Haven't wrote this much since high school

August 16th

We awoke in the middle of the night to the sound of our bikes crashing to the ground and the sound of claws tearing apart the bikes.  As we lay there trembling in our little hammocks I realized that I shouldn't mislead you like this.

It was freezing cold in the morning, there was frost over everything, so we packed up as fast as we could and headed towards Dillion for some hot breakfast.  Found a diner and I drank more coffee in one sitting then I had  in all my previous years put together.  Weird what the West does to a person.  =)  When we hit the road again it had warmed up to 50 degrees and it felt wonderful!  Into the mountains we shot for the story of the day.  A big hill climb on Fleecer mountain.  What makes this hill challenging is it's length and the loose gravel the whole way up.  It really wouldn't be to hard without all the weight we had with our luggage and low offroad gears.  Duane headed up first and looked like a cowboy trying to ride a bronco.  The loose gravel had him flying all over the place.  He hung on though till just about the top, high enough that Ty and I could hardly see what was happening way up there, were he laid it over.  Ty tried next and puttered right up for the most part.  He had a low first gear and the best tire among us.  So that leaves me.  I didn't have a lot of confidence after seeing how the other bikes handled because my bike was geared higher and is much heavier making it hard to handle.  So up I went, about a third of the way, till the first real steep part, were the bike thought it knew best and started flying all over the place and ended up sideways on the hill and stalled.  Well anybody that rides motorcycle knows what happened next.  The bike and I started rolling down the hill, me first and the bike chasing me.  I managed to stop it after about three rolls and picked it up and nothing was broke at all.  These bikes are tough buggers for all we put them through.  Duane ended up coming back down and trying again and made it up about the same distance as before, but with Ty's help he got going again and made it to the top,  I headed back down the mountain and drove around and met them on the other side.  I wasn't going to push my luck and have something major break that would cost me the rest of the trip.

We carried on, on some nice dirt roads and make it into Butte MT(pronounced butt by Tyler :D) where we decided to change our oil again.  After riding around town for awhile we found a dealer and took care of that job in the parking lot.  Our GPS lead us into National Forest ground next were we found a nice place to camp and even had our first campfire of the trip on the last night of camping on the CDT.  We thought it best not to cook anything after last nights grizzly experience.  :D