Riding Solo 2 - Arizona High Country Motorcycle Adventure

Mm .

Mm .

This was my first campsite on this trip and it worked out pretty well .

I slept on the ground in my tent over there last night .

What a beautiful first night on the road .

After I went to bed , the coyotes started howling and serenaded me to sleep .

And so now it's probably about eight o'clock in the morning and I'm almost all packed up and ready to go .

We'll leave hot , well , dunes here and we'll head north .

This is the Black Hills back country scenic highway and it's basically just a little scenic gravel road .

Nothing major for this adventure bike .

But if you were to take a car down it , you'd want to have a high clearance vehicle .

I don't know how , well you can hear the sounds of nature around me , but there's all kinds of insects and birds making noise in the background .

And as you might have guessed , we've entered a different habitat .

We're in a riparian habitat , which means we're by a river and it's just so cool .

I'm gonna take a little rest here , maybe go for a swim .

My energy and my enthusiasm for this trip was so high .

That I wasn't really able to see the difficulties that were right in front of me because of the heat and the weather .

And I was just suffering more than I was allowing myself to even realize it's a scorcher out there .

I think this a , I think this is the right place to be .

Hm , might not look like much , but this river is really , really cool to have this flowing through southern Arizona like this .

I mean , look at what it does to the landscape .

It just brings out all the green , you know , riding down the hill , I could see this green from miles away .

So I knew I was getting close to this river , Clifton .

It's a very interesting looking town .

It has kind of a cool old downtown area , but it seems very economically depressed at the same time .

It seems like there's a lot of old buildings downtown that could be fixed up and it looks really cool .

The biggest economic driver in that area is in neighboring Morei because there's a huge open pit mine in more .

And we're going to drive through that mine .

It's really spectacular to see how man has transformed the landscape through this big open pit mine .

And once we get on the other side of that mine , we're going to be on one of my favorite paved roads in all of Arizona .

It's a twisting turning road that goes for over 100 miles .

It gets us up into the high country of eastern Arizona and the White Mountains , which is like seven or 8000 ft high .

So the temperatures ought to drop a little bit .

We'll have some twisty tarmac to ride on and it's just an awesome road .

My priorities when it comes to filming this trip are that I want to show the scenic beauty of the places that I'm traveling through .

I want to learn about the different eco regions of the US and be able to show you guys what it's like when you go from one zone or one part of the country into another because that affects your riding , elevation , weather , climate , geology .

All of those things are part of a big motorcycle adventure ride in the Western US .

I made it up here to Big Lake and when I got up here to the higher elevations , it's about 75 degrees .

And guess what I saw , I just saw a whole family of skunks .

They're like living in the ground right over here behind my tent .

And there were a couple of them walking around and they pulled a few more out of the hole in the ground .

I am tired .

I am beat .

It was a long hot day of writing and filming .

I hope you guys are enjoying this footage I'm collecting for you .

I'm going to call it a night here really soon .