We Ride from Moonscapes to Hot Springs (a.k.a. Spa Day!) – Moto Travel Diaries [S1 Ep23]
![We Ride from Moonscapes to Hot Springs (a.k.a. Spa Day!) – Moto Travel Diaries [S1 Ep23] We Ride from Moonscapes to Hot Springs (a.k.a. Spa Day!) – Moto Travel Diaries [S1 Ep23]](/pic/we_ride_from_moonscapes_to_hot_springs_a_k_a_spa_day_moto_travel_diaries_s1_ep23_/WjVKVnF2N2Z4YTA_.jpeg)
Hey everyone! Welcome back to Notiers Frontiers. It's Notiers Frontiers Diaries. Hey everyone! Welcome back to Notiers Frontiers Diaries! In this episode we're going to talk about one of the most incredible days we had this summer. So we started off in Salt Lake City in Utah, which is an incredible state. We were visiting our friend, Emiliano, in Salt Lake City. Awesome dude. And we were heading north to Idaho. Now, we've been to Idaho once before, but it was this tiny corner. And it was actually really impressive that one tiny corner. Because I always thought just
"Idaho potatoes". I didn't know that it's amazing. And to be honest, we just wrapped up last episode with our buddy we met in Africa, Emiliano. And he's awesome, and we really didn't have a good reason, at first to go to... Like we didn't plan on going to Idaho in depth, but we had a really good friend up there that we had met at an expo years and years ago. And he kept calling to us to come and check out some of the beautiful scenery. Brandon. So we ended up headed out to go see somebody that we had met at an expo
in years passed, and we just loved the rekindling, let it be with Emiliano from our African travels, or people we've met at shows, or people we meet in Walmart parking lots that extend their friendly hands. So just a shout out to the other end of the camera over there, a huge thank you to everybody who watches and is generous. We don't expect anything, and that's why it's just so magical when it works out in everybody's favor, and we get to meet and greet and are invited into people's homes. Thank you! Thank you! And so that was our destination was to go to Boise. And so from Salt Lake City to Boise we didn't know what there was to see. So we just kind of drew a line along roads, and we were like, "Well, let's hope for the best." But we did know one thing, because we had been to that little corner of Idaho before, and we'd gone through Logan Canyon. Yeah. And
Logan is a town in northern Utah near the border with Idaho, and there's a little canyon that goes between Logan and Idaho. And we'd gone through it before. That was seven years ago! A long time ago! It was on our Maiden Voyage. But you know, it's fun sometimes when you're just kind of ignorantly riding around the States, or in whatever country you're in, or state you're in, it's like we're going through this beautiful canyon, and it kind of has an apex. And then you're at the top of it, and there's this cool little town at the very end, and we we dived in. And we knew that
this time around we were close, and I said, "We've got to go to that same pizza joint." Oh, the pizza was so good! And we were like, "Yes, we have to have pizza at that place again!" It's called The Pizza Factory, and it's right on that main street, and it's this basement hole-in-the-wall place. But it has amazing pizza. But we found it again! Seven years later. You know, it's not like I marked it on my Google Maps forever ago. It was amazing.
As soon as we saw it, I was like, "Oh, that's the joint! That's the place right there!" Yeah that's right. So we went there from Salt Lake City to Logan. We had a very early lunch there. Peace, dude. Bye! And we were just sitting eating the pizza outside of the restaurant, and this guy walked up to us.
He owned the bar next door. And he was really really nice. I mean, we look kind of weird with our motorcycle and all of our gear and stuff, and so people often talk to us just on the road. And he was asking questions about our journey and everything, and we told him our plan for the day. And he said, "No no no no no! You have to go through the Sawtooth Mountains in Idaho."
And he recommended that we camp overnight at a place called Challis where they had hot springs that were amazing. And so we redirected our plans. We had planned on camping in the Craters of the Moon, which also looks very interesting. It does, it has a draw to it. And we love all types of landscapes, but that one kind of seemed to putter out in my imagination. Well... hot springs!
I mean you just can't go wrong with that. That was what was calling me. I was like yes, "I want to go swim in some hot springs!" So we changed our plans. He also recommended that we take a different road into Idaho since we'd already been through Logan Canyon before. And it is kind of sad that we weren't able to recreate that Logan Canyon experience because we took this other road. It goes by Bear Lake. We're kind of going down memory lane, if you will. But we're creating new memories. Exactly, and we wanted to try a new road. And it was also nice. It was nice. But instead of... I mean Idaho looks like a chimney, right? And I can't do
it with my fingers. I can't make Idaho with my fingers, but we had this graceful line towards Boise originally. And this time we kind of had to do a hypotenuse leg. That's right, we kind of made a steep angle. We went up north, and then went southwest to Boise. But he said, "You'd be crazy not to go through these mountains." And he's a bicyclist. So he was like, "I do those roads all the time. They're fantastic!" But I mean, if it's good for a bicycle, it's got to be good for a motorcycle too. Yeah, for sure. So we took his advice, and we headed up into Idaho.
