Its Utah Jim, but not as we know it. Day 4

It was another early morning with Maximus, but this time we did not get a colorful sunrise. We did not spend much time in camp that morning as keeping Maximus out of the cow pies was not the funnest of chores. So we ate a quick breakfast and hit the road in short order.

About another hour down the trail we found a couple of really nice areas to camp in. All three of us were wishing that we had pushed on a little further the evening before to find these spots.

The first one was wide field with lots of wide flowers. Jessica wanted to photograph them and it was a good place to let Maximus out to run around for an extended period of time. That something that he had been able to do much of up until this point of the trip. Of course Jessica also got a rare picture of me with Maximus.

The campsite I had originally wanted to make the night before turned out to be another 2 hours down the tail, so I’m glad we did not try and reach it the night before.

The campsite was a State campground at Buckeye Reservoir. I don’t normally stay at developed campgrounds, but I wanted to give Jessica a somewhat civilized night as it came with at least an indoor bathroom. While checking the place out, I noticed another OGT setup, this one was a Pando 2.0 in the same color as my own. Of course I had to stop and talk to the owner. It turns out they (I’m sorry to say I can’t recall the guy’s name) were from the Denver area and were also doing the Rimrocker trail, only going from east to west. We exchanged pleasantries and some trail information, then were back on the trail.

It was not long until we crossed over from UT to CO.

Getting a little low on gas and already well after noon, we decided to drop of the RimRocker and take the highway a short distance to Nucla CO.

But before we could hit the pavement we needed to air up. On this trip airing up was a long tedious chore. Since I have not decided 100% on my on board air system yet and my the CO2 tanks I used with the JK were off getting a new inspection done on them, I was using a small Viair 88P on this trip. It actually did pretty good considering it was not rated for tires this size, but it was really slow. Like 17 minutes per tire slow, times six tires. Yes, that is correct, it took us just over an hour and forty minutes to air up.

While airing up I always give the rig a once over to see if there are any issues developing. As it turns out, there was an issue this time. The cotter pin on one of the trailer chains had come out or broken and the chain was dragging. The hook was also wedged up against the receiver pin and trailer break away hook. Nothing that a hammer could not sort out. With the tires finally inflated and the one chain safely secured out of the way, we pressed on into town.

After spending almost two hours sitting and airing up, it was not 20 minutes later that we ran into more cows on the road. This time a small herd being driven by ranchers on horse back.

The wait was not too long thankfully and we soon found our selves in Nucla where we got gas and picked up lunch from a local restaurant and eat in a near by park.

By this time it was already after 4 pm and we had to decide what we were going to do next. We could pick up the east portion of the Rimrocker trail and try to find another place to camp in the next couple of hours, we could stay on the highway and find something in the Telluride/Ouray/Ridgway area, or we could just hit the highway and grind it out all the way home in one hard push.

After a little discussion, we decided to push on to the house and wrap this trip up.