About 22 Sonora Chapter members and guests assembled at the base of our Catalina Mountain Highway early in the morning July 25th.
The drive up wasn’t one big conga line of BMWs: as Drive Tour Coordinator Mike Hornisher briefed everyone, “…this isn’t going to be a convoy…”. So some of us left earlier and some of us left a little bit later. We did manage to squeeze together in the Windy Vista parking lot for a few photos of our tightly assembled ‘non-convoy’ of cars. There were more than a few convertibles among this pack, and we didn’t share the road with just BMWs either: a late-model papaya & black MacLaren, a hunter green Aston Martin and a similarly-colored Mazda convertible shared our itinerary to The Iron Door Restaurant at Ski Valley on Mount Lemmon.
After the photo shoot at Windy Vista, I drove in a lead-follow ‘mini pack’ of three BMWs, led by Shaun Rodabaugh in his e36 M3, followed by Mike Beyer in his Z4 convertible, and tailed by myself, Quentin Peterson in a Z4 MRoadster. We weren’t impeded much at all on this leg of the trip to the mountaintop, but we did need to give space to the bicyclists who were ascending the mountain road on our right. I recall that it was a spirited drive up, and I don’t remember seeing either Shaun or Mike use their brakes much at all on the way up or around the curves. Pretty good little ride up, I’d say!
We all arrived in Iron Door’s parking lot early enough to enjoy the morning mountain air and each other’s good company before the restaurant opened for breakfast a little later. The arrangements by Jill Becker were superb, the service was attentive without being fussy and I recall the food and caffeinated conversations as being memorable. Some of us headed back down the mountain to tend to those nagging summertime tasks in the valley below, and some of us spent the rest of the day on the mountain. Ski Valley gave a 50% discount on chair lift tickets. The valley panorama below did appear somewhat hazy, perhaps owing to the increased humidity of the Monsoon season.
Text by Quentin Peterson
Photos by Mike Hornisher and Mike Beyer
