Whew!  Glad we won't have to do that again!  (Ha Ha)  None of the shops in town handled motorcycles tires, but the owner of this shop was kind enough to let me use his machine so I could do the work myself.  Nothing wakes you up like a little grease in the morning!

Back on the Mackenzie River Ferry.  We hit the road about 5 hours later than we intended, but we were confident we made the right choice.  After all, we don't want to spend the entire rest of our ride dealing with flats, right?

This shot kind of gives you an idea of how slow mike is - I'm that speck waaaay off in the distance.  (OK, he's not usually quite THAT slow...) You if look closely, though, you can see the razor-sharp shale laughing at us from the roadway.

We made it almost to Eagle Lodge, the half-way point of the Dempster Highway, before Flatty reared it's ugly head once more.  All of our plug kits were useless, though, because these weren't punctures - these were big ol' slits.  We managed to cram enough sticky strips in there to hold a little air, and I made it to the lodge's tire repair shop just as it officially reached "Completely Flat".   Once again I had to do all the work, but no matter - we want it fixed right so we don't have to deal with any more flats.   Right?

Remember that fire I mentioned earlier?  Not only was it still going strong, it was now frighteningly close to Eagle Plains.  It was already 9pm so we really should have called it a night, but we were worried about where the fire would go.  We decided to push on for Engineer Creek about 100 miles to the south, and it turns out we made the right choice:  Just hours after we passed through, the fire overtook the road and it was closed off just south of Eagle Plains.

This is the scene from the road at about 10:30pm.  The fire makes it look like a sunset, which it rightfully should have been long before 10:30pm, but it wasn't because the sun doesn't set, but it kind of was because it was covered by smoke.  See?  Or maybe that's just the extreme exhaustion talking - We didn't reach the next campground until 1:30am.

Day Four was off to a great start.  We certainly weren't as apprehensive about the road as we had been on the way up, but we weren't nearly as excited, either, because we knew what we were in for.  We were up and ready for an early departure, and we walked outside to find that my rear tire had gone flat again.  Oh, goody.  Rather than chance a slow leak, we decided to track down a shop where we could repair the tire properly...