Just finished editing the Huascaran Naitional Park leg of my Peruvian adventure with my son. This was the best part of the ride. 12 hours or so in the saddle, peaked at 4,735 m elevation, several beautiful glacial lakes!
Weather cooled off a little in Skunk Hollow, so decided to run up to Young and see what the recent Monsoons had done to the AZ BDR...
First 20 miles or so were not to bad, water crossings were a little deeper, with some mud in the low spots, but pretty manageable.
It got a little more interesting about 25 miles in, from the 288. The water had washed a lot of the gravel and dirt out from in between the beach ball sized rocks. Took off up a kinda gnarly hill, but decided that I didn't have 18 more miles of that left in me:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/3wMgKoXhHOk
Hit the Sr. Dining menu at Judy's in Globe to reflect on just how tired I got!
About 230 miles for the day, and I was done!
Good ride! Climbing up into the mountains must open up a stunning view. Especially at night. 😎
Hold my keyboard and watch this! 🙃
Which Senior Citizen treat did you order, and was it good value ? 
@mick-boon the Chicken Fried steak was more a quantity over quality sort of thing, but I was pretty hungry, so it worked out ok.
Well friends,
It was a fine day for a mini-adventure, out west of Skunk Hollow. Riding buddy with a DR650 and no fear of sand took off with me to explore roads, trails and non-trails that we had not been on. No disappointments!
Temps were around 73 F (22C ish) and sunny, so off we went. It has been about a month since the last rain, so things were starting to dry out in the desert; lots of flowers, sand getting a little soft.
We kinda ran out of road, then things got interesting. Greg stopped, to figure out where to turn in an unusual intersection full of concrete chunks and barbwire. I stopped on some sand that I should have not stopped on, and found that with even 1 bar of traction control on, out of 7, it cut the engine and let me sink.
By the time I got the traction control turned completely off, forward progress was not happening and the skid plate was sitting on the surface of the "road."
At about this point, I was pleased that I was still toting the winch around on front.
This poor little sage bush made the mistake of growing in exactly the place I wanted to go...
Fortunately it was a stout little bastard and I was able to pull the rig out of the sand.
Made it about 50 feet before deciding to see if I could get enough momentum going to stay on top of the sand. Never quite achieved full flotation, so got to winch it out one more time before deciding that the road was tougher than just dodging bushes to get to what appeared to be another road a few hundred yards west.
Found the "other road" but the direction we were interested in was blocked by a fence with no gate; oh well, turned around and headed back to another gasline road, and made it back to civilization.
Only spent about 5 hours out playing in the sand, but it was a bit of a workout. Was a whole lot of fun, though!
That is a big improvement. Will keep paws crossed the success continues for another 400,000 miles. 😎
Hold my keyboard and watch this! 🙃
Dane, my question is....were those previous tires Mitas e-07 Dakar..... or.....e-07+ Dakar ?
I prefer the non-plus version.
Mitas e-07 Dakar
Just say NO to the Plus.
Two Million Mile Rider
Exploring the World in Comfort
@miles-ladue , mostly not the plus version. However, cheap bastard that I am, I just picked up a couple of the plus versions kinda cheap off ebay, so will run them on rear only, while I work through my stash of "not plus" ones on the front and the hack wheel.
@ben-franklin, Thanks for the pic. I’m really excited to get that thing back. It’s gonna be a blast
