I’d found Skyline Drive on YouTube before leaving Australia to ride Colorado — a narrow strip of bitumen edged by steep drop-offs on both sides with a speed limit of 25km/h… it was so hair-raising I didn’t tell my travelling companions about it, but just led them on a rollercoaster-like razorback ridge of a road and hoped they wouldn’t panic.
Skyline Drive turned out to be one of the many highlights of our ride through and around Colorado, a state with great roads, spectacular scenery and where the weather would be friendly. Colorado ticked all the boxes. The majestic Rocky Mountains run through Colorado, making it a very mountainous state with over 50 “fourteeners” — mountain peaks higher than 14,000 feet (4267m) — and is well known as a skiing destination in winter. As a motorcycle destination in summer and autumn it is superb, with over 40 mountain pass roads higher than 10,000 feet (3048m) and winding tarmac galore. Since we planned to be there in mid to late September, there would also hopefully be autumn colours to make our riding even more scenic.
Four of us on two bikes rode east across Utah into northern Colorado on Interstate 70 (I-70). Travelling on interstates can often be boring, but with a speed limit of 120km/h and all the traffic doing at least 130km/h, you can at least get to places quickly. However, the I-70 was a real surprise and not boring since it traverses scenic country in both Utah and Colorado and has multiple pull-offs
