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 2nd 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.
