Day 7 - 4 States one day

What a day!! Said goodbye to Graham this morning, took a quick parting group shot and hit the road. Bummer to see Graham go but it looks like things are getting tougher from here and that V-Strom 1000 is just not really up for it. He will be missed.

We hit the road out of Liberal Kansas and ducked quickly back into Oklahoma to pickup the trail again. It did not take long for us to get back out into the wheat fields again and start cruising on gravel. We saw tons of pheasant as we crossed the fields and also started to see tons of deer looking animals (antelope?). The sand also did not wait long to make an appearance and was a good bit deeper today. After about 70 miles we left Oklahoma and crossed over into New Mexico. Almost on the border the terrain switched over to desert scrub. As we were getting use to running up our speed on the hard packed desert we ran across an area covered in prairie dogs. There must have been 5 hawks circling overhead just waiting to pick one of those little guys off. Really neat to watch the prairie dogs pop out and check for hawks and then go sprinting off for another hole.

After cruising in the desert for a while I saw what looked like a dark cloud on the horizon. The cloud looking things then became two and about the time I was thinking how strange it would be that two little storms were camped out on the horizon I realized they were our first mountains. After what seemed like a long time we turned towards the hills and they gradually grew and grew until they became mesas. We ran up to and around a few and then the trail went straight up a set through some of the most technical trail that we have seen so far. I think that was a pretty good preview of what is to come. After we got to the top we cruised through some rolling scrub for the rest of the day. We were up at altitude so the whole day stayed nice and cool. We finished out the day in Trinidad Colorado bringing the total number of states for the day to 4.
Tomorrow is supposed to be a tough day with 260 miles of technical trail so this might be the last update for a few days. Hopefully I will have the energy to at least do a post with video so I don't have to take the time to type. For now we are hanging out at Valcome Motorcports getting oil changed on both bikes and new tires on Palmers bike.

Here is a little video all clipped together of the terrain from today.