DISTANCE TRAVELED: 63.29 Miles
AVERAGE SPEED: 9.74 MPH

          At 6:30, I woke up to find that the rain had continued throughout the night and was still coming down! I decided that I did not want to pack up while it was raining so I stayed in my sleeping bag until 7:15. Finally, the rain let up so I packed everything inside my tent and climbed out to another oatmeal breakfast. After eating, I dried off my tent and finished packing up. By 9:15, we were riding on the muddy road, slipping around, and having mud thrown up on our backs and in our faces. After a short downhill, we began an uphill that was muddy and slick. As I looked up the hill in front of me, all I saw were tracks from other bikes weaving from one side of the road to the other. It looked like every rider had been drunk and could not keep a straight line. When we reached the top, we had a great but muddy downhill, descending into a wide-open valley with basalt cliffs on both sides. Once again, mud was thrown up everywhere and I was coated in dirt. Somehow, I was the dirtiest of all! After five miles of pavement, I caught up to Tom and Marnie and discovered that when I had looked at my map the previous night, I had been looking at the wrong place so I had anticipated the rest of the day to be a gradually downhill. However, we had just reached the bottom of our first downhill and how had 11 miles to climb to the top of a 10,000-foot pass! I was very depressed but started to climb anyway. The first four miles were fairly easy although slow because of the mud. (Picture151) Soon, the grade steepened and we climbed quickly to the top. With the sporadic rain, which forced me to always put on and take off my rain jacked, the day became even harder. When I finally reached the top of Carnero Pass, (Picture152) I still had 37 more miles to go! The descent was great. Not only was it fast but the views were great of huge rack faces on both sides of the road. (Picture153,Picture154, Picture155) The stream that we followed was overflowing from the recent rainfall and the road was almost like a river itself! At the bottom of the descent, the rain came down hard and the wind picked up. (Picture156,Picture157) We stopped at one of our turns and headed into the wind but it was so strong that we turned around and rode a mile to take refuge from the storm. As we rode back at 20 mph, the wind was still felt at our backs. When we reached the town, we went into the Roadkill Café where their motto was “You Kill It – We Grill It”! I opted for the grilled cheese, which had a low possibility of being scraped off the road! Soon the storm was over and we left the café to ride into a much less severe wind. (Picture158) We turned to ride back into the Rio Grande National Forest and were back with the giant rock faces. Natural arches were visible a few times but I decided not to ride the extra 4 miles to get to the big natural arch. We turned off onto a double track road and flew on the narrow tracks over rises that made us fly into the air, through dips were streams ran through, and around mud puddles. Twice I almost fell trying to get around a puddle since the edges were slick and my bike would unexpectedly slide into it. It turned out to be one of the most fun stretches of the trip. Seven miles after we began this great road, we rode into Del Norte and found a motel since the RV park was out of business. Scott and I shared a room which was a real luxury. The shower was great and the bed was very comfortable. We had planned to do the laundry, but since we did not get in until 6:30 and the Laundromat closed at 7:00, we did not have a chance. We also had planned to eat out but when we realized how nice it was to say in a room, we got take out and went to eat on our beds in front of the TV. Soon it was 9:00 so we went to bed and talked about the day until 9:30 when we went to sleep.