those of you who watch matt's offroad recovery on youtube have an idea where this is going, anyway we had been talking about doing the middle fork of the judith last weekend. had planned on camping saturday night and making it a leisure trip but as usual things change. I'm building a shed on the backside of the shop to relocate air compressors sand blasters etc to and we spent saturday framing it up along with moving gun safes etc. thinking we finished up around 9pm which felt like midnight so another trip was lost. after finding out the ultimate challenge was in montana and watching their videos finally crashed around 1am. took that long for the tylenol and ibbe's to work. I had told Darren about our plans earlier and he was interested in going so i told him i'd let him know. About 4:45 i get this call that went something like We're meeting at rocky mtn at 6am to do the judith, what else can you say but sure. Sam was home so we loaded the 40 and unhooked the trailer from it and took off to town. I remembered telling Darren i'd let him know so sent him a text sometime around 5, some are smarter than others and he must not have woke up. Got to eddies corner for fuel around 9 then found a friend camping at the trailhead around 10, last year we did the trail in october in a snow storm and this year we did it in the smoke! We had a great time, had a ford pu on 42's that got his education on trying to follow a 40, ford explorer on 37's i think, toyota 4runner on 35's and my 40. had a great time, water level is down as expected and scenery was great except for the smoke. pics are on my phone which i don't have at the moment, when we got off the trail around 4 we we're all pretty zombied from the day and night before so we decided to take the shortcut and head south , i'd been wanting to go on the etten(sp) ridge trail so we decided to take that. it might be shorter but definetley not quicker and at the overlooks all you could see was smoke. After wandering for a while in the dark we finally came out east of checkerboard. Stopped in white sulpher for gas and to air up then tried to decide what route to take home. The quickest is through townsend except for the road construction. I've been driving that and the amount of chloride used is bad and won't take the 40 on it. with the fire still burning decided to take flathead over maudlow, mistake! finally got home around 12:30
