The Peaks and Valleys of Idaho – Moto Travel Diaries [S1 Ep24]
![The Peaks and Valleys of Idaho – Moto Travel Diaries [S1 Ep24]](/pic/the_peaks_and_valleys_of_idaho_moto_travel_diaries_s1_ep24_/a19teEx4S05nSzg_.jpeg "The Peaks and Valleys of Idaho – Moto Travel Diaries [S1 Ep24]")
What could it be this time? It might be the kickstand sensor. But I can fix that. Hey everyone! Welcome back to Notiers Frontiers Diaries. In the last episode, we went into Idaho to explore the incredible state that it is, and in this episode we see one of Idaho's most famous, and beautiful features - the Sawtooth Mountains. And we also have a bit of a disaster that happens. That's almost a common theme. You might be catching on to. Yeah, I think that's just a part of travel though. I mean it's always
ups and downs, right? You always have good things and bad things that happen to you, and it's always out of your control, and you just have to go with it, whatever it may be. Stay positive. That's right. So we started off in the morning at this campsite that was one of my favorites. It was in Challis hot springs. Well, get in there.
This is nice! That's where we had our Spa Day, because they had hot springs there, and it was amazing. I just loved... first of all, I love hot springs. But the fact that they were so clear, they were just the perfect temperature, it was nice and chilly out, and so it was that perfect contrast between the hot water and the chilly outside. And so we slept really well. Yes. We had a gorgeous view of the mountains. And that night we ran into, there was a bunch of, like nine motorcyclists that are on dirt bikes, or single track orientated. So I don't think there was a 650 among them. They're all 250 cc, 300's, but a good conversation. It was really cool. Most of them
were level-headed. There was a few weird ones, sorry if you're watching this. They had a shaman. They were awesome. But I just thought that was really great that this group of people had come together. And they did it every year apparently. Yeah, so it's like just a group of friends that get together regardless of where their lives are at, and they go... to different places out West. And they certainly picked some good places to go to this time through Idaho.
And so they were telling us some cool, harder stuff. We told them about the Colorado BDR, and how there were some difficult sections. But they would just zoom through happily. You know, it's always just fun to talk with like-minded people. There were beers involved. Marisa doesn't drink, and so when strangers have beers, I just seem to magnitate... to them. You're magnetized. You're attracted to them. Magnetically. Yes. So I had an extra good night because I had a couple beers, a couple few more than I should have had. After a wonderful swim in the hot springs, I mean
it's perfect. And they had a campfire... that's the best. And just good conversation. Absolutely. And so we woke up the next morning and it was beautiful. Those plumes of mist coming off of the hot springs, because it was so cold and crisp out, it just filled the view of the mountains with those wafts. It looked like smoke, it was really beautiful. And we packed up the motorcycle, it started to get a little bit warmer once the sun was more or less coming over the mountains. We honked to our neighbors as we took off, and waved goodbye. And headed on down the road.
And so to go through Sawtooth Mountains, there's a beautiful road that we'd been told about that is paved. But we'd also heard that there is something called Bayhorse, which has an old mining town, and a little bit of off-road. I don't even think we heard of it, I think we were just riding down and I saw an offshoot, and I was like, "Hey, you want to go check out a mining town? When was the last time we were disappointed by an old mining town?" So we said yeah, so I turned off it, and we just... Yeah, you're right. It was just very serendipitous. It was a random road. And it was fairly easy, especially after some of the stuff we had been doing. But just loose
gravel and ruts... Really kind of perfect. Oh, it was fantastic. Sadly when we got to the main mine thing, it was closed. There was a big gate that was closed, but you can appreciate it from afar. And there was a car and a dude in the car waiting there. I didn't know if he was a security guard
or what, but the road kept going and I asked him, "Hey, are they open?" He said, "No, they're closed." And he was just waiting. He said, "Are you gonna go down that road?" And I said, "Yeah." And he said, "Because I heard it gets really gnarly, and I don't want to go down it by myself." I said, "You can follow us. I'm not gonna be able to help you whatsoever if things go astray." He's just in a car, and we're on a motorcycle. A rental car because he was in the area for business. And he said that his brother had recommended that he go down this road because there was a lake, Bayhorse Lake, down at the end of the road. We had no idea about any of this stuff.
