I'll relate my faux pas as folks seemed to like the story. I had been following the GPS from Helvetia to the campground and it put me on a well graded dirt road called Zumbach, which became County 52, and I just found it's also named Silica Rd. No problem till passing several houses, then there was a steep short uphill left behind the last of them, and the road suddenly got much worse. My own fault for not turning around, as I know that in WV when this happens, the road goes from "maintained" to "unmaintained" and may literally have been washed out 20 years ago. Fun on the KTM 690 - not so much on a Tenere with a trailer.
The trailer was doing OK and I was up on the pegs with slip sliding through the mud and steeper unmaintained sections. Basically I was just trying to keep the 3 wheel tracks out of the rain galleys and besides, the GPS said this was the road to follow, right? That's about the point I went through a set of puddles like hundreds before and the little 8" tire on the right hung up in a surprisingly deep one. This looks back, so it's on the left and doesn't look like much of a problem.
The bike suddenly paused a second and then the tire popped up and free, like unleashing a spring. I knew this wasn't going to end well when the trailer came into my right peripheral vision. The Tenere went down on the left, the trailer pulled it back up again, and for a little I was riding backwards before the bike went down the second time. The Helite air vest popped as I came to a stop and the bike kept going with the trailer plopped up on it's side.
No real damage beyond a slight ding in the tank, bent shifter, and bent license plate. Not something you think of when you set up a trailer is that when the bike was on its side, the orientation of the trailer tongue was straight up from the hitch. Fortunately, the trailer tongue has a swivel coupler and I credit that with the lack of trailer or hitch damage.
The GPS at this point said that continuing on was the shorter way off the mountain. Being the idiot or glutton for punishment I am, I rickshaw the trailer past the next puddles and got everything back together. Remember that bit about roads being washed out? Another quarter mile up the road the drainage had left a rock wall and steps that would have been a minor challenge for the thumpers. This is the point I said F- this, I'm turning around.
I rickshawed the trailer back through the worst of the muddy section and about this point it was less than a half hour to sunset. Having just passed a beautiful lonely spot on the ridge, that's where camp was for the night rather than riding in the dark. After a can of soup, went to sleep listening to tree frogs and woke to the song of cicadas. The next morning I retraced my steps to Helvetia, washed up everything at a car wash, and got to meet the others.
btw - I've carried a SPOT tracker in my jacket for a couple of years, largely because Karen likes to follow along when she is not with me. I'm really thankful to have not been hurt, and even so, consider the tracker to have paid for itself on this one outing, since it gave me a way out if I really needed it.
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