Sitgreaves Pass

Well...it's been a full couple of days. Yesterday was pretty hard. We started the day by leaving Kingman, Arizona and heading towards Oatman - a small mining town on the old Route 66. To get there we needed to drive through Sitegreaves Pass - I knew that there were hairpins turns and a steep climb, but I had no idea how many and how steep. The picture below is an aerial shot of this route (it shows as a light line labelled "10").
Most of the climb was in 1st and 2nd gears and at no time did we go more than 20 MPH. The climb was 9 miles - those in our group that have ridden the Dragon's Tail in Deal's Gap down south (318 turns in 11 miles) said that this was even more challenging!

This was pretty hard on Melinda and it took some time for her to calm down in Oatman. Eating some ice cream (at 10 AM) helped.

We spent some time in Oatman, but did not see any wild burros - apparently they wake up later in the day.

We left Oatman and began to travel across the Mojave Desert. The sun was hot, the ground was dry - we were riding in 104 F temperatures - it felt like you were standing in front of a hair dryer as we rode. We packed water and stopped often. We had one co-rider that fainted in the heat, but was revived with lots of cool water and damp cloths. She felt much better and was able to continue.

We made it to Barstow, California and spent the night. The Route 66 museum opened up for us after their normal hours and we had a great time there followed by our last dinner together as a group at the Idle Spur Stgeak House.

This morning the group headed for Santa Monica. Melinda and I decided that the big city traffic was more than we wanted to deal with so we said our "good byes" and photographed the group as they left.

What a great trip! We be doing some more posting as we figure out our route home.

More pictures at http://www.picasaweb.google.com/stephen.hamstra