Colorado Cruiser: 2019 Sept Mountain Man

2019 Sept Mountain Man - Day 1

I think we have enough firewood for 3 nights.

The Mountain Man campout is run by my friend DaveB. It's not one of the big rendezvous that you see on TV with guys wearing coon skin caps and shooting muskets. It's just a bunch of guys that DaveB knows and invites for a few days in the mountains.

Mostly its about camping, cooking, riding ATVs, and sitting around a huge campfire at night. It's just guys having fun in the woods.

And before you picture drunken peeing for distance contests, we're mostly all mormons (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints) so there is no alcohol, smoking, or other things that many men would do in the woods. We sit around the fire allot, telling dad jokes and quoting old movies.

DaveB usually sends out his invites early in the year, with occasional reminders throughout the fall and early summer. Then in mid summer he will send an email with the planned days and destination. It's always in late September so we can see the fall colors.

I agonized this year over whether to go or not because I was going on a 2 week motorcycle ride through California just prior to the campout. I was worried about leaving my wife with all the grandparent duties for nearly 3 weeks.

It's tough being a grandparent, so many grandkids to spoil, and so little time.

It was my wife who told me I should go or I'd regret it and she was right. I really enjoy the campouts, so I emailed DaveB that I would be going just before I left for California.

As I usually do, I way overpacked for the campout. I had my big 8 man tent, oversize cot, big sleeping pad, Tent heater, camp table, 2 camp chairs (one for the tent, one for the fire), blackstone griddle, and a ton of electronic gizmos and gadgets. I had allot more stuff, but you get the idea, I wasn't going to be roughing it by any stretch of the imagination.

I also decided to tow my little 4x6 utility trailer so I could have all of the Glamping stuff I'd bought for Yellowstone this summer. If you don't know what glamping is, google it. If you are reading this so far into the future that you don't know what Google is, ask your robot overlords to explain it to you.

On the night before departure, I did the final packing of the car and trailer. As always, I kept spotting things and thinking "I could probably use that" and tossing it in.

I got out my nice zero gravity chair and found it was busted. So I ran to Bass Pro Shop to buy a new one. I found a Cabella's chair for sale and was puzzled by that. I later learned that the two had merged. That's how into camping and outdoors I usually am. My new chair cost $137 with tax, A small cinder from the first night's campfire burned a small hole in the brand new chair, not 5 minutes after I got it out of the trailer. But I'm not bitter.

I'm going to be cooking a breakfast and a dinner on this trip, so I bought 30 lbs of ice and loaded all the food and my snacks into 2 ice chests. The 3rd bag of ice I put into another ice chest just so I could add ice to my hydration bag.

I have so much room between the trailer and the highlander that once I loaded everything, it was still half empty. But this way I don't have to play tetris trying to get it all to fit, it's just toss and go.

I hitched the trailer and pulled it out onto the street. I didn't need to gas up because my wonderful wife had already done that for me earlier in the day. I was all ready, except for the 10 of 15 things I thought of as I got ready for bed and stuck in a pile in front of the bedroom door.

My alarm went off at 3:30am. Yes, my children, there is another 3:30 in the day beside the one in the afternoon.

I didn't have to rush because I'd prepped everything already, but even then, it was 4:30 before I climbed behind the wheel and headed for DaveB's house. He's about 15 minutes away but I always panic when I go there because I can never remember the way. Was it 3 lefts and 4 rights? or 10 lefts and a u-turn?

I managed to get there right on time, 4:45. But there was no one else there. Had I misread the time? Had I confused the date? But no, DaveB was in his truck in the driveway and only 1 other vehicle was showing up to drive with us, DaveW. He showed up a few minutes later. We had a prayer and headed down the road.

It was an uneventful drive out to Buena Vista. We all got separated by stop lights and other traffic, but we arrived as planned at 7:00 am for breakfast at Jan's. It's a nice little cafe that we've often had Mountain Man Breakfsts at.

We met up with DaveB's 3 brothers at breakfast. Thad, Chris, and Jayson. They all live in Utah and had driven over in Thad's monster truck. I don't really know what it is, but it's huge. He was towing his 4 seater UTB and Jayson's ATV. I had met Thad before, but didn't know Chris or jayson.

For Breakfast, I got a Denver omelette and I was glad to see no one order a breakfast burrito because that's what I'd be cooking in a couple days.

After breakfast the real fun began.

Due west out of Buena Vista is Cottonwood Pass, one of the highest mountain passes in Colorado that you can drive over. It has been paved between Buena Vista and the top of Cottonwood Pass for many years, but the far side from the pass, down into Taylor Reservoir has been dirt. I have often ridden my motorcycle to the top of Cottonwood, but then had to turn around and ride back down because of the dirt on the far side.

For the last 2 years, CDOT has been paving the West side of Cottonwood Pass and I was excited to see how it would look. I was mostly excited to know whether I could ride my Goldwing motorcycle over the pass.

That's really what this whole trip was about. All the camping, drones, cameras, tent heater, offroading, everything was just so I could find out if Cottonwood pass was now bike worthy.

Not really, but I was excited about it.

And the Verdict?

Not only did they pave the West side, but they reworked the approaches on the East side and completely repaved the whole of the East side. It is now one long beautiful road. It can be used as an alternate route to Crested Butte, rather than going over Monarch Pass and all the way to Gunnison, you can now take Cottoonwood and cut off proably 50 miles, but that's just a guess.

All the switchbacks are wide and well banked, it was just a wonderful drive and will be a wonderful motorcycle ride in the future.

We stopped at the top of the pass and I got the drone out to take pictures and video. The top has also been repaved with more parking room but the same great view down to a small pond just below the pass.

