A Sea of Motorcycles


 I mentioned in my last post that Sturgis Bike Week was coming upon us.  And it has.  We are in all-hands-on-deck mode with daily 7:00 am briefings and the day's work assignments.  Cyndee and I drew Visitor Center duty for the entire day, leaving the professional rangers to crowd control and in-park contact.  One thing we learned during the morning briefings that somewhat shocked us was that the expected crowd was going to be a bit smaller and tamer this year.  It was explained that the biking crowd was "aging out".  Their advancing age has made them less mobile and more chill.

I guess their analysis was spot on.  The number of trikes was amazing and it was shocking to see the number of canes and walkers strapped to the bikes.  There were a bunch of these bikers that could barely walk across the parking lot to the Visitor Center!

In our briefings we were warned not to agree to taking pictures with biker visitors because of past problems with park employees being in images where all kinds of flashing was going on.  Well, this year that was not a problem.  In five days I never saw or heard of anything of that nature happening.  In those same five days I was asked to take hundreds of pictures of couples and groups with the tower as a backdrop with no monkey business even remotely happening.  However, I did witness a marriage proposal.  She came down the tower trail jumping up and down and showing me her engagement ring about two inches from my face.  He, on the other hand, looked green around the gills.  I wondered if he was already regretting his decision.

Early arrivals.
Motorcycles only allowed up top this week.

Bikes were parked four-deep for the whole week.
Even so, we filled all 200 parking spaces and still had to park many bikes
at the bottom and have them ride the shuttles up.

The big day was what they call 'Wyoming Wednesday'.  They were estimating 80,000 bikes for the day.  Don't know if we got that many but there were a heck of a lot.

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