My roomate and brother-in-law Tom awoke volently ill. Not a good sign for my riding later in the week :(

It had stopped snowing for a while, but we heard one of the highways out of town was closed. The day looked great.

We rode to a couple secret spots off the Two Top mountain trial. We tried to drop down a drainage toward Alice's Restaurant that we had done before.

While working our way down, we rounded a corner to find three moose in the only path we could use on a sidehill, about 30 ft in front of us. Scott was in front of me at this time. I had stopped on a flat and I was frantically digging for my camera to capture the mutual panic: Scott was committed to the hill and couldn't stop, but as he kept going he was sliding down the side hill right toward the three moose. The moose had panicked and were moving away as fast as moose can move in 5 feet of powder (slow!). Unfortunately, the Moose made the trees before I got my camera ready.

After getting part way down, we discovered there was too much snow to figure out where the correct route was. So we couldn't go down, and we weren't sure we could make it back up throught the tight trees we'd come down through. We decided to head back when darkness approached.

We thought we'd all made it back up through the trickiest section of climbing through some woods--except that Ken had had to back off the throttle trying to squeeze between two trees while climbing. We'd all missed lunch, it was about four o'clock and Ken was feeling wobbley and ill, so we fed him all of Steve's granola bars, dragged his sled out, and rode back to West, beat, as usual.

My RPM was still too low all day. Since I'd fought this clutching bug the last trip, I was beginning to get a bit frustrated. If I couldn't get my target RPM, I wouldn't get top performance and risked damaging the motor.

We fought with Scott's sled's starting problems all day and pronounced it dead at the end of the day when pulling the rope for 15 minutes couldn't get it going. This wasn't a big deal because we had brought an extra sled (99 Polaris XC500) belonging to Tom. So Scott actually got a sled upgrade by having his break down.

After a second day of unplanned acceleration when turning right, I removed the riser block from my handlebars. This cured the problem and I made a note to get a longer throtttle cable for next year.