Day Five - Wednesday - 80 miles
We wanted to go up Imogene from the Ouray side and do Yankee Boy Basin and Governor’s Basin so that was our target for the day. We remembered Yankee Boy being a little difficult but this time it seemed to be a breeze.
I don’t know if the trail was graded to make it easier or we were just better, I tend to think it was the former. Anyway, we would have gone up without incident but I made a bone-headed wrong turn and with everyone following me realized it too late and the others got stuck a little on the hill before I could turn around and make the correction. No big deal, but we continued on to the top with our pride only slightly wounded. Yankee Boy sits at 12.7k feet and the view is really nice so we stopped for pictures before continuing on to Governor’s Basin. We rode up Governor’s with equal enthusiasm and no issues. Back down we were ready for Imogene. It is much more difficult going up but we tackled with no problem stopping at the top and then riding back down the other side to Telluride. When we were making reservations in the beginning of the year I learned there was a Toyota FJ convention in town this week, but we hadn’t seen that many. Well, that changed for us as we rode on Wednesday. They were all over the place, and unlike most of the Jeeps encountered over the years these guys didn’t like to get out of the way. It was really bad as we encountered a long group of them coming down by Tomboy. They really made if difficult to pass, but maybe they didn’t realize all they had to do was to wait for about 20 seconds and we would be by them. So, once we hit Telluride we thought since we were here we should stop again at Smuggler’s for lunch. It was as good as always and soon we were on our way and back over Ophir Pass to US 550 and back to camp. A really good day of riding logging about 80 miles mostly on the dirt.
