Not a bad way to spend some time off from work. I headed up to meet the other two on Saturday, I was the last one there since I stopped off in Farmington to pick up a popup to replace the one that died on me after 8 long years of faithful service. I hope this one lasts that long. The KOA in Ouray was pretty nice, I loved the idea of having a base camp, since that meant showers and being able to have more comforts then if we had camped along the way.
The first day of riding started over Engineer. We headed off, since I made a deal with Kelly to cook if he and Bart would pick up my bike I was in the middle of the group. It was raining a bit and the bike being on the light side made getting over some of the rocks interesting. There was one section that I just couldn’t seem to master, that of course meant we had to go over it multiple times…… I thought I was seeing Kelly’s headlight behind me, but it turned out to be a guy from Vale. How’s I know where he was from? Thanks to that one section I couldn’t get over, he offered to help out after I stalled out the bike about 8 times. He climbed on and stalled it a few more times, then he walked it up for me, since I can’t really reach bars when going up hills. It sucks to be 5 foot 4 at times. Once I got through the section we waited for Kelly, then decided to turn around to go find him. He’d spun out the rear wheel on a wet section of rock and did a 180 with the bike pointing down hill. It took him a bit to get it turned around so he could pick it up. I’m sure that being from AZ and not being used to the altitude didn’t help him any. I’m just glad I didn’t laugh at his description of what happened, since I did the same thing about 30 minutes later. At least I wasn’t the first one to fall down, YIPPIE!
Only when I do fall I do it a huge way. Being that it’s a 250 I have no choice but to use momentum to help me through things. I thought I had this part, but the back tire bounced on to a really wet slick section of the rock and that was it. I ended up facing down the hill on my left side. It was a pretty hard fall, at least for the poor bike, it put a huge dent in the slip-on and broke off the folding tab on the shift lever. Do you have any idea how hard it is to shift with out that peg on the lever? I figured it out after awhile and didn’t really have too much trouble other than miss shifting a few times. We ended up in Lake City had lunch, that’s when the guy who’d push my bike up the rocks showed up. Heading back we did the Alpine loop, Cinnamon pass, Hurricane pass and Corkscrew pass. I got to feeling a bit cocky by the time we were coming down Hurricane so I was playing with sliding the rear of the bike to change direction and I bit it two more times goofing off like that. Kelly got off easy, I had the bike picked back up and was off before he could think about how to park to help.
For the record this put my fall number count at 3 to Kelly’s 1. Bart being the master jedi that he is, never fell down once the whole trip. I don’t like him some days, just sayin.