Luckily there was this picnic shelter with a potbellied stove, tables, and fully screened to keep the bugs out.  This is actually pretty luxurious - why hadn't we thought of this before?  Probably because the rangers are likely to wake you up and make you move out in the middle of the night, but hey - desperate times call for desperate measures.

And what's this?  We woke up to find yet another flat tire!  By my count, this makes four flats so far.   Are we done yet?  Haven't we paid our dues?  To make matters worse, we had used up all our CO2 cartridges on the last flat.   We had a backup plan - a hose that screws in to your spark plug hole so your engine acts as a air compressor.  It does the job, but it takes a LOT of work to get at our spark plugs.   Well, better get started.

...And just look how excited Mike is about it!  Boy, by that long face, you'd think HE was the one doing all the work!   More than the work, the dirt road was very draining and we were ready to be back on the pavement.  (Or, as I was singing, "On A Road Again")   We were about half way to our spark plugs when, from across the camp, we heard the tell-tale droning of an air compressor.   We're saved!  They let us borrow it, and it cut our labor in half.   That cigarette lighter charger we installed in Mike's bike really came in handy today!! A few more sticky strips and a quick fill, and we were heading for the highway.

Alas, the excitement did not last.  We were less than a third of the way to pavement when Mike caught up and asked how his rear looked.  I said "Flat".  He clarified that he meant his rear tire, but unfortunately the answer was still "flat."  Upon inspection we found that my rear tire had also gone flat again, bringing us to a total of six flats.

We started work to remove the spark plugs, and we found that we didn't have all the tools we needed to get at them.  (Now before you give me a hard time, we had the right SIZE tools, but the bolts were too tight for the tools we had to loosen them.)  A few people stopped to help and a tour bus gave us some extra box lunches they had, but no one had the tools we needed.  It took quite a while before someone stopped by that had a compressor.  Now it was a race against the clock to reach pavement before we were stranded for the night.  Where we averaged 25mph on the way up, we averaged over 50mph on the way out.  It was do or die time, and we had run out of options.  We were flatter than flat and running on the rims by the time we eventually reached the Klondike Lodge, but our day's adventures were only beginning...

Good News!  When we reached the campground, it was completely full.  On a Tuesday.  At 1:30am.  The same campground that was completely empty the previous Friday.  The next campground is 80 miles south, so that's not an option.  Now Day Five of the Dempster was off to a bad start, that much was true, but if you had told me that my day would end sleeping in the trunk of a car in Fairbanks, Alaska, I still would have called you nuts.   Boy, would I have been eating my words...