Carolina Biker News
February, 2008

Snow in June  
By: Matt Estepp
Travelers Rest, SC



I have always wanted it to snow on my birthday.  Since I was born in June, what’s the chance it would ever happen?  It was June 2007.  I spent two weeks out west.  My family and I rode our motorcycles through Yellowstone National Park.  We saw lots of wildlife.

We made it to a little town called Cooke City, Wyoming where the population was 90 including two buffalo.  After we ate, we went to Chief Joseph Highway where it was a nice 80 degrees.  Then we turned around and headed to the Bear Tooth Highway.

The temperature went from 80 degrees to 30 degrees or cooler.  Snow was everywhere.  On each side of the road there was three feet of snow, we even saw a frozen lake.  This was my first long ride.  My dad had just given me a Softtail Custom for my birthday.  The best part was having the road mostly to ourselves.  We did meet a local rider who asked us if we had ever ridden the Dragon’s Tail or the Blue Ridge Parkway.  That seemed funny to me at the time because we had ridden those in one weekend.

At this moment nothing compared to this trip.  At the Top of the World store we pumped gas from an old gas pump.  The sign on the pump said, “Sometimes I work, sometimes I don’t”.  Lucky for us that day it did work.  On the way back down the Bear Tooth it started snowing again.  It stopped as soon as we got to Cooke City.  We took some time to warm up before leaving.  On our way back through Yellowstone, we had a close call with two buffalo.  They were standing on both sides of the road, we had to ride right through the middle of them.  We could have reached out and touched them.  They didn’t even move when two Harley-Davidson motorcycles went by.

Snow in June was something I thought I would never see.  It was a trip and a 16th birthday I will never forget.