Adventure Motorcycle Blog

This morning we woke up and headed back to Chama to get gas and water.

After we filled up, we lowered our tire pressure knowing the trails were wet from recent storms and we were going to hit rock trails after that. From there we had some great valley and mountain trail riding. It wasn’t too technical but still a blast. We headed out of town and once on the trails we ran into the nastiest mud we’ve seen so far. It was extremely sticky, immediately encased the tires, filled the rear spring area with mud, encased the forks and was packed all around the front sprocket. It was horrible to the point it actually added weight to the bikes and made the tires worthless. I had to get a stick and carry it with me to scrape mud out from everywhere.

We made it to Chama and found a car wash. The bikes were packed full of mud and we had to blast all of it off. Last thing you want is for the mud to dry on the forks plus it needed removed from the radiator and around the brakes. From there we tried to find a place to eat. We went to a couple different places but they were all closed. Restaurants there have lunch hours and dinner hours and closed in between. Our only option was subway. After subway it was time to hit the trail again. Rode about ten minutes out of town and straight ahead were a couple of massive storm cells so we turned around and went back to town. We found an old abandoned store of some sort off the main road that had an overhang so we parked the bikes in the shade and started to call hotels. We called at least 5 places and they were all booked. There was a legislation committee event going on in town and all the rooms were taken. We finally found one that was a combo RV park/hotel so we went there. It was pretty sketchy but it worked. Once settled in we made a laundry run since we had the time. Once back from doing laundry I noticed my back brake didn’t work. We looked at it and discovered the brake line had failed. There was a leak at the fitting by the brake assembly. We started to research motorcycle repair shops between the hotel and the trail system and there really weren’t any. We had two options, Go way out of our way to Durango, CO to a Yamaha dealer or Pagosa Springs, CO and find a custom shop and see if they could work their magic. I had left a VM at the Yamaha place in Durango as a heads up just in case we headed that way but that wasn’t option 1. It was too late in the evening to call the shops in Pagosa Springs, but there were a couple of promising shops that could probably fix it. At this point we had a plan and went to bed. Oh, the long overdue shower was amazing!