Up almost above the line where the aspen had their leaves yet. It was up here, about 15 miles in that I fell off for the first time of the day. It was a common sort of fall, back wheel slid out and down I went, done it dozens of times and I picked the bike up and carried on as always, the bike is getting heavier as I get older I'm sure. However, it turned out that all was not well, somehow this fall had hit just right so that the radiator guard had been bent back together with the radiator.
Another mile up the road the trail went into some trees and I got stuck in a stream that was running down the trail - too narrow at this point for anything other than bikes or ATVs. I noticed that the temperature gauge was all the way in the red which is unusual for the KLR and it was then that I discovered the damage, in a mud hole naturally. I dragged the bike onto dry land and assessed the position, potentially not good, the radiator fan was jammed which is a weakness of the bike and it likes to burn out the fan motor in these situations. It was too hot to poke about in there so I got some snow, oh yes - there was snow, and cooled things down. The whole radiator was actually bent back and fan blade was hitting the little round guard. You can imagine what I was thinking, pushing the bike 16 miles back, I don't think so, hiking out would be a job in my motorcycle gear. I found a medium size rock and gave the radiator a couple of persuasive bashes to bend it back a bit but the fan still hit the guard, a bash and a twist with a wrench finally managed to get a little clearance for the fan blade.
Then to decide which way to go, I hiked out of the trees and fired up the GPS to see where I was, it looked like there was a better trail about 2 miles ahead but there was some uphill to get there. I started out in that direction and in the very next muddy area fell off again and snapped the mirror off - that's never happened before either. After some huffing and puffing and dragging I got the bike up and going again and to my relief the fan worked. A few hundred yards further I came across snow across the trail, I might have been able to pass that but I scouted ahead and found a steep single track covered in snow, no possible way to make that. So I had to turn around, at least it was mostly downhill and into the wind so cooling wouldn't be too much of a problem, I was as hot as the bike by this time! Back through the streams but they are much easier going downhill and were not a problem. Fairly quickly I was out in the open again and discovered the next problem, the bike wouldn't shift into 2nd gear, everything was covered in mud but I eventually discovered that the shift lever was bent and gouging the engine cases, I can live with that and used a little more force when shifting was needed.
During all this excitement I didn't take any pictures which I now regret but I'm not going back up there just for that. I was too busy thinking about how long it would take to hike out and how on earth would I rescue the bike and hoping that I could get back to the motel before Randy called search and rescue, I had left a note telling him roughly where I was going. I did take a couple more of the scenery on the way down.