It was about 4PM and the odometer on the Road King read 250 miles as we pulled into the parking lot to see “Old Faithful” with about a million tourists.

We had left Billings, Montana, at 9:00 in the morning, determined to see the famous geyser and as much of Yellowstone as we could in between. The ratio of bikes to cars was considerably higher than average, especially for a Tuesday. Thousands of bikers had taken the same detour on their way to Bike Week over in Sturgis, South Dakota. They were no problem; it was the gawking tourists in four wheelers who had never seen animals grazing on the sides of the roads, had made the ride less than pleasant. . .they never bothered to pull over, they just stopped in the middle of the road!

                We live in the middle of Nowhere, New Mexico, and see more wild game before breakfast than a tourist will ever see in a National Park. So we were more interested in the natural phenomena; like spouting geysers, bubbling water and noxious smelling sulfur pits.  Well, yes, the scenery was pretty, the lakes serene and blue. But I found it a little unnerving to realize that all of that volcanic activity meant that this was once, and still was, an active volcano.

                Now Yellowstone has always been high on my list of places to see.  None of my travels had brought me up this way until a sister-in-law moved to Billings.  So here I sat with the in-laws, with a whole day of virtually nothing to do that absolutely had to be done! So we decided to take the ride!

                Looking at the map (one of those cheap, truck-stop editions) I came to the conclusion we could make it from Billings to Yellowstone on the bike in just a few hours.  My in-laws (who were undoubtedly just glad to get me out of the house) said nothing to dispel that delusion.

                They had even helped me plan our route!

                “It’s better to go there by way of the East entrance and then come back by way of Red Lodge.  That way it’s almost all down hill,” my mother-in-law said with an innocent air.

                She didn’t tell us that the way to Red Lodge is by way of the Beartooth Highway.

                And it was true... most of it was downhill…straight down hill. And a long damn way up the hill to go down!

                The trip down through Cody was uneventful.  We ate lunch there then rode the seventy or so miles to Yellowstone, paid the fifteen dollars to get into the park, and took our time going south around the loop to arrive, much later than we planned, at the lodge by Old Faithful.  We had about an hour to kill until the next scheduled eruption. 

                A Café Mocha later, we walked around the famous landmark, mingling with other tourists and a few bikers. I struck up a conversation with a HOG member from Billings and in the course, asked him if his group was going home by way of Red Lodge and would they like to ride with us.

                The whole group turned to stare at me.

                “Are you crazy? We’re going home by way of Cody.”

                “But we just came that way. That’s the long way.” I said naively.

                One of the women looked at me with the look usually reserved for terminal cancer patients. “That’s the Beartooth Highway. You don’t ride the Beartooth Highway after dark,” she said matter-of-factly and with a finality that allowed for no argument.

                My wife looked at me a little apprehensively but knew that I have this quirk about going back, period.  If we forgot it, forget it, we ain’t going back.  Missed the turn, never mind, there has to be another one soon. Back track, not on your life.  Been there, seen that, got to go some place new.

                I tried to reassure her. “Don’t worry babe, it stays light late way up here in Montana.”

                “”We’re in Wyoming,” she pointed out.

                “That still counts as a Northern State.” I wisely kept my mouth shut about that 250 mile odometer reading ‘cause she was already talking about her butt being a tad tender!

I guess the fact that the whole group quit talking to me should have counted as an ominous sign.

Even more ominous was the sign at the turnoff to Red Lodge that said, “Pass Closed” 

I figured it must have been a mistake, someone had just forgot to change after the snow had melted.  Just to be sure, I stopped a jogger. Don’t even ask me why I thought a jogger would know anything about road conditions. . . but she did.

                “Oh, that’s up ‘cause a truck ran off the road.  They’re supposed to have it cleared by now.”

                That was good enough for me.  The only other choice was to go north to Livingston and then take the Interstate back to Billings. . .but we had been down that road once.

                I was picturing a pickup hanging on the side of a mountain, and a wrecker or two pulling him up. But when we got to Cooke City we learned that the situation was a little more complicated than that. Seems a thirty wheeler or some such vehicle, much longer than your regular semi, loaded with one of those giant machines that lay asphalt on roads, had run off the Coulter Pass at 8:30 that morning.  At 6:00 in the evening, when we pulled into Silver Gate, four giant wreckers, tons of earth-moving equipment and all the King’s men, had not been able to pull the truck back up on the road.  The tiny town of Silver Gate was vastly over-populated with tourists and bikers.  The bars and restaurants were doing a great business, all of the four motels were displaying “No Vacancy” signs and those hundreds of people were the lucky ones.  On the other side of the mountain were more hundreds of people, some of which had been sitting in their cars for up to six hours, with no bars or restaurants at all!

                The difference, someone once said, between an adventure and an ordeal is your attitude.  So we wheeled the bike around, returned to Silver Gate and ordered the best filet mignon from the best restaurant in town.

                Around seven o’clock, with a couple of hours of light left, vehicles we had never seen started streaming in from the direction of the pass.   We paid our bill, tipped the waitress well and quietly slipped out before the rest of the town realized the road was finally open.

                Now the rest of the story is really the best but words can’t really convey the experience.  You have to ride the highway, feel the chill at 11,000 feet on what had been a hot August night, watch the road drop off about four thousand feet just inches from your front tire as you lay your bike into a turn that you have never been on before.

