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Victory Summer 2005: Diary from the Kyle Petty Charity Ride (KPCR) Webmaster’s Note:
We have a lot of great photos of Victory riders and Victory events
accumulated from the past several months and we’ll be posting them
under the banner of “Victory Summer 2005,” which has been our best
riding season ever. Look for photos of Victory Rides, rallies and
Victory riders and their bikes. Here we’re reprinting our exclusive
diary from the Kyle Petty Charity Ride and presenting photos from the
ride.
KPCR Diary: Day 2’s Mountain Adventure
By Michael Dapper
Managing Editor
Victory Rider Magazine
What’s a Kyle Petty Charity Ride without Kyle? It’s still a gas! Kyle
was out in Pennsylvania, racing at Pocono today, and he’ll fly into
Idaho Falls tonight with fellow racers such as Matt Kenseth and Tony
Stewart. But we’re more than happy to ride on without him for now.
These Idaho mountains are too good to resist.
While Kyle and
the gang drove in circles (actually, a tri-oval) at Pocono, we headed
out of Boise and took a spectacular ride up Hwy. 21E to Stanley, Idaho.
The parks just outside of Boise were beautiful, then we got into
endless switchbacks, up and down over mountains, before making a final
sprint on a relatively flat, straight stretch into Stanley. It was like
a mountain stage of the Tour de France, minus the Lycra shorts. Those
of us looking for optimum fun quickly got the hang of laying back from
the bike ahead of us so there was space for us to power through the
turns and really lay bikes like my Kingpin over. A little floorboard
dragging never hurt.
The Kingpin handled the changes in
elevation flawlessly. Up and down mountains is clearly no sweat for the
Freedom engine’s EFI.
We rode south from Stanley to the
vacation home of Jerry and Maryanne Whitcomb, a major supporter of the
KPCR and Victory Junction Gang Camp. The home and lunch were
spectacular, as was the scenery where the property sits, in the hills
just north of Ketchum, Idaho.
Craters of the Moon
After lunch we trolled south through posh Sun Valley, then cannonballed
it east toward our destination: Idaho Falls. En route, we rode through
the Craters of the Moon National Monument. We’re talking odd terrain
here, folks. The ground looked like gigantic black coral.
From the National park Service website about the monument (http://www.nps.gov/crmo) comes this information:
“A sea of lava flows with scattered islands of cinder cones and
sagebrush characterizes this ‘weird and scenic landscape’ known as
Craters of the Moon. Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve
contains three young lava fields covering almost half a million acres.
These remarkably well preserved volcanic features resulted from
geologic events that appear to have happened yesterday and will likely
continue tomorrow… Today more than 750,000 acre National Monument and
Preserve is co-managed by the National Park Service and the Bureau of
Land Management.
“Craters of the Moon lies at the north edge of
the eastern Snake River Plain, a broad flat arc, concave to the north,
which covers nearly 10,000 square miles of southern Idaho… The primary
resource value of Craters of the Moon is the great diversity of
basaltic features in a small area. Almost all the features of basaltic
volcanism are visible at the monument… Much of the volcanism of the
Snake River Plain was confined to volcanic rift zones. A volcanic rift
zone is a concentration of volcanic landforms and structures along a
linear zone of cracks in the earth's crust. The Great Rift volcanic
rift zone is a zone of cracks running approximately northwest to
southeast across almost the entire eastern part of the Snake River
Plain. The entire Great Rift is 62 miles long.”
Recalling the Snake River Jump
Of course, any talk of the Snake River makes many of us think back to
2004, when Victory General Manager Mark Blackwell recreated Evel
Knievel’s 1974 motorcycle leap across the Snake River canyon. Unlike
the famous daredevil, Blackwell, riding a nearly-stock Victory Vegas,
successfully cleared the canyon. But that’s another story for another
day.
It was mid-afternoon, we were baking in the Idaho sun and
we felt like we were in the middle of nowhere as we rode through the
lunar-like terrain. If that wasn’t enough of a Twilight Zone feel, who
should head west past us on the highway but an Oscar Meyer Wienermobile!
Who needs Kyle when you’re sharing the road with a Wienermobile?
We stopped at tiny Arco, Idaho, for the day’s final fuel stop, then
rode into Idaho Falls for the night, completing a 365-mile day.
Tomorrow, we stop at Action Motorsports, the local Victory and Polaris
dealer, before Kyle and the other NASCAR celebrities join us for the
ride through the mountains around Yellowstone and on to Cody, Wyoming.
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