“It was also 90 degrees again, steamy and draining, and by afternoon I had a strong craving for a milkshake.”
-Neil Peart, excerpt from Roadshow
There is something inexplicable about riding motorcycles all day that makes you want to do nothing more than stop at the local dairy bar in a small town for a good milkshake. Almost always, when you bring it up to your riding partners, they say they were thinking exactly the same thing at the same time. More on this later.
Lord Darth and Moto set out for an all day ride, part of our prepping for the May Trans-America Trail trip. We started with a greasy breakfast and a mapping session at the Silver Summit Cafe on a sunny but chilly Saturday. Our original plan was to ride from sunrise to sunset and explore as many dirt roads in the west desert of Utah as possible, but because we were still on the tail end of a long and amazing ski season, it was still a little crisp in the morning for the riding to be enjoyable, so we took our time getting started. We rode from Park City, through the Heber Valley, on our way to Lehi and then Cedar Fort for the last gas up before we hit the dirt. After passing through a few towns with names like Faust, we ended up on the Pony Express Trail. It was hard keeping up with Darth on the loose gravel at first, but after we stopped at the Simpson’s Spring Pony Express monument, I started to get in a groove and let the bike go a little bit. I am still riding the stock Sahara 3 tires that came on my KTM, and I am looking forward to more rides like this with some knobbies on the wheels, hoping this will help me close the gap on the wide open dirt sections.
After stopping at a crossroads in the dirt to stretch and check the map and GPS, Darth took a picture of an Alta sticker on one of the road signs, thinking it would be cool to send this to Connie from Alta. We were only 39 miles from Delta, and decided to continue on to the Little Sahara sand dunes and eventually hit pavement somewhere near the little town of Eureka, an old town in the Tintic Mountains. It was right about this time, we started to think about milkshakes.
One thing the GPS unit does not tell you is what lies ahead when it suggests routes by “the shortest ride time.” In this case, we tried to make it over a mountain road that was snowed in. This time of year, you always have to consider that anything over 6,000 feet might have some snow left over. The telltale signs were more and more deep ruts in the road from trucks and ATVs that had come before. After getting turned around, we backtracked and made our way to Eureka, but without the requisite time to stop for that elusive milkshake, since neither one of us wanted to ride back up Provo Canyon in the dark. There will be plenty of chances for milkshakes on the Trans-America Trail, I suppose.
