Rally Riding...

We decided to go for a ride today - I know Joan is not crazy about riding among the crowds during the Rally... she surprised me when she suggested Iron Mountain Road.  The Rally is "officially" on, and I expected  that road to be lousy with traffic... but, I am up for it.

There was very little traffic on the "local" back roads we take between here and Keystone...

We saw 6 other bikes in that 20 mile stretch of road; I was amazed.

Keystone was hoppin'...

Through town, and heading for Iron Mountain Road...

Turning onto Iron Mountain Road, and...

... no traffic.  More amazed.

As we got further in, we started seeing more traffic...

Still, surprisingly light traffic.  While waiting for our turn to get through the tunnel, Joan said, "I bet they are all IN Sturgis, instead of out riding!"

That makes good sense: you come to Sturgis to see and be seen in Sturgis.  With the Rally just getting underway, seems that most people are not out riding.  Good timing for us!

That is one of the "splits" in the photo above, and the Volvo with New York license plates was content to do less than the speed limit.  Even slowing to a crawl to give them a chance to get further ahead, we still caught up with them in just seconds.  Fortunately, they eventually pulled off into a view area.  We didn't; gloriously clear road ahead...

We caught up with the group of Harleys that had been ahead of us...

The guy at the back of that group, with the ape-hanger bars was wallowing around - not a great set-up for enjoying the curves.  Eventually, they pulled off, and...

More great, clear road!  I absolutely did not expect to see any of this.  Again, we caught up with a couple on a full dress HD...

Honestly, we weren't riding hard to try to catch any of these.  With low speed limits and lots of tight curves, these sporting scoots are less effort to blast through the curves.  That couple eventually pulled off, too.

More clear road ahead until we came upon this...

An accident ahead.

The officer finally waved us around.  Looked like a Harley went down hard on this straight stretch of road.  Since the traffic had been stopped, we again had empty road ahead of us...

We road Iron Mountain Road to the Custer State Park boundary, then turned around to ride it back.  The traffic was beginning to build...

But still able to have stretches of road all to ourselves...

Coming back upon that accident scene...

You can see the scrapes in the road in that photo above.  From this point on, the traffic was pretty steady...

Another day or two, when people have had their fill of the roar of downtown Sturgis, this road will look like rush hour in a big city.

There were a couple photographers set up on this stretch of road: they shoot pretty much everybody that rides by - you go to their website, look up the date and time you rode by them, then search through the many. many images from that half hour block.

Nice to have a photo of you on your bike.  I was surprised at how high their prices are.  Of course, only a very small percentage will buy, but at the price they're getting, if they sell a few images (prints or digital files) for each hour of shooting, they are doing well.  If I am calculating their files correctly, it looks like they took about 38,000 shots from this location yesterday.  They must have some killer servers to be able to handle the on-line traffic.

Back to the ride.

I turned off the camera before we rode back through Keystone - it looked a bit like New Orleans during Mardi Gras, with people up on the balconies watching the traffic cruise by.

On our "local" 20 miles of twisties, we came across another accident scene: a Goldwing had run off the road... Joan described it as "an abrupt stop"... there was plastic debris all over the side of the road.  If the couple that was on the bike are the ones standing next to it talking to law enforcement, it didn't appear that they needed an ambulance.  We did pass a flatbed tow-truck heading that direction... a Goldwing weighs on the far side of 800 pounds - they're going to need that tow truck to get that out of the ditch.

The rest of the ride was uneventful and uncrowded.  A lovely weather day and a great ride.