place, we wondered what to do next. Another rider came by. He offered to go
to town and find a fuel pump for us. And so Sam and I found ourselves sitting there, staring at our bikes, expecting every engine we heard coming up the hill to be Saint Nick with our new fuel pump. Around noon we began to consider that perhaps Saint Nick wasn’t coming. If he had ridden down to cell service and called around and found us a pump in Montrose, he should’ve been back by now. We decided to give him another hour before we’d come up with a plan B. The hour passed slowly, our hopes rising and falling as each engine came up the hill revealing something other than our rescuer. New plan: I’d ride down the hill to the
highway and get cell signal and try to figure out what had happened to Saint Nick. Sam would wait an hour and a half, and if I hadn’t returned, he’d catch a ride down the hill to the trailhead in one of the many Jeeps that had started going by in the downhill direction. We didn’t like the idea of splitting up, but it seemed to be the only plan that made sense. We didn’t want to sit there waiting for a new fuel pump that wasn’t coming. We said a quick prayer, and I headed off. I was tense. The downhill trail was very
technical with lots of exposure, and it was easy to imagine slipping off the side of the road and falling hundreds of feet to the bot- tom of a hidden gully. If that happened somewhere in the five miles back to the road, it could be days before anyone found my battered body. I knew I needed to relax, but my imagination was running wild with worst-case scenarios. I didn’t enjoy the ride down at all, but thankfully I made it to the bottom without incident. Sure enough, I had a message from Nick,
left at 9:30 that morning. Nick’s message explained that he’d called a few shops and hadn’t been able to find the part anywhere. Turns out we’d spent five hours waiting for nothing. Houston, we still have the same problem. I reached out to some buddies. We tried
finding the pump in several states with no luck. Justin then texted me to say he’d found the pump on Amazon, and 15 minutes later we’d ordered one with overnight delivery for $54 and had it shipped to a shop 20 miles
south in Silverton. Now we just needed to get a 500-pound, non-running 62 BMW OWNERS NEWS April 2016
Sam enjoys a stogie while we wait for the FedEx truck to arrive with our part.
bike off the side of a mountain and 20 miles down the highway, preferably before dark. Sam was eager to try coasting his dead
bike down the mountain road. But then there was the water crossing to contend with, all without an engine. Having ridden it white-knuckled a few hours earlier, I was skeptical and a bit afraid for him. But I didn’t want to say anything to make him worry, so I halfheartedly agreed to help him push it up the hill in front of us to get him going. Sam rocked it! He rode the bike the
whole way down on sheer momentum, including through the long water crossing. With no engine running, he went faster than I did and I had to race to keep up. After bagging the last hotel room in
town, we rode my bike over the following morning to the auto repair shop that had been our delivery address for the part. Sure enough, they had it waiting for us at the counter. We installed the new pump, turned the key and hit the ignition. After a moment's hesitation the bike fired up and started purring. We were right—it had been the fuel pump, and our trip could finally continue. We grabbed some fuel and headed for Engineer Pass. As Sam filled up, gasoline started pour-
ing out from under the seat and I immedi- ately knew what was wrong. As we’d reinstalled the new fuel pump, we had mis-
aligned the tank seal on the access port. “Not a big deal. This is an easy fix,” I told
Sam. Oh, such idle words. In our rush to get the fuel line removed,
we snapped off the feed pipe—a vital part of the fuel system. Without it there’s no way to get fuel from the tank to the engine. This was a serious problem. It felt like a punch in the gut after the jubilation a few minutes earlier when the bike started. The next day was the Fourth of July; if we couldn’t find this part in the next couple of hours, we were stuck here at least until Monday. We pushed the bike around the corner to the side of the repair shop so we could get some space, think and assess the situation. At that moment Geordy, the owner of the
shop, came around the corner. “Bike trou- ble?” he asked nonchalantly. We explained the situation to him. “Can I see the broken part?” Sam handed it to him. “Hmmm. Never seen one like this before. You know what I’d try to do? Take a piece of a ball- point pen and join these two parts together.” He was like a real-life MacGyver. “Give
me a minute,” Geordy said and disappeared into his shop. He came back with a one- inch piece of tubing. “I think this might work,” he said. Then Geordy connected the two broken pieces with the small piece of tubing. “Should we glue it or something?” I
asked.
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