Our three day trip

Last week Wilma, Tank, & I took three days to complete a quest I had started in the early 1960s. To do all six of the jeep trail passes in this part of CO. All are over 10,000 ft & most over 12,000 ft; the tallest being 13,100. We did two this trip; Stony pass was 12,650 & the other one, Cinnamon was 12,600. Stony was the one we had not made. They may have added more to the list, but not to my list. The six passes are Black Bear, Imogene, Ophir, Engineer, Cinnamon, & Stony.

We went by the Rio Grande Reservoir to Lost Trail Campground. Lost Trail is a NF campground and there is no fee. We were close to the begining of the Rio Grande river. After setting up the tent we had a quick supper of sandwiches we went to bed so as to get an early start.

We had breakfast with toast and hot tea & coffee, & started out. Before we had gone very far we came upon a man & his son from our campground, they were stopped because of a water crossing he was unsure of. He asked me if we could make it I told him I was sure I could but advised him that he should turn around. We then started up Stony, I found it was a lot of rock crawling. We do not have any pictures of the rocks as we were trying to stay on the 4-wheeler. Coming to an overlook we stopped for a picture of Wilma, Tank, & the 4-wheeler. We had our ponchos & it was a good thing as it rained then hailed, then rained then hailed you get the idea. The 4-wheeler did not like running over 11,000 ft and gave us problems. We had to clean the spark plug after it totally stopped running. It then ran OK till we got back to 11,000 ft. We weren't sure we would make it but we did. We do not have pictures of our trip over Cinnamon as our camera messed up.

When the day was over we logged 67.7 miles in nine hours of at least eight on the 4wheeler. The last 10 miles or so were the hardest I have ever done so far, and we had saddles sores to prove it.