The only casualty was my GoPro remote charging cord which got broken when Tim crossed. He was charging his remote with it and the cord is short, so the bumping around caused it to get caught on something and broke. No big deal. We were all pretty stoked about getting through without a problem. But this crossing did cause us problem we just weren't aware of at the time.
The rest of the morning was pretty uneventful. We realized we'd skip lunch today but that's not really a big deal for us. Especially with all of the beautiful scenery we were riding through. Around 12:15pm we were coming up to the Colorado River and saw a train coming.
Not wanting to get delayed by it we were rushing to cross before it got there. But it wasn't a long freight train, but an Amtrak passenger train. We crossed the tracks and then I quickly turned around so we could face the train. It rattled by and we waved to all the people. It was silly, but fun. The last guy in the observation car gave us the "hang loose" handsign.
The road takes us to state route 131 and the State Bridge where we passed Bond and McCoy and turned off on the Colorado River Road (301) paralleling the railroad tracks for quite a while. We missed our turn to Trail Gulch and had to backtrack a little bit. When we got to the road we saw another faster group approaching and knew we'd need to let them by at some point. Trail Gulch is a little bit rocky, but not annoyingly so, but there was one really silty spot that literally blinded you. Not wanting to run into me since he couldn't see, Tim slowed down and "biffed" it as he says. Dave and I had stopped because we heard Tim say he was down. The other group was right behind and the first guy helped him up. Tim rounded the corner and stopped with us and we let the group from Pennsylvania go by. We never saw them again, so it was a good call to let them go by. We finished the trail which took us straight to Gypsum. Here we gassed up and got groceries. We were going to camp at Sylvan Lake State Park.
We headed due south out of town on Gypsum Creek Road and started climbing up the mountains on what became a really uncomfortable rocky road. Not difficult, just annoying. But we eventually rounded a corner around 4:30pm and saw beautiful Sylvan Lake below us. This was going to be a very picturesque camping spot. We stopped at the entrance and that's where things got more annoying. The campground is by reservation only but was not in the least full. There's a phone there to contact someone about it which was good because there was no cell service in this little canyon.
It took him about 20 minutes to deal with all that, which was trying my little brother's patience! But maturity took over and he got through it. We found our camping spot and got set up. No showers tonight, but what a beautiful spot. We got our tents set up and got started on dinner which was sausage, green beans, and mashed potatoes. Before we started on dinner though we scrounged for some firewood.
Tom Clark
I'm a Senior Software Engineer at Intellitect, living in Spokane, Washington. I also do a little development work on the side. And I love riding motorcycles all over the country with my friends.
