Gifford Pinchot Camp & Ride Report, July 2014

[liv2day]

Another year of epic riding and camping at Gifford Pinchot is in the books and I'm already looking forward to next year.

The weather didn't quite cooperate as expected; the forecast bozos were off by about 24 hours. We arrived to showers Wednesday afternoon and they continued all night and through Thursday. The bright side is we wouldn't have any dust issues and traction would be fantastic. One lesson learned was that when considering what to bring for the trip, don't think you can't fit the canopy in the back of the truck - make room for the damn thing as huddling under a golf umbrella while trying to cook over the fire wasn't anyone's idea of a great time in the woods...lol.







We managed to get some hot food made Wednesday and took shelter in our tent to chow - good thing we brought the big one so everyone fit.



Woke up Thursday to more rain and pretty cold temps; good thing I told my buddy from WI to pack light and not worry about a heavy jacket (DOH). For a change of scenery, we decided making coffee in the back of my truck was good and huddled in there for a while. Migrated from there to the cab and then watched dirt bike videos from a recent trip to Lyda Camp and Jim's trip to MI. You know, because watching riding is so much fun when you should be actually doing the riding...lol.



Al decided to bail and head home as he had stuff to do Thursday night, so we unhooked the trailer and drove down to find a cel signal and figure out if we were going to get out of the rain at any point. Figures, 10 miles outside of Trout Lake had us in partly sunny skies, so we turned around and headed back to camp to wait for Randy & Willy.

Those two arrived in the early afternoon and rather than complain about the liquid sunshine any longer, we nutted up and hit the Boundary trail with the plan to do an out-and-back on trail 18. Although we were soaked, it was a great rip out and back, first time on Trail 18 and it's a blast - as is the Boundary trail.