After a late night of watching movies and sitting around the campfire on Thursday, we discussed a possible route for Friday. We decided to do some exploring on the south side of highway 410.
Friday arrived and the weather didn’t look too promising. There were a few clouds and after leaving camp we got sprinkled on a few times while riding down FR19 towards Highway 410. Our route took us east, so we ended up making our way out of the clouds and sprinkles and did explored some trails and forest service roads up in the hills.
We found the site of an old Forest Service Fire Lookout with a small garage building still on the site. The garage has been converted into a shelter for use in the winter by snowmobilers. We ate lunch here and made a few cell phone calls and continued on down the road which ended at a Jeep trail. We had a good time riding the Jeep trail which had some awesome views of the valleys below.
Late in the day we reviewed our maps again and picked the most direct route to Highway 410. The road we chose was the WRONG choice, which we found out after riding through about a mile long section of the road that had been intentionally damaged by either the Forest Service or a logging company in efforts to keep vehicles off of it. The road eventually led us to another road that dead ended where there was a large a fence across the road. Our maps showed the road would connect us to Highway 410 in about another two miles, but obviously the fence prevent forward travel so we did major backtracking to get around the fence and found what appeared to be a course laid out as an ATV poker run.
After several more rounds of backtracking up and down the ridge, we eventually found an ATV trail that went through the woods on a ridge line and hooked us up with another road. Wish we all had Chatterbox helmet radios so exploration and splitting up would be easier to tell the other riders "COME THIS WAY, I FOUND THE ROAD!!"
Jeff found a huge trench that swallowed his bike, so when Kjell and myself made our way to him, we had to help him get his bike over over the dirt mound.