Today was another day of great weather, despite the predictions.  I made a number of trips back and forth across the Dragon. There was very little traffic – most of the time it seemed that I had the road to myself.

I stopped at the Overlook and chatted with a bunch of folks about the Atom. Here’s a picture from there:

That’s not a UFO in the picture – it is one of the basketball-sized orange things they put on power lines so helicopters can see the power lines and avoid them. There’s a lot of power lines here because most of the dams generate hydroelectric power – Alcoa built them in the first half of the 20th century to generate the massive amounts of electricity needed to process aluminum ore.

I had stopped at the Deals Gap Motorcycle Resort to gas up the Atom and grab a soda, when I heard a siren in the distance. An ambulance came tearing up the hill and made the turn onto 28 on two wheels. Some of the folks at the Resort commented that they wouldn’t even take the turn that fast on a bike.

As I went down the hill, there must have been a dozen emergency vehicles of all types heading up the hill to 28. There hasn’t been any verifiable news about what happened, though I’ve heard various rumors. I’ll just say that I hope everybody is Ok. It’s a sobering thought that this may have happened to someone I was just talking to less than an hour before.

With all the hooplah about the police presence on the Dragon, it’s easy to overlook the hard work put in by all of the emergency services people – getting to a spot that’s pretty remote and risking their own safety to get to someone who needs assistance in as fast a time as possible.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009 at 9:28 pm and is filed under The Trip. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.