The weekend of Aug 28-30th we took the camper out to Rosy Lane campground on the Taylor River. The plan was to fish the Kokhanee salmon run on the East River just south of Crested Butte, but the Kokhanee weren't upstream yet, so we decided to do some hiking. We took the pups for a drive out over Schofield Pass. When you start getting closer to Marble, there's a section of the road that gets pretty narrow and they recommend short wheel based vechicles with high clearance. Since we had our F-250 super cab, long bed, I don't think we fit into the short wheel base category. :) We went as far as we could on the road, then we pulled over and went for a hike. We started going cross-country uphill, then found some animal trails that we followed. We kept going up, and up, and up... through the forest and crossing meadows up past timberline. After hiking awhile, we finally got to the top of a 12,700 ft peak with 360 deg. views!
You could see some 14ers from where we were including Maroon Peak, North Maroon Peak, Snomass Mountain and Capital Peak. There was nobody else in site the entire hike! The dogs had a blast and we all slept very well that night. I have more pictures posted here.
The next weekend was Labor Day weekend and we went out to Grand Junction for a flyball tournament. The tournament went well! Our regular team RUFF Edge has been running the same 4 dogs together for 3 years as of this tournament! We ran great all weekend and finished 2nd on Sat. and 1st on Sunday. The only reason we finished 2nd on Sat. was because we ran one race with some of the jumps at the wrong height, so we had to take a loss on those. Otherwise, we were sweeping the competition in almost all of the races! We also ran an open team Jagged Edge and that team took 1st in Open div. 1 both days, so all-in-all, a good showing from our dogs.
Since racing was only on Sat & Sun, we took the ATVs along so we could go play on Monday. I found some trails on traildamage.com and we went out to Bangs Canyon just outside Grand Junction. We left the pups in the truck and took off down the trails. We found some ATV only trails that were pretty fun. Much narrower and there were some fun rock areas where I got to work on my driving skills. We finally ended up at Billings Canyon - an area that is a 9/10 on the 4x4 scale. They recommend 33" tires and lots of other equipment in order to make it through. We decided to give it a try on our ATVs. We got to the first obstacle of rocks (prepay #1) and the rocks were almost as big as the ATVs! Travis gave it a good try, but he wasn't able to get the ATV up and over. He got the front tires up, but all 4 tires started spinning so he couldn't make it. I noticed fluids were dripping out and his front tire was getting flat, so we backed up to asses the damage. We still don't know what was leaking, but the ATV was almost standing on end, so it could have just been some overflow. His tire got 2 holes in it somewhere along the line and pushing it on the rock just made it lose air faster. With a dying tire and dogs in the truck, we decided to head back. Travis had to stop a couple times to re-inflate the tire. I had a blast out there and could have stayed out on the trails a couple more hours! Instead we went back to the fairgrounds where we were camped and grilled up some burgers before heading back home. There are more pictures of our ATV adventure here.
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