This is from the last reunion at GR in 2010; the water crossings start about half way down. In the one pic, even though my bike is laying on its side in the middle of the river and not under water, it is actually balanced on a thin ledge; 1 foot back and it was at least 2 feet deep.....
I pretty much struck out on my own for this trip, which was actually pretty nice because I went at my own pace (read alone out front ;-) ), which was fantastic for not eating anyone else's dust.
I did the entire route. The route sheet was good, except distances were for how long you were on each segment rather than cumulative with resets. Then I messed up trying to make it cumulative, which took me a while to figure out.
The first deep water crossing was cake. The last was deep but smooth and straight. The middle deep crossing was over 2' deep along a natural dam. I don't know the proper way through there, but I knew to stay upstream of it yet it got so deep I was afraid of swamping my carb and ended up holding the front end up in the water with the back sunk in while I gingerly made my way across on the top of the dam. I had considered trying to ride across the dam but it was narrow, rough, and slippery. There is a picture in my Facebook of someone who tried crossing downstream of the dam, where water cascading over the dam digs a trench on the other side. The water was up to his gas tank.
Overall, I think the route was really well done. I am keeping the 100+ mile route sheet for future reference (and will post it here), but for $40, a ride on public roads with no support vehicles should have included a light breakfast and had a cookout at the end. There wasn't even a real lunch stop, so there was no impetus to meet any of the other riders. Hence my decision to just solo it. Also, the gas stops needed to be better marked as detours since there was no real need to stop. The last gas stop actually kind of annoyed me. I took a left and went almost two miles to a gas station I didn't need, then went just over two miles back. Net result was I could have taken a left and gone .3 miles. It doesn't sound like a big deal until you realize the previous gas stop, which I also didn't need, I went almost ten miles out of my way because I didn't realize I was supposed to go back the way I came and went the wrong way out of the lot.
Anyway, completely minor complaints and they probably wouldn't even be complaints if not for my decision to ride alone and having enough gas and desire to iron man the entire thing in one shot.
By the way, I don't mean to complain about the ride. I talked to the organizer after the ride, and he's a great guy and the route was well thought out and I thought he did a great job of tying everything together with a minimum of pavement by hopping onto and off of dirt roads at various places to actually hit up a single dirt road but in multiple sections so they felt like different roads and never had a feeling of looping back on itself. Also a few of the roads were pretty gnarly for named forest roads, which was cool. That description is probably hard to follow what I mean, but what I'm getting at is the route is great, as I said at the beginning. I look forward to bringing people out for a repeat ride at a later date.
Momma says, I better put the water wings on my handle bars.