But we said, "Sure, follow us along." And we took off down the road. And it did get quite narrow. I could see how if you were in a vehicle that you felt couldn't handle the road, there wouldn't have been a good place to turn around. No. So that would have been tricky for him. But it wasn't too bad. The problem was that going off-road on a motorcycle, and going off-road even in a 4x4, a Jeep... When you see Jeeps doing nasty off-road stuff, they're
kerplunking and they're at crazy angles, and they're doing all this, but they're going two, three miles an hour to do all this stuff. And me, I'm zipping along. I'm doing 10, 12, 15 mph. If you're on a 250 cc dirt bike, you're doing a wheelie the whole time. But we were definitely not that fast though. No, but I kept looking in my rearview mirror for this guy in this
Rav4 or whatever. But he was way off in the distance. And actually, on a motorcycle the truth is you can't go that slow. Especially uphill. You'll fall over. You can only go so slow on these off-road areas. It really depends on the terrain, but on certain terrain, you have to keep your speed. I was trying to be a good samaritan, but at some point I just said, "I don't know where he is, and I'm not not waiting around for him." We were like, "Let's check out this Bayhorse Lake!"
Yeah, and then the road splits off, and again we didn't know where he was. The guy just pointed down the road and said, "There's a lake at the end of the road." And then there's a split, and we were like, "I don't know which way to go." But to the right was certain doom. It was zigzaggy,
and there were mines on the side of the cliff. And it looked really cool, and I was gung-ho. I would have done it if Marisa was on board. But I was equally excited when she was like, "Let's go left." There's not a lake up there, I'll tell you that much. Maybe there's a crater lake, but... You could see these old mining buildings, and one of them was built so directly onto the cliff, I have no idea how those settlers built that place. Just like chuck the
ore down the mountainside. It was nuts how steep that was. And you could see this tiny road going to it. And I was like, "No, that is a mule track." There is no way that they got anything up there that wasn't on two feet or four feet. No wheels managed to get up there. So I'm glad we didn't go that way. I'm ok with that. So we went left, and the road was beautiful. The trees were nice and colorful. There were campgrounds, or you could see people had camped out in these fields. But we finally got to the lake. It was really beautiful. There was this little pier
that went off into it. It was like there's this beautiful empty lake, there's nothing around, and then just a pier that kind of goes off into it. It's kind of like your picturesque little mountain lake. Just you and the lake, and maybe some ducks and maybe a loon if you're lucky. Yeah, really picturesque. But my favorite part was on the way back. Because as we were coming back, this was still very early morning, and the sun was rising and there were some clouds in the sky. And the clouds made it so that the sun's rays came down in what we call God Rays. God Fingers massaging the earth. God Rays just streaming down. Yes,
that one valley was blessed. It was so beautiful, and then the sunlight would filter through the clouds, and we were at high enough altitude and it was fall so that some of the trees had turned a beautiful golden color. And we were just kind of going through this tunnel of golden leaves with the sun's rays shining through and mountains in the distance. It was beautiful! And we saw our little four-wheeled friend, and he said, "Yeah, I turned around." Good on you. Sure. He saw the first place he could turn around, and was like, "I'm going back." It was a rental car, so he's not doing that. But we got a good adventure out of it. Indeed. And then at the little mining camp, we
saw like the same nine bikes from the campground. And they were all there, and we're taking pictures and we heard, "Tim!" Who in a thousand miles knows my name? And I was like, "Hey!" And so that was cool, a little reunion, meet and greet. And then we bailed. And we headed off to Sawtooth. So your brother had texted you, he saw that we were in this area that he had visited. Yeah we have the GPS Garmin Inreach, and it gives our family and immediate friends exact locations of where we are. And my brother saw that we were in an area that he had just ridden to the
year prior. And he said, "Oh my God, you got to go to lake..." Well, he'd "driven" to. Yeah, he was in... four wheels. But, what was the lake named? Stanley. Lake Stanley. Yeah, and he said, "You got to go to Lake Stanley." And I said, "I don't know if it's too far out of our way." But then I looked at the map, and it was like right there. That's where we're going. It's kind of in the heart of the Sawtooth Mountains. And so we put that into the GPS, headed there. And the picture
that your brother had taken was gorgeous. It was placid. He got up in the bright morning, and the lake was just a mirror. But we found the same, I must have been standing on the same stone that he took his picture from. We'll do a side by side here. Then I sent it to him, and it was just
it was just so cool. I love my brother to death, he had some good advice. He had a good time, I had a good time at the same exact spot in the world. We both met at different timelines, at that second. So that was cool. And the mountains around it, I can see why they're called the Sawtooth Mountains, because they are so jagged, they really do look like shark teeth or something just sticking up out of the earth, and kind of cradling this lake. It was beautiful. And so we had a good lunch stop. I had a reuben I remember fondly. Oh yeah, we found some sandwiches. That was perfect. I mean you just have a good riding day, you pack some delicious sandwiches,
and the weather's nice, pull over, have a nice view, we ate our sandwiches right there with the view of the lake and the mountains behind it... And yeah, it was pretty perfect. And I was thinking, "Could it get any better?" You know, there's really only one way for things to go when it's that perfect. And ironically, we had reached like the apex of the mountain pass, so we were going down. We did enjoy ourselves for a little bit longer. We had, again, perfect
weather. We were stopping at every little pull off and campground that there was to take pictures. There was a beautiful river that the road followed. So the asphalt road, the main road follows this river as most roads and mountains do. And so there's a bunch of little pull-offs,
they're campgrounds or picnic areas or whatever. But I'd see all this beauty, this river through all the trees, and then there'd be an opening. And I'd turn around and pull in. "Oh my God, this is beautiful!" And then we'd get two miles down the road, and I'd see another one, like, "Oh my God, that's beautiful!" And we had nothing but time. We were going through
Idaho to visit our friend Brandon in Boise. So we were going to make it to Boise that day. So we had plenty of time, we were just enjoying ourselves at every little pull-off. And then at one of these pull-offs, we were taking lots of pictures. The pictures were great. They were so beautiful. I took a couple "blue steel" shots just for fun. But we were having a great time, and then we went to get back on the motorcycle... and it didn't start. And this has at this point been kind of a reoccurring thing that has made me nervous.
