Pre-Trip #5 Minnesota – Part 2

We experienced a lot of water crossings on the trails which were flooded by multiple days of rain.

Most of the water was covering solid trail bed, however, there were some places where the water was covering heavy mud or clay which was torn up by other vehicles. This gave us the opportunity to have extra fun with the water crossings as you will see in this video. Scott got a foot pinned under the bike which held him in the water for a while – just long enough to cool off a bit.

Fortunately our water adventures did not result in us getting water into the engine so we did not experience dewatering an engine.

It did take a couple days to dry out the boots. We used boot driers which was a bit of cheat since we will not be able to do that on the trail. The trail plan is to use multiple applications of crumpled newspaper packed into the boots to absorb moisture. Another change we will make is to keep our feet on the foot pegs instead of raising them out of the water because that will increase our control while encountering unseen obstacles or ruts under the water. We have waterproof socks which we will use to keep our feet dry when the boots get exposed to water. We did not use them on this trip although we did have them with us.

Scott learned his rain paints were a bit too snug around the boots because the boot opening on the motocross boots is fairly large. Larger pants were then purchased for the trip.

By the end of the day we were much less apprehensive about crossing water. We came to believe that following the wheel tracks used by four wheeled vehicles is not a good idea for sandy and muddy trails as we would likely encounter holes/ruts which are dug out by the vehicles passing through. However, theory does not always hold up in practice. We look forward to what the TAT may offer us.