The Wild Bunch and Friends take on Black Bear, photos by Terry and Lynn Hubbard

September 7, 2008

As planned at the club meeting, a few of us decided to take on Black Bear. We planned to meet up at City Market and take off for Ouray at 8:00 a.m., Terry and I were going to just blaze up to Ouray, and thought we would let whoever was going know.....we met up with 4 people from The Mountaineers of Fort Collins, Darwin and Colleen Stengaard, Roger Stengaard, and Darren Finger, since it was so close to time to head out, we made a call to Perry, who let us know he didn't think anyone else was coming, so off we went. We got to the Overlook outside of Ouray right at 9:00 a.m. as planned, to meet up with Bob and Braidy Kirkman and Mike Sola, a friend of theirs. We then headed for the trailhead, where some friends of ours from Texas were meeting us, Kurt and Sharee Joplin, and Dale Womack and his girlfriend Cheryl, I do apologize to the people with Bob and Braidy and Mike, as I did not get their names. We picked up another vehicle, driven by Randy Holdren from New Mexico, he was in a full size '72 Chevy pick up and had never gone over Black Bear, Roger and Darren were also in bigger vehicles and it was Darren's third time over so they very graciously offered to make sure Randy got over the pass, kudos to them, and the more the merrier! We ended up with 10 vehicles!

The weather was perfect and a blue sky, with hardly a cloud in it made for a beautiful day.

We traversed over to the summit, where Braidy had a blown fuse for his electric fuel pump (I was reminded that it was really the first time the CJ had been on the road in 10 years)  and after figuring that out they came on down to meet up with the rest of us, which really didn't take long. About the time they were catching up with us, at the "point of no return" Darren was having trouble with his power steering, so they were working on that, and since all was under control they said they would meet us at the bottom of the trail....so off we went again, at the bottom, where the waterfall is, we stopped for some lunch, and Bob, Braidy and Mike went on into Telluride to grab a bite. While waiting around and worrying about Darren, Roger, Darwin, Colleen and Randy, we heard them talking over the radio about getting a new power steering pump so we knew they were on the way down. Just a few minutes later they were in sight. From there we all basically split up to go our separate ways. I really enjoyed the outing, and even though we had some issues, I am pretty sure everyone had a good time.

Lynn Hubbard