TAT-2016 Post 43 – Thursday, 4 Aug 2016

What a day. Not sure where to begin.

We all got up around 5 am with a few grumbles but were loaded and ready to ride in short order. The weather looked promising with T-Storms due in the afternoon but the morning looked good. We decided to ride up Engineer Pass and return via Cinnamon Pass and left the cabin at 6:30 am. Should have been a 50-60 mile ride but it turned into a 104 mile ride and here is the rest of the story.

I have included a number of pictures at the end of my post and they may not be in order so hope you can correlate the picture with the text. I’m too tired to do it myself.

We had a great ride up to the start of the Engineer Pass climb. Lots of beautiful scenery and I had to stop numerous times to get a picture or two or more. We started so early we had the mountain to ourselves. We didn’t pass an ATV or jeep until well into the afternoon. The first incident was when Woodrow hit the first switchback. This requires a quick turn on a steep slope and usually some rocks to make it interesting. I was behind him and he made the turn but was way down on the power and the bike stalled. He immediately went down with the bile hanging part way over the ledge. He kept his cool and got the bike down to the climb entrance, remounted and nailed it on the 2^nd attempt. This definitely made us all a bit nervous because the hard climbs were yet to come.

We made Engineer Pass without a lot of trouble and what a ride. Once we reached the pass the wind was howling. We managed to get the required pictures next to the sign including one of me and my son Jeff. That one’s going on the mantel at home. We then started down on the backside of Engineer Pass. The ride down was steep with a few rock gardens that required some maneuvering. This is where the trouble began.

We constantly changed riding positions and not far down the decent, Steve was in trail. I was in front of him and noticed he wasn’t in my rear view mirror. I rode back up and found Steve bent over his parked bike. He stated he couldn’t get his WR250R to shift gears. In fact none of the gears were working. Jeff and Terry eventually rode back up and they all started troubleshooting the WR. Eventually they determined that the front sprocket had come loose and stripped out most of the splines in the sprocket. They decided that they could reverse the sprocket and get the last remaining 1/16” of splines to mesh with the transmission shaft. This was accomplished and we all rode down to the end of the west side of Engineer Pass. BTW I dropped my bike while trying to turn around on the slope (pic below).

We decided that we needed to find an easier way to get back to Lake City than Cinnamon Pass. Not a lot of options were available to us. We could go to Silverton to try and get a new sprocket. We could take the Stone Pass back to Lake City (more on this later). We could leave Steve and the rest of us ride Cinnamon Pass and bring the truck back to pick up Steve. Another issue was we passed the entrance to Cinnamon Pass and it was a steep climb on solid rock. None of us trusted Steve’s bike at this point and was concerned it would fail half way up this climb with disastrous results.

We had received a map of the passes from the Lake City Sheriff the night before and it made us believe Stone Pass would be easier than Cinnamon. That’s how we proceeded.

Stone Pass – What can I say good about Stone Pass – It has great scenery but other than that NOTHING! The map gave no elevation so we assumed it would be less than Engineer, which is around 12,800”. It also had no warnings or notes. We headed up this pass with the intention of making a quick passage back to Lake City. My two GPS weren’t giving me a lot of useful info so we kept going. Stone Pass has numerous switchbacks and steep climbs. Much more than Engineer Pass. We finally made the summit and were in the clouds at about 12,350’. It had also started to rain, which made the decent tremendously treacherous.

I can’t describe how bad the decent from Stone Pass was. Imagine steep decants with baby head and bowling ball rocks combined with wet and slippery mud. We had numerous bike drops through this section. Throw in some muddy stretches and lots of mud holes. Even had water crossing that we walked the bikes across and lots of creeks crossings that we rode across. On many occasions we would find a flat spot to all gather and we all said the same thing: “How much further can this go?”. The answer is about 60 miles.

We tried to count the number of bike drops and it was too difficult. I had 2, one when Steve’s bike broke but I had another hard drop trying to get down an especially bolder embedded decent. It bent my muffler and right hand guard. Woodrow dropped at least 4 times but I think more than that. Steve and Jeff keep bragging that they didn’t drop theirs at all but I remember clearly following Jeff and watching him almost run off the road when he hit a baby head rock on one climb.

The most important incident is reference to Terry’s KTM. We have continually had to hear about how he never drops his bike. Well today it happened. He says, and I didn’t see it, that he was on a steep ledge and couldn’t get aligned with the decent and the bike went over. Broke his clutch lever and left mirror. His license plate had already come loose earlier in the day so Jeff used tie wraps to hold it on. Only bike that had parts fall off!

To top it all off several bikes ran out of gas; Jeff only .9 of a mile from the cabin. We were all carrying 1 gal RotoPax fuel but we had to stop and fill up at a time when we were exhausted from the days ride.

We pulled into Lake City at 3:30 pm, 9 hours after our start. We did not have breakfast and nowhere to eat on the trail. We went directly to a local salon and had dinner and a few beers, still in our muddy ridding gear.

After dinner, we rode to the cabin and unloaded. Everything I have is covered in mud including the bike. About this time the 2 additional riders arrived; Ernie and Cutter. As I explained in an earlier post, Ernie and Cutter are bing supported by “The Judge” in a big and I mean BIG, RV. Interesting fact is while they were driving through the mountains on their way to the cabin, a bolder rolled off one of the mountains and the RV ran into it. Took out both headlights but the RV is still drivable, in the day anyway.

Everyone one is tired, including me, so an early bedtime if we can find room for everyone to sleep.

Tomorrow we plan on an easy ride to get Cutter up to speed before we head east on the TAT on Saturday.

I’ll post more picks in the future of what we saw today.