When we first got into Idaho, it was mostly these gorgeous rolling greenish hills. Not green like a thick forest, but kind of that spring green, even though it was the middle of summer. And there were cows all over the place, and just the hills, they were small but rolling. Really
picturesque in its own interesting way. And the road, there was nobody on it. It was a beautiful, curvy road between the hills, and it was just us. It was just a great feeling, like, "All right. Now we're in Idaho." And something that I think I've learned about Idaho from riding through it is that it is not necessarily as popular of a destination as some other places, as far as crowded goes. But the nature, and just the scale of how beautiful it is, is top-notch. Just some of the best in the world. And it's up and coming. People are catching on that Idaho is pretty cool. Right. It's no longer a hidden secret anymore. But we did find that the roads had less congestion on them,
which was fantastic. And so we were making our way through the hills. They were really beautiful, and then they kind of stopped, and it became this flat landscape that was super super windy. You could see that it was old volcanic rocks, a volcanic landscape from long ago, which made sense since we heard about hot springs and whatnot. There must be a lot of volcanic activity in that area. And these black rocks would cover the desert landscape, and out in the distance you might see some sort of old volcano has-been, like an old cone or some mountain just in the middle of nowhere that shouldn't be there except for a volcano. And it was insanely windy.
It wasn't quite Argentina windy, but it was very very windy. It was pretty close. Yeah and I had to learn in Argentina, when you're over far enough and you're using a phone as a GPS, sometimes it will take it from horizontal mode and put it into vertical mode, which sucks when you're trying to follow a road. So now I've locked the positioning on my phone to landscape. Because it's just annoying. We're not riding sideways, but you get to a certain point... It feels like it sometimes. It does. And it's like when you're on a roller coaster, or when you're in a go-kart, you feel like you're going 80,000 miles an hour, because you're that close to the ground.
And on the motorcycles in the wind, I'm leaned over maybe ten percent, but it feels like I'm at a 45 degree angle or more, about to scrape pegs. And then to the on-viewer as I zip by, I'm just... Like a slight angle. But I think part of it is also the strain of the wind. First of all, it's so loud, it just takes over all your thoughts. You can't think about anything else but this wind. And then, if you were just to sit upright, maybe it's just me, but I think it's for you as well, then the wind is hitting your shoulders and certain parts of your body. And it makes you
not very aerodynamic. And so naturally you tend to crunch down over the motorcycle in order to be more with-the-wind aerodynamic. You're not a burden against the wind. But that is a strain on your muscles. You have to really be clenched and tense the whole time. It's not a relaxing ride to go through winds like that. No, and I'm glad I don't have one of those beaks on my helmet. Yeah. Because that would have driven me nuts. But I just always... and this isn't a smart thing to do, I've learned recently, but I always leave my visor open just for airflow. But
in small incidences where if we were to crash or something, the windshield could just totally nick you in the face. That's why you do have a wind visor there. And I have a pretty weird setup on my helmet. Because I hate it when my visor slams down on me. So now I have a binder clip that's attached to Marisa's hair tie, that is attached to a GoPro mount, so that it can always grab it. And so it keeps your visor up. Yeah, it's a crazy system. But you were doing really well with the wind. It was very intense, and I kept looking in the distance like, "Something,
save us, please!" When are the mountains going to come? These incredible mountains that I've heard about in Idaho for so long. And I could see these mountains just way out there. I'm like, "Come on, come on. We can get there. We can go." Because I just wanted to get out of the wind. And I'd see a tree every once in a while, and be like, "Oh, a tree!" And it's all leaned over and straining against the wind as well. We were just north of Craters of the Moon National Monument, and it
was so windy. And then we passed this little town called Arco. And Arco looked very weird because it had this cliff behind it with all of these huge numbers painted on the cliff. And I was like, "What is that all about?" I could not think for the life of me why they painted those numbers on the cliff. It went up to 70, and 80, and 90, and then zeros, and I thought, well maybe they are
mining the cliff, and then exploding them out in different times. Like some video game? Like Dig Dug? That's all I could think of. Some numbers were really big, and some were really small. Well, that must be a small section that they're going to blow up. I didn't know. And then they had all these signs for nuclear energy, because I guess Arco was
the first place on earth where they powered homes using nuclear energy. There were signs like, "Home of the Atom" or something. Maybe there's radium in the cliffs? I don't know. So I looked it up, and it turns out that... Lame. Lamest thing. What were you thinking? Was it as
lame as the answer? Three... two... one. It's the year people graduated from high school. It's like a high school tradition. So they would go to the cliff, and then paint their graduation number on the cliff. Sorry anyone from Arco. But that's lame.
