When we woke up to pouring rain, we knew we wouldn't be riding up to the Dormer Pass. Greg had told us the night before that if it rained the pass would be in the clouds... so plan B was to wait for the rain to either stop or slow down, and do a shorter ride up the river.
By 10:30 there was only a slight drizzle, and we were heading north up the trail. We crossed Stoney creek and arrived at an old fire road - these were built in the thirties when fires were fought by hand, with a hose in the creek. Several hours later we turned off into a meadow to have lunch beside an old elk pen - years ago when there were too few predators and too many elk, they would capture them and truck them off to other places.
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| The old elk corral |
Again Greg unpacked the mule and got the fire going - no bagged lunches for us! This time it was grilled cheese sandwiches - grilled in tin foil over the fire.
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| Crystal the mule carried wood, a stove and food for lunch |
We took a different way back to camp, on a narrow twisty trail beside the river, sometimes climbing high above it and then having to descend down steep paths. We crossed a slide, and at one point the trail had a cliff on one side and a drop-off on the other, but mainly it had a lot of sharp turns. A memorable quote from one of the Australians, who was on a really big horse, part draft: "it was like driving a semi - the front end would go around and then you had to wait for the back end to get around." It was a memorable ride, not for the faint of heart, and gave us much to talk about back at camp.
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