Chasing Fall: Our Annual Ride to Killdeer

Every year we make the ride down to Killdeer to see the changing leaves. It’s the Passenger Princesses favorite time of year. It's become one of those rides we just do every year, and unfortunately, it's also one of the signs that riding season is starting to come to an end in North Dakota.

The mornings are getting cold, the days are getting shorter, and winter is getting closer whether we like it or not.

We left Williston and headed south on Highway 85. From there, we turned onto County Road 10 and headed toward New Town.

It was a pretty chilly ride to start the morning, so we kept our speed down around 55 mph. About halfway through County Road 10, the wind decided to join us.

And it never left. We had 20–25 mph winds for pretty much the rest of the day.

If you've spent any time riding in the wind, you already know it makes for a long day. You're constantly correcting for it, leaning into it, and paying attention to what everything around you is doing.

It doesn't sound like much when you say "20–25 mph winds," but spend several hours riding in it and you'll understand why you're exhausted when you get home.

Once we got to New Town, we headed south on Highway 22.

This is probably our favorite part of this ride. But to be honest we love all of it!

Highway 22 isn't your typical North Dakota highway. It's not just straight road disappearing into the distance. It goes up and down quite a bit and has a lot more curves than you normally find around here.

And then there are the trees.

Once you get onto the reservation and start heading toward the Killdeer Mountains, the road starts getting lined with trees on both sides. This time of year, that's exactly what we were looking for.

The leaves were a mix of bright gold and orange, with some green still hanging on because apparently even the trees aren’t ready for summer to be over.

It made for a pretty damn good ride.

The Killdeer Mountains aren't really mountains in the traditional sense. They're part of the North Dakota Badlands, but they give this section of Highway 22 a completely different look than most of the roads around here.

You do need to pay attention, though.

There can be quite a bit of oilfield traffic on Highway 22, and with the curves, elevation changes and larger trucks, this isn't a road where you want to get too distracted looking at the scenery.

Once we got to Killdeer, we stopped for lunch at the Buckskin. I'll be honest, our expectations weren't exactly high going in.

Sometimes you stop somewhere because you're hungry and you just hope the food is decent. The Buckskin actually surprised us. The food was really good, and we'd definitely go back again.

After lunch, we headed west toward Grassy Butte and then made our way home on Highway 85.

The sun finally decided to show up on the way home, which was nice. It still never got above about 72 degrees, but at least we had some sunshine for the second half of the ride.

By the time we got home, we were tired.

Not "we had a nice relaxing motorcycle ride" tired. This was more of a physical exhaustion from the wind kicking our ass most of the day kind of tired.

That's one thing about riding that people who don't ride probably don't think about. The miles don't necessarily wear you out. Sometimes it's the conditions you're riding in.

And that wind was relentless.

Still, it was another fall ride to Killdeer, the leaves were exactly what we went looking for, lunch turned out better than expected, and we got another ride in before winter starts shutting things down around here.

We'll take it.

Until we see you on the road again...

Live Life With An Attitude.