So we passed through that, and finally we got to these mountains. And I mean, it's not that passing through that barren area was bad. The winds I thought were very strenuous, but it's beautiful in its own way. But I was really relieved to get
to the mountains because it sheltered us from the winds, but also I love the topography of all the different hills surrounding us. And there seemed to be gray ones, and red ones, and just mountains everywhere we looked, just rippling off. And very jaggedy mountains too. It was gorgeous. At one point in time, we passed this green valley. It seemed like a lot of people were irrigating for their crops, and they had this bright green hay grass growing. And it was so beautiful, that contrast with the more barren mountain rocks. And I thought, this is like a Garden of Eden. You have this water from these streams and rivers, and they're able to grow these incredible green crops, and trees and forests, and then also have these rugged rugged mountains surrounding these perfect valleys. And then we came upon Challis.
And Challis was going to be our destination that night, and I think it may be one of the most perfect towns on the earth. Oh, I remember now. It was so beautiful. You even saw some Pronghorn Antelope there. Yeah, jumping over a fence from one of the farms. So we put Challis into the offline Google Maps, and we headed out. And I was kind of tired from the day. But we turned off the main road, and twisted down alongside these these bluffs that were colorful. And right now it's that golden hour, because the sun's about to set. And so what was already
beautiful, is now casted in molten iron. It was just beautiful. It really was. And we pulled up to this... they're hot springs with a campground. And so they have RV parking there, but also tent camping because they have beautiful lawns of perfect grass, and trees with shade. And we
set up our tent, and it had this view of the mountains. On one side, it was gray, kind of black jagged mountains. And the other side it was these red sandstone cliffs. And we could smell, kind of, not too strong, but a little bit, the sulfur in the air. We knew the hot springs are really close. They said they're just over in that building. Check them out. And they had outside of the building, an area where the hot springs were just natural, bubbling up from the ground. And the original source of the hot springs was too hot for humans to go into. It's very hot.
And so they channeled them off into two separate different pools at a 10 degree difference, which was like 50 degrees less than the natural one. But it was really cool. And I... Like, saunas, like hair day, to me, I don't really care to go to hot springs. But it was really awesome. It was getting cold though. And I knew those waters are
going to be hot. It's in the name. And we're going to get out and then try to go to sleep, and we'd be like, "This is freezing!" But you know, they had a nice little changing area there that was heated. And so we were able to just get dry and change, and then snuggly go into our sleeping bag after we went swimming. But back to the hot springs, because it's Spa Day now! And I am on board! That's the glory of, that's the story of love. It's amazing. And the bottom of the pool was all natural. Rocks, like pebbles. River pebbles. And
it was just so fantastic. And that water was so crystal clear. And it didn't really smell that bad. In fact, I don't think it smelled like anything once I got there. And it was just clear, and the perfect temperature. They did have another pool that was even hotter. We didn't know about that at the time. But it didn't matter, because the first was so perfect. The sun was going down against the cliffs, and it was just just surrounded by this complete paradise. It was a paradise, this crystal clear hot water coming up from the earth into this mountainous landscape, creating this green valley of lushness... it doesn't get better than
that. Yeah, and then we did go to sleep, and had happy thoughts. And it got pretty chilly, and then the next morning we woke up, and it was like we were camped next to a nuclear reactor. I mean the hot springs were just plummeting clouds off of them. It was stunning. So beautiful. So if you ever find yourself in Idaho, I highly recommend going to Challis. Spa day! But then we took off the next morning, and my brother had texted me saying, "Hey man, you're right next to lake whatever-the-heck. Are you going to go there?" And I had never
heard of it... Well, that is going to be in our next episode. Oh, so what was this one about? Just spa day? Yes, just spa day. Now we know the title everybody. You just figured out with us. So I hope you liked this episode. If you did, please give us a thumbs up,
and hit the subscribe button below. And I hope to be seeing you next time when we go through the Sawtooth Mountains. Incredible. Beautiful. Stay safe everybody! Bye! Peace! You want to see my cat? Yes you do. Who doesn't want to see a cat? This is Mr. Moto man.
2021-11-17 20:26