The tour is a bit challenging, so ATV experience is required, making the trip a bit faster paced and as a result more fun to lead. Its a 4 hour tour with about 2 hours of set up and breakdown. We arrived at the trail at 5:30 p.m. and pulled all the machines from the trailer, lined them up, cleaned the windshields and waited for the customers to arrive on their bus.
There's a few things that make this tour so fantastic. First of all, as I mentioned most riders have a little experience so we can keep a good pace. Second of all, there's TONS of water. Everyone loves driving through water!
Third, about half way down the trail on a good clear day you catch a good glimpse of Mt. McKinley which is a commodity around here being that it can be difficult to spot since its so large it generates its own weather patterns. Lastly, the tour includes FREE FOOD! When we reach the end of our trail where we turn around, we set up a camp, start a fire, and cook up some Hot Dogs, Hamburgers, & Veggie Burgers.
On my second training tour, which was Tuesday, I was riding in the lead rhino with Travis.
Now on my first tour we were told that one spot was particularly dangerous because we had to navigate customers around a deep bit of water that was our normal passage on our tour, but this time Travis said the tours in the two previous days had braved the water and made it across without a hitch. I was still skeptical because I'd seen the water and it looked unpassable. As we approached the water I said to Travis "God it'd be a real bitch if we had to pull someone out." I had no idea it would be us that needed to be pulled out. We entered the water and made it about 20 feet when the rhino stopped in its tracks and the floor started to fill with water. My first thought was "Please tell me no one followed us into this PLEASE!" I looked back and thankfully the customer immediately behind us had also been skeptical and had stopped short of the water. So we had our rear guide come up to the front and guide the customers around the water while we tried to pull out our very stranded and stuck rhino from the murky stream. We probably looked pretty funny with one guy standing in the back jumping up and down trying to get some traction and me pulling on the roll cage from the bank while Travis was gunning the machine. Eventually we were able to get it to move about two feet and get it close enough to tow it out with our 450 cc guide ATV that the rear guide was using. However our triumph was short lived. The machine wouldn't budge. The engine would rev up really loud but the tires just wouldn't spin. We'd flooded the clutch which was causing the belt to slip. We figured this was the problem so we pushed the ATV into the brush adjacent to the trail and left it to dry while we continued on our tour riding on the back of our two back guides' ATVs. It was an uncomfortable ride, but we made it to the campsite and had our dinner and exchanged our opinions of Chris McCandless' adventures and returned to the Rhino to find it still wasn't moving. So Travis and one of the rear guides took the customers to finish the tour and get them on the bus to go home while me and Sterling, our young local Alaskan guide, towed back the disabled machine.
I road in the machine being pulled by Sterling on the 450 ATV guiding it in neutral just 5 feet behind him. It was an interesting ride to say the least and at one point I didn't think we were going to make it up a muddy incline, but we did. It was actually a lot of fun.
This is one of my favorite tours of all our tours, falling just short of the Denali Ridge Line Adventure of which I trained on for the first time today and will write about in my next blog.
Miss everybody but loving my time in the great state of Alaska.
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