FurtherAdventuresTeam91 - Full Story
Monday, January 13, 2020
The weather the few days leading up to the Death Valley ride had me concerned about making it to the ride at all. On December 26th, even here in the mountains of San Diego County, we got fully 4 inches of snow. Our local freeway was briefly closed. I knew by the time we needed to leave on the 27th the roads would be in good shape, but I had a much closer challenge: getting the trailer out of the driveway. I have to keep it parked by the barn in order to keep it plugged in while not in use. Getting it out involves backing it down the driveway. The driveway is steep enough if it's iced over the trailer will drag the truck helplessly down the hill. Ask me how I know this. So we had to wait for the sun to do its job and defrost the driveway before I could get the thing out.
We did finally hit the road about 10am, which all things considered isn't bad. It's only about 270 miles to ridecamp. It's really rare for two days after Christmas to have particularly bad traffic. I usually make the drive in 5 hours or less.
Not this time.
Of course with all that weather and snow, people were out in force. We hit a lot of backups. It wasn't until we got past the Kramer Junction we were able to reliably make time. There was even snow on the mountains between Red Mountain and Trona. We made it to camp about 5:30.
Due to all that weather, there were very few rigs in camp. Maybe a dozen. Probably less. Never have I seen ridecamp at DVE so empty.
Because there were so few riders, the decision had been made to vet everyone in at 6:00am on ride day. Seeing as there was perhaps a total of 15 riders all told, it was an easy enough thing to accomplish. Our ride started at 6:30am...
Read more here:
https://furtheradventuresteam91.blogspot.com/2020/01/death-valley-encounter-2020.html