Because it happened first in Florida. And then again on our way when we were going over the Mississippi, it just died on our way to Colorado. We were towed by our friend Pete back to Colorado. But we thought we had resolved the problem. There's the Regulator Rectifier, and it's called the RR. It's where the the battery is terminated with the charger and the stator so that the stator is always continuously charging the battery, but it's not going to just over charge it. And so the stator regulates how much voltage the battery is kept at. And in a perfect running vehicle,
it's always 13.5, 14, 15, whatever it may be on your particular vehicle. Boring stuff out of the way that I don't even really know what I'm talking about. But it sounds good. It sounded pretty good. But I unscrewed the regulator, and a liquid, black death had come out of it. And it was like a mixture of Namibian sand and Peruvian mud and Florida monsoons, and I knew that that was not good. I know that during electrical terminations, more water, more problems. And so when I had that dumped out, and fixed and taped it back up, everything started, and it felt good. Because
when when you're solving problems and you don't do anything, and then things work, it's like I don't know. I didn't really fix anything, and so I don't really feel confident that this isn't going to happen again. But those were one of those times when Marisa asked me, and I was like, "I'm like 90% sure that we fixed it." Every day his confidence would go up too. We'd
already been going through a bunch of off-road in Colorado, and we'd gotten all the way up to Idaho, and so everything was functioning fine. We figured - found a problem, fixed the problem, we're good, right? And then... surprise! It's just so disappointing because it's just like... I don't know much about bikes to begin with. And I'm a strong advocate that I don't think that you have to be a professional KTM or Ducati or BMW mechanic to be able to go ride your bike. I mean... Around the world even. For sure. But I don't know a lot about the mechanics,
and I know even less about the electronics. And if it's mechanical, like I don't know how to mend a broken bone in a leg. But if something snapped, I would know to put a stick on it and wrap it. And same with a motorcycle. I know how to use JB Weld and Gorilla Tape and zip ties, but when it comes to the electronics, or the neurological system... Is that a system? Yeah. I think so.
Nailed it! I would have no idea what to do. And same with the bike. If you gave me a fluke meter, I would just press a bunch of things and the thing would go beep, and I don't have any idea what's going on here. Long of the short, at that very moment in time, my energy and my happiness went down. You know, you're not giving yourself enough credit. Because you do know a few things, and you know to disconnect the battery, and reconnect it, kind of reboot the whole electrical system. You tried doing the kickstand sensor. There's a throttle body trick,
because I had googled some tricks. You know some things. And actually, it did get working again. I don't know. I can change out the dongle... Or we can just go now that it's running. I can change out the dongle, and if it happens again, then we know it's not that. Yeah, let's do that. But at this point, we were so upset that this reoccurring problem had... It was back.
It surfaced again. So that definitely dampened our spirits, and we didn't know if we would be able to make it to Boise or not. And I didn't want to call anybody for another tow, and it was just poopy... And so we're sitting there, trying to do all the different things that I could finally do.
It started, and I said, "Okay, let's not mess around." Let's not turn the bike off unless we need gas, and if we're at a gas station and need help, that would surely be a better place to be stuck than at a campground in the middle of some mountain pass. EDS Failure - which is normal.
I say we just go. So that will all be in our next episode of what happens next. Cliffhanger! I hope you liked this video. If you did, please give us a thumbs up, and hit the subscribe button below, and we will be seeing you next time. Peace everybody! Bye! Stay safe.
2021-11-23 11:29
