Lost Creek had its share of noisy neighbors. The bullfrogs in the creek stayed up all night talking to each other about whatever it is bullfrogs talk about. I was awake from about 4am on staying in the hammock trying to grasp onto whatever sleep may return, but it wasn’t going to work. At 4:30, after trying hard to sleep in, I decide to try out the lights I’d installed on the bike. I also practiced my visualization skills by packing up in near complete darkness. The moon was very low on the horizon and was giving off reflected light in the trees. Just enough to make packing up what little I had pulled from the bags possible. Once packed and dressed I used the lights on the bike and my own flashlight to sweep my camp, making sure I hadn’t dropped anything or absent mindedly left something behind, and set off into the damp, dark morning.

Almost immediately I discover I’d forgotten something — cleaning my visor. It was bug-covered from the previous night’s post-sunset search for camp and nearly impossible to see through. My lights, while working extremely well, were drawing all sorts of bugs into my path. This also makes it impossible to just open the visor and keep moving without risking my eyesight. After a quick stop to clear the visor and snap a night photo, I’m off again.

On the trail at 5:30am.

I putter through the forest finding a lot of evidence of recent storms. Surrounding all of the downed trees are dozer tracks. Crews had cleared all of this storm damage very recently. As I lumber through the woods, first light starts showing through the trees and that dim balance of light and dark that only happens at dusk and dawn takes over the forest — twilight.

The GPS shows a left turn growing closer and as I approach it, I see the outline of a vehicle sitting in it. It’s a black Dodge Durango and there is a rather burly guy standing beside it as I approach. I notice the Durango has a trailer attached to it as I begin my left turn by the imposing figure in the pale morning light. I downshift and as I am releasing the clutch and rolling on the throttle, he yells, “HEY!” in a commanding tone. Great.

I stop, expecting…..I don’t really know what I was expecting, but I wasn’t expecting anything good to come of it. He comes over to the still-running bike and tells me there is a huge tree all the way across the trail about two miles in. Relieved I shut the bike off and ask the FAQs — can I get around it, over it, through it, etc. He was pretty sure I couldn’t get around it. We talked about my bike and the bikes he had as a kid and the bikes he wants now. This is a common theme with almost every stranger I speak to — men anyway. They all had a dirtbike of some kind as a boy and wistfully speak of how they wish they still rode or wish they still could.

Then he told me an interesting story about the tree. He’s been working for the forest service in the area for a month or so and one afternoon he was driving to a work area and came up on two women in a heavily modified Jeep Wrangler Rubicon. He said they had to have had $100,000 in “thuh thang” and they were both pushing 70 years of age! When he rolled up on them, they had their winch line hooked to this primordial tree trying to move it out of the road. “They said they’s on some kinda trail and they started at the outter banks and were goin’ to California or somethin. They showed me some kind of Roledex thang they had their route on. I told ’em, ‘Ladies, even if you do git that tree to move off that bank, your Jeep’s a goin’ with it! That thang has to weigh 10 tons!'” I told him about the TAT and that I was also doing it and he should get used to seeing a lots of bikes and 4x4s heavily loaded passing through there. He laughed, “Buddy, I ain’t never gonna get used to seein’ two old ladies in a Jeep tryin’ to winch themselves off the mountain.” I worked out a way around the giant tree, but only after riding up to it to take some photos. It was indeed a huge tree and it did indeed block the entire way. Mystery solved.

Winch this.