Tuesday and Wednesday August 17th and 18th
After 16 days of straight riding we took a rest day on Monday in Ashton, ID, a one road small town with two bars and a few restaurants. It was a much needed rest for our bodies and a time to catch up on a lot of things. There was 3G cellular service too. Oh, almost forgot, was walking down the sidewalk of Ashton talking on the phone and saw a kid looking back on a bike, no helmet. He ran right into a tree, over the handlebars, a very scary crash. I hung up and ran over to him, he was already back up and getting on the bike. I was making sure he was alright and told him to wear a helmet and that I did and was riding from Canada to Mexico. He just looked at me like I was completely crazy and rode off. He is he one that ran into the tree!!!

Tuesday was a long ride, 80 miles, which we thought would be relatively easy but turned out to have some climbing. The Ashton-Flagg Ranch Road was a stretch of dirt road in varying degrees of surface from nice gravel to steep rutty spots. It took us until almost 3pm to get through the roughly 45 miles of the route. Had an over priced, tourist lunch in Flagg Ranch then went after the rest of the miles. We were skirting Yellowstone Park and the traffic in and around the park was significant - a lot of RVs, tourist from out of the country and a ton of Harley-Davidson's! I would guess roughly one-third of the traffic was motorcycles and they never travel alone, usually in 3-to-5's and loud as a firecracker going off right next to you. And people think we are going through a mid-life crisis! We made it to our very simple accommodations by about 7pm despite stopping along the way to see the Teton's and a few bald eagles. Our goal today was to be close enough to the start of a really big climb up Togwotee Pass (9,658 feet). There were group shower facilities that allowed us to do the usual shower and stomp on our riding clothes. Have to thank Col. Dick Hansen for giving me the idea, sure has come in useful the last 3 weeks.

Wednesday was our big day, a single climb of over 2,500 vertical feet to Togwotee Pass (which means top of the mountain). The climb was not one single road but a set of roads, gravel and then paved. On the last 9 miles of the climb there was a lot of highway construction underway. About half way up we were pulling over to rest and a flagman yelled at us to not do that. We went over to talk to him as to why. Seems there was a bear released from that rest area earlier that morning and they were all on edge that the grizzly would be coming back. The bears remember the smell of humans and are not happy about being caged up and moved to a new location. We jumped back on our bikes and kept riding, noticing on the way that his truck was only 10-15 feet away from where he was standing. We decided we really didn't need a rest and to keep going to the summit, which we reached about an hour later.

All the signs of the summit and even the lines on the road were still missing as the construction was still in progress. We ended up falling into a line of cars waiting to go through a construction zone, which was the largest, roughest zone I had ever been through. The crew said we couldn't ride our bikes through it and the only way down was by putting bikes and trailers into a pilot truck that was guiding the other cars through the site. Despite wanting to make the entire trip from Canada to Mexico without ever riding in a car we caved seeing no other option. The Bobs, bikes and John were piled in the back of the pick-up. After getting into the zone I could see why we had to be taken, it was very sandy in spots and others had baseball-sized gravel, and huge earth moving equipment racing around. It was about 5 miles until they deposited us on the other side and we lost a big chunk of our downhill reward. We reattached the trailers and were on our way. We reconnected with our route turning off the highway and immediately started climbing. After 5 miles of uphill pull, when we thought it was going to be mostly downhill we realized - we had missed our turn at the top and were going back up the road we suppose to have come down to just above the construction zone! It happened again, we missed one line of instructions on the map and blew it big time, we could have ridden away from the construction zone and stayed out of a truck to achieve our goal of no motorized vehicles! At Brooks Lake we turned around and started heading down, mad at myself for not paying closer attention to the map and paying dearly for it with increased miles and a late afternoon climb that we didn't need to do. You can't let your guard down for one moment with these maps you have to constantly be going over them. Relearned another painful lesson on map reading. We got to see Brooks Lake though and atoned for the mileage lost in the pilot truck.