                You see, the HOG member from Billings and his wife were absolutely right in their description of the twisting, winding, dangerous road that is the Beartooth Highway. The Beartooth Pass tops it off at 10,947 feet. It is a long way up to the barren, treeless tops of the mountains.

To me, it wasn’t the worst road I have ever been on, it was the best!

                Every one is different and we all ride for different reasons.  To me, a windy road is a test of my skill.  Could I judge the curves just right? How quickly could I pass a frightened tourist before another switchback loomed.

                Past the last signs of civilization, through the blocked Coulter Pass measuring a mere 8,040 feet, I began to mutter the praise of my bike, a 97 Road King that never balked, even as we neared the 11,000 foot. The uninitiated might have called it a prayer.

The Beartooth is one of those legendary roads, like Highway 1 or Spearfish Canyon.  It was a challenge. It was an experience of a lifetime. It was an adventure. . . but it could have been another man’s ordeal.

                It was an ordeal to many of the bikes and cars we passed.  They were taking it slow and easy. Too slow for me. I passed them all on the way up. . .except for one.

                A handsome couple on another Harley followed my lead, passing everyone else, staying with us as we climbed the Beartooth.  He was a great rider and managed to stay right on my tail, a safe distance back where I could watch them in my rearview mirror.

                We had wisely leathered up after eating.  We climbed and climbed and yet, every time we came around another curve, we could see the lights of the first wave of cars that had been let through, miles ahead of us and thousands of feet above.  As the light faded, it looked like the red tail lights were spaceships, climbing into the heavens.

                We climbed way above the tree line.  The landscape looked like the surface of the moon.  Patches of snow glistened in the twilight. Still, we climbed.  Moths by the thousands flickered eerily through our lights, sacrificing themselves upon my windshield.

                It was then that I noticed , somewhere along the way, our riding companions disappeared.  I felt a twinge of uneasiness.  Could they have missed one of the turns?  Should I go back to check on them, these strangers who had followed me up the Beartooth?

I decided against going back.  In retrospect, sitting at the typewriter, it sounds kind of callous.  But there were a multitude of reasons we didn’t.  First of all, we didn’t know them, and except for the last few miles, had never ridden with them before.  Second of all, there were a lot of other motorcyclists and motorists we had left behind.  If they had mechanical trouble, someone behind us would have helped them.

There had been no signal of trouble from them, they had just disappeared from my mirror somewhere along the curves. We were still many miles from the nearest town and even further to our bed in Billings.  Finally, I reasoned, this guy was good, too good to go down. 

Yet in the back of my mind, even the next day, as I was leaving the in-laws for Sturgis, there was the question, “what if?”.  Another month or so and this road would be closed for the winter. What if he had gone down on one of those curves and over the hill?  Who would have seen them? Who could have seen them?

We finally crested the hill, the speed limit went up and it was downhill all the way into Red Lodge. We rolled back into Billings near midnight, pried our sore butts off the bike, and waddled to the bedroom.

                “I don’t think I’ve felt this much pain since childbirth,” my old lady said. I knew how she felt. As I got off the bike, I touched the seat and was amazed to find that there was still foam rubber under the leather.  It had felt like concrete to my ass.

                Still, tired as we were from five hundred miles in the saddle, I had survived Beartooth. So as we peeled off layer after layer down there in my sister-in-law’s guest bedroom, I smiled.  “I know how to take the pain away,” I said, as she got down to the bare essentials.

                “But I’m exhausted,” she said.

                But she wasn’t.

That should have been the end of the story. I scanned the paper the next morning before we left but there was nothing in it about a biker going down on the Beartooth.  I supposed the question would have eventually left my mind, like, “wonder what ever happened to that crazy guy riding naked down Main Street?”

                We got into Sturgis on Thursday.  It was raining and there weren’t a lot of people on the street.  We parked along Main Street with hundreds of other bikes, and were walking past a row of porta-potties when a couple standing nearby caught my eye. 

                I don’t know what it was about them.  There were thousands dressed just like them milling around town, checking out t-shirts and leathers. He was blonde with a beard, she was pretty with long brown hair, with nothing really outrageous about them that would attract your eye in the middle of Bike Week.

We looked at each other for a few moments. I spoke first.

                “Were you riding the Beartooth Highway day before yesterday?”

                “Yeah, you got a red bike?               

                “Yeah, I was worried about you.  You were keeping up so well and then you were gone.”

                “We stopped for a smoke.”

                “It was a great ride.”

                “Sure was, Usually, nobody keeps up with me on curves.” He said with an admiring tone.

                My wife turned to me and asked how I had recognized them.

I couldn’t tell her how a couple of quick glances in a rear view mirror had stuck in my mind.  I damn sure couldn’t tell her how we had managed to see them again among the hundreds of thousands of bikers on the streets of Sturgis.

                We smiled at each other and shook our heads. “What are the odds?” I asked.

                He smiled. “You come with people and can never find them here.  We run into each other twice. Go figure.”

                And then they were gone. I never even learned their names or where they were from.

                Maybe, someday, they will read this story of two bikers with nothing in common except for the love of riding and taking the Beartooth Highway into Montana on a cold, dark, August night.

                I hope they write.

Clay Douglas

http://freeamerican.com/