to North Dakota today. Jimmy was going to have his bike trailered back by buddies because it had some strange noises coming from either the transmission or the bottom end as I understand it. Pete, his wife, and their friend were staying for another day because the friend's daughter was coming up to hear Sublime play tonight. We all got together for some photos and then packed our tents and got ready to roll. Neither Garry nor I ever got the names of the two women. Jeremy suggested that we should come back next year to see his bike when it was finished but I told him that unfortunately, it probably wasn't going to happen.
Pete, his wife, Jeremy, Doug, Pete's wife's friend, & Jimmy
Jeremy is from Escanaba, Michigan and in 1974 I spent some time there. We chatted about the Suzuki dealership where I had seen my first woman bike mechanic. He wasn't sure if he knew her but thought he knew another woman bike mechanic who had married the owner of the dealership. It was kind of neat meeting someone from I place I had been to almost forty years ago.
There were two ways out of our campsite - a road made by dumping dirt into the small trickle that runs through the field, probably in the spring, and a track through the wet area at the end of the field. We decided to take the level roadway but it was still wet from the night's rain and the fill seemed to contain lots of clay. Riding a fully loaded Harley through wet clay is not the best way to start a day but we made it through and left the Chip for the final time on the way to Sturgis.
Since it was early, most of the traffic going through Sturgis this morning was leaving so it wasn't too hard to make our way through town to Highway 85. Our destination was Casper but we decided to take a shorter route on state roads rather than ride the I-90 west to Gillette and then south on I-25. Highway 85 winds through Deadwood then through Lead to catch the main highway. We had not been through Lead when we rode the Spearfish Canyon Loop so when we saw the Homestake Mine pit we stopped for photos. The mine started in the 1870s, and with a slight hiatus gold is still being mined today according to the display in the museum.
Homestake Mine pit, Lead, SD
Homestake Mine pit, Lead SD
Leaving Lead we headed through the Black Hills and over the pass that would take us into eastern Wyoming. Here the weather got nasty. The black clouds started to roll in the wind picked up and rain began spitting down. I was really concerned that we were going to ride into a big rainstorm, or, given the increased altitude, hail, but apart from some minor rain and the wind we made it over the 6500+ foot pass and into Wyoming.
The road to Newcastle was a lot easier than the highway through the Black Hills with its constant 35 mph curves and we made good time to Newcastle where there is refinery that puts out a heavy petrochemical smell. Garry and i both had trouble gassing up because in some of the stations here you have to enter a Zip code that matches your credit card. Being Canadians, we don't have a Zip code so we have to go through the long process of having a manual override done. I gave up & tried another station but Garry was able to gas up. I ended up at a station with old pumps that still had the rotating dials with the amount on them.
When I pulled up the pump a character out of a bad motorcycle movie strolled over & told me how to operate the pump. He was a skinny grizzled kind of guy who was wearing a Banditos, Wyoming patch. Needless to say, I paid this one with cash. Maybe he wqas being helpful, but he may also have been an owner. There were a few patched guys there from the Sons of Silence MC from Colorado as well.
We stopped at Subway for lunch - Subway is a mainstay of our diets these days - then headed down highway 85 for the eighty mile run to Lusk. This road runs straight as an arrow for most of those eighty miles with some slight curves thrown in. We crossed the Cheyenne River which was not much more than a muddy trickle that you could probably jump across. If that's what passes for a river here, I'd hate to see a creek!
Highway 85 south of Newcastle, WY
The landscape of the high plains.
We stopped in Lusk for a coffee and met a great lady who was having a very slow day at her coffee kiosk. She made us Americanos so we had our first jolt of caffeine for the past few days. And it was good. We continued west on Highway 20 to Douglas. The wind was getting stronger and we were being thrown around a bit. My bike is heavier than Garry's so I can imagine what he was going through with the vicious crosswinds.
In Douglas we pulled in for gas and met a group of seven riders from Indiana. In ten days they had been at Sturgis, rode the Beartooth Pass, and were heading for home expecting to clock 4000 miles in that time. Impressive.
We hit I-25 out of Douglas for the final fifty miles to Casper and this is where the ride got hairy. For the whole distance we were faced with high crosswinds, quartering winds, and headwinds, depending on our direction and were constantly being tossed around. It was fortunate that we were on a four lane highway because at times we were being pushed almost across whole lanes. This was white knuckle riding all the way and we arrived in Casper just before 6 p.m. Both of us had sore hands and forearms from squeezing the grips so hard for the run from Douglas.
We got a room at a reasonable price, and that is great for a change. Tomorrow we are heading west on the way to Rawlins, then on to Salt Lake City. From there we haven't figured it out yet, but it is a great ride. The weather for Sunday is supposed to be sunny and relatively calm so the ride should be hot but not too difficult.
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