I got some video but couldn't remember how to get the drone to take a spherical photo. I'll figure it out later.

From the top down to Taylor Lake didn't seem nearly as long as it used to take on the dirt road. Once we reached the highway, we turned right for just a couple miles, then turned right again toward Texas Creek.

This is where my angst kicked in. The highlaner was great, but I was town the trailer equivalent of a toyota corolla. It was not meant for offroading. It had short stubby springs and a solid axle that didn't seem all that far off the ground.

We meandered our way down the dirt road with the rocks and ruts getting bigger and bigger. After a while I figured we'd gone 10 miles and wondered how much farther. I came to a steep drop off and before I headed down, I stopped and waited for DaveW to catch up, then asked him how far we'd come and how far we had to go.

"We've only come a mile and half" he said, about another 2 miles to go. "It's not going to get any worse" he assured me. So I climbed back in and headed down.

Writing this report on day 3, after the ride of day 2, that road was NOTHING and I was a wimp for even thinking it was rough.

Anyway, nothing bad happened and we arrived in camp just fine.

We are on a small rise, overlooking Texas Creek. There is a big circular gravel area that is free of grass and trees with a few trees off to the West end. We pitched our tents along the Trees on the west.

Once everyone's tent was up, we headed farther up the road to get some firewood.

Campfires at mountain man have goot a bit out of hand, thanks to DaveB. Every year he wants to cut down one more whole tree that they did last year, or at least it feels that way.

We had 3 chainsaws going. They would cut down a dead tree that was still standing, then cut it into 4 foot segments. We burned stacks of those 4 foot segments in the campfire.

DaveB says we cut down 8 trees this time. It took 2 trips with a full trailer to haul all the wood back to camp. There has to be 2 chords of wood in that stack

I helped haul wood, but I also tried to get some video footage of the tree cutting and hauling.

At one point, DaveB cut a 12 foot tall tree, but it got hung up on the way down, then as he trid to free it, it started falling toward him. He said his first thought was just deflect it with his hand, until his sence kicked in and he scramble backward out of the way, falling over his chainsaw case. Unfortunatly I wasn't filming at the time or it would have made great footage.

I also caught Jayson cutting a treee down. I was watching real close to see how it would fall and wanted to get it falling close to me. I haven't reviewed the footage but the 3 guys who thought I'd been hit were proof that I picked my spot good. That thought for sure I'd been hit. But to me, I was 6 to 8 foot from where it fell. I got pelted by the shattering limbs, but no where near being hurt.

Footage of the tree coming down

Once we got all the wood back to camp we setup the cooking area and prepped our other personal things. I flew the drone a bit and started writing this blog.

Ben showed up after an hour in his Camper, pulling a trailer. He had his 650 offroad bike in the trailer.

Then DaveB started calling out that it wass time for a ride. Everyone geared up to go for a ride.

I rode with DaveW. I've ridden with him on 2 other campounds in the past. He has a 2 seater can am and feels pretty comfortable. I wear one of my old motorcycle helmets and I'm forever whacking my head on the roll bar as I get in and out. It's got grab handles for the passenger on the center console and across the front dashboard. I've had to hang onto these many times as DaveW had driven up, over, across, and through some wild roads. He likes to brag that his can am has never rolled over, no matter what stunts he's pulled, but he can't say that anymore.

Today we just continued up the Texas Creek trail. The road got rougher the farther we went, and DaveW said that's why we camped where we did, because most trucks and trailers couldn't make it back to where he'd really like to camp.

As we got higher, we finally started seeing some yellow and orange aspen trees. We hadn't seen much so far and were worried that we wouldn't get any color. The trip is planned for the end of September specifically to see the fall colors on the ridess, but it's really hard to know in advance if you'll be too early or too late for the changing leaves.

We stopped for picturs a few times, then stopped at the very end of the trai for more photos. Like a dummy, I hadn't brought the drone. There were some nice views out there.

On our way back we stopped and walked out to cabin across the creek from us. It's a private cabin even though it's in the middle of a national forrest. The owners let people use it if they follow some rules.

There used to be a road to the cabin, but the road had logs laid across it ever 5 feet or so and signs declared the road closed. So we walked over. Most of us waded across the crek, but I didn't feel like it, so I waited with a few others on the near side.

After a few more photo stops, we got back to camp and I worked more on the blog while DaveW started cooking dinner. He always makes fried chicken on the first night and it was as good as always.

By this time it was getting dark, so the fire starters made their way out to the stack and started prepping a fire. It took an embarassingly long time to start until someone just grabbed a cup of gas from the UTVs and doused a few logs, then it roared to life, and kept growing and growing.

The wind was blowing from southwest to neartheast, right at my tent. I watched with growing concern as the fire lept 5 feet, then 8 feet, then 12 feet in the air while spewing cinders all over my tent. I was sitting off to the side and decided I should see whether anything was reaching the tent. There was ash on it, but nothing hot had reached it, yet. But just as I got back to my chair, a gust blew a log to the side and it shot cinders all over my chair. Before i could brush it all off, it had burned a hole in my brand stinking new chair.

Oh well, now I can stop worrying.

We sat around the campfire for a few hours as it got darker and colder. DaveW brought out some brownies to pass around.

Again, mormons in Colorado. These weren't special brownies, just plain ol' fattening, heart clogging brownies.

By 10 o'clock I was all done and ready for bed. The temperature was in the 40s and showed signs of dipping way lower.

I started the tent heater while I undressed. Then took a baby wipe bath and climbed into my sleeping bag. I was asleep pretty fast because I don't remember anything after that.

Thad and Jayson at breakfast.