Coffee and Dirt

Sedalia, Colorado -- What do we search for? Well, many things; people who really, truly love us, a perfectly executed béarnaise sauce, a great cup of camp coffee. What did you say?

There is this one particular coffee-snob, who shall remain nameless, who requires a piping-hot, 1 ¾ cup, cup of coffee each day before anything else. But, not just a regular cup of coffee. This extra-sized, extraordinary beverage must be a mix of dark-roasted, fine-grind Sumatran beans and Café DuMonde brand Chicory, ground medium. This elixer must be sweetened with the best Tupelo honey that ever came out of Florida, and it must be lightened with real ½ and ½.

And it must be reproduced both at home and on the road.

Okay, the constituent parts are easy, as long as you have the luggage space and a willingness to carry a great many thimble-sized cups of UHT-grade half and half that Land-O-Lakes appropriately calls “Mini-Moo’s.”

The hard part, until recently, is how to get the coffee infused into the hot water so that little chunks or the sandy, muddy grit of coffee grounds don’t get included in the final product.

Forget all those fancy gizmos and convenient coffee presses. What works best is a basic pour-through filter cone. The water from the Jet Boil is plenty, plenty hot, and the coffee tastes just like home – that is unless you burn your tongue on the fist sip.

With the required caffeine dose coursing through the bloodstream it’s off to find an alternative to that horrific stretch of I-25 between Colorado Springs and Denver. For Motorbikers who prefer taking the time for a bunch of curves and a bit of dirt, there is an option, State Road 67, north out of Woodland Park.

This road is a joy. The paved part is narrow and twisty and roams through thick forest and an area recently devastated by fire. At a place called Deckers it gets really fun. The road more-or-less mirrors the Platt River, so there is almost no straightaway, just a bunch of curves that zig-zag both wide and tight like long a downhill ski course. At places the road is almost level with the raging waterway, making one wonder what happens to the road when the water rises. At another place called Oxyoke — not a going concern so much as a collection of seemingly ramshackle cabins — the road to Sedalia, Colorado turns to dirt and delivers buckets of fun.
Just a fraction of SR 67 is the loose stuff, a mixture of sand, gravel, and a beautiful red clay, but well worth the detour. There are big wide curves that turn to sand on the low side, and teeny hairpins that really get the heart pumping. For the real dirt bike set there are a number of side roads that look like logging roads, at best. Not for the heavily loaded dual-sport big-bike with street knobbies, but for the brave on a 500cc dirt bike — oh baby!

State Road 67 in Colorado is one of those roads that make owning a GS bike worthwhile.

One bit of warning though, the fine grit from a long ride on dirt really gets into everything. The MacBook used to post this article was safely sealed, supposedly, inside a padded aluminum briefcase, and held inside a sealed, supposedly, Touratech pannier. But at day’s end the laptop was dusted with a very fine coat of the most beautifully red clay. Now where did that come from?