After an amazing day at the first day of the Summit, I was excited to rise and face day two! The original plan was to run Ophir, but I learned from talking to some folks that I might prefer to do Imogene and it just happened that the R2′s were doing that this morning… I met up with them only to find that our trail leader had not showed up! Fortunately we were more than equipped to lead the group, the R2′s took charge, had a brief driver’s meeting, and we head out!

Sign!!

Just across from that sign was one of the most ridiculous things imaginable… at 13,000+ feet where there isn’t enough oxygen to support my walking 100 feet or so, these people hiked up an incredible and amazingly vertical elevation gain to snow board their way back down. Yikes!

I was fortunate to have Jeff (CactusCruzer) along as a copilot since his FJ had been stolen by the wife and kids for the day. We decided that since we are two incredibly sexy men, we MUST have a picture together by the sign…

This was followed by the obligatory ‘omg I’m driving behind the signzor’ picture…

Just when I thought I was starting to become cool though, Josh and Heidi had to outdo us all by pioneering perhaps the first ever ‘roof tent deployed on FJ behind the sign’ picture… damn!

The awesomeness continued…

Soon we were coming into the town of Telluride. If you look closely, you can see Katie Holmes! But while that fact was exciting, being in Telluride meant only one thing to me… that over my shoulder was the dreaded Black Bear Pass.

In town we all stopped at a RIDICULOUSLY good Thai restaurant whose name I can’t remember. Returning to my truck, I happen to notice something a bit odd and upon closer inspection saw that both of my front shocks had completely exploded!!! All of the shiny black areas in the following photo is due to the oil splashing everywhere…

There was still enough in the shocks to provide for some dampening, so driving was not yet a problem. We exited Telluride and returned to Ouray via Ophir. Another two for one trail day! Thank God I hadn’t done only Ophir as planned, it would have been a very short and easy day, though it was extremely beautiful of course.

I wasn’t in a good position at the end of the day… Black Bear Pass was on my agenda for the next day and my FJ was only miles from becoming undrivable. Setting aside the problem of Black Bear (which had me very freaked out), what about the rest of the Continental Divide Expedition?!?