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September 5, 2011
The Highest Paved Road in North America
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After Jen left, I tried to just sort of hang around and be normal, but it never works. I found myself out in the garage, rolling the toys around. Sort of rearranging the four wheelers to make room for yet another XR. Rolling dirt bikes around is about like rolling a crack pipe across a coffee table or sticking your hand down a woman's pants. You know you don't have the willpower. You know where this is going before you even start. I find myself gassing up the bikes and hastily cobbling together a plan to ride up Mount Evans on one of the XR's.
It's hard to imagine how cold it is at the top of Mount Evans, but it's cold. Very cold. So I broke out all of my new Circle 7 gear and put it on thinking, "Well, I'll try all of this gear out and see how it works. I put on two Ibex shirts under my jacket and immediately started sweating like a whore in church. I backed off down to just one Ibex shirt and threw the rest of my cold-weather gear in the Givi case and made for Mount Evans.
My house is at about 7,450 ft above sea level. By the time I got to Echo Lake, at 10,600 ft above sea level, I was seriously cold. Stopped and put on my 2nd Ibex shirt from Circle 7, Frogg Togg DriDucks over my other clothes.
Thanks to the Circle 7 gear, my core was warm. Only my hands were cold really. Even wearing my winter ski gloves, my hands were getting numb from the cold, but I pressed on.
Along the way, I stopped and shot a few photos. Eventually, I made it to the summit at 14,130 feet. The bike ran fine the whole way, but was somewhat sluggish once we got about 2 miles above sea level. I'll probably have to re-jet the carb for about 10,500, I think.
The places I've been recently are beautiful....Alaska, British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, Utah...but Colorado isn't a bad place to call home, me thinks. :)
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Posted by Rob Kiser on September 5, 2011 at 10:24 PM
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