The Story Of A Cummins Suburban (Lots Of Pics)

[mosesburb]

So the next day our only other scheduled event on our trip is to occur. We are to meet someone in the middle of nowhere, at a given time, coming from vast distances in opposite directions, and even Verizon has no service for miles in any direction. Sure, why not?? Let's go!!

So we left the thriving metropolis of Tropic and headed east down Hwy 12. We took a side jaunt down to a scenic location:



I felt old when I had to explain what Kodachrome is, or was as the case may be. We took a side road through some camp areas and put to a massive monolith:



Remember the rain from yesterday?? We were on a dirt road going out to that point and I got out to lock the hubs as I had a sneaky suspicion that it was going to be needed. I was sneaky right on that one. The gravel surface we were on changed at a cattle guard to dirt. Clay dirt. The water had moistened the clay making mud, which was only an inch or two deep, but slicker than greased banana peels. It was a challenge keeping the truck on the road. I didn't want to spin the tires to clean them because it would tear up the trail and the tires would just pack up again. We made it out to the point and back. I stopped to take a picture on the way back. I climbed up on the roof rack and got what I think is a nice picture of the view:



Now an interesting thing happened right here. When I got back in the truck, my boy asked me where my phone was (I don't recall him ever asking that before). I said it is right here, pointing at the floor. But it wasn't there. I checked the dash, not there. I checked the end of the charging cable, not there. WTF happened to it?? I got out and looked around the truck, climbed up on the roof again, all for nothing. I was back in the truck wondering WTF I'm gonig to do now and for some reason I looked in the LH mirror and about 30 yards behind the truck, in the middle of the road, lays my phone. I jump out, run back and pick it up only to find that it is fine. No damage whatsoever. How the hell did it get back there?? Well, come to find out, that is where I locked the hubs going in and it must have dropped out of its latch and onto the ground. It just so happened I liked that spot and decided to stop and take some pictures, and my boy for whatever reason asked where my phone was at that point. Very strange sequence of events that all lined up to return my phone to me. Yay!!

There is some spectacular scenery in this place:



A natural monument to, uh, something....



Standing water and mud. Thought it looked cool:



More scenery:



I really liked this state park. It's a little off the beaten path, but worth the extra miles.

Scenic barn:



Escalante area:



Gratuitous truck pic:



Really cool view ahead:



More scenery (notice the wet pavement...)



We went over Boulder mountain in a torrential downpour. After turning east at Fruita, we came upon this:



More great scenery:



It is very difficult choosing which pics to post and which to pass...



More:



Ever changing compositions along this road:



More:



All of the rain has filled up normally dry stream beds. I told my boy that we are kind of lucky to see water flowing in this area.



Water flowing down the massive sandstone walls:



So that's about enough for today. Do we make our rendezvous?? Do both vehicles make the long distance journey and end up at this point in the middle of nowhere at the same time?? You will have to tune in for the next installment to find out exactly what happened.

[1985-GMC]

Originally Posted by mosesburb

So that's about enough for today. Do we make our rendezvous?? Do both vehicles make the long distance journey and end up at this point in the middle of nowhere at the same time?? You will have to tune in for the next installment to find out exactly what happened.

Hahaha that's hilarious! More great pictures making me want to take weekend adventures out there.

Just curious if you ever use any kind of GPS app or something that logs everywhere you drive in that thing? I think it'd be cool to see a map with all the squiggly lines showing everywhere the burb has driven over the years.

[MaxPF]

Originally Posted by mosesburb

So the next day our only other scheduled event on our trip is to occur. We are to meet someone in the middle of nowhere, at a given time, coming from vast distances in opposite directions, and even Verizon has no service for miles in any direction. Sure, why not?? Let's go!!

So we left the thriving metropolis of Tropic and headed east down Hwy 12. We took a side jaunt down to a scenic location:



I felt old when I had to explain what Kodachrome is, or was as the case may be.

Did you remember to tell him it was also a Paul Simon song, so he could say "Paul who?". Yup, we're getting old.

[mosesburb]

Originally Posted by 1985-GMC

Hahaha that's hilarious! More great pictures making me want to take weekend adventures out there.

[Mr Burns voice] Excellent....[/Mr Burns voice] This has been my evil plan the whole time. Use these truck to go places and see stuff.

Originally Posted by 1985-GMC

Just curious if you ever use any kind of GPS app or something that logs everywhere you drive in that thing? I think it'd be cool to see a map with all the squiggly lines showing everywhere the burb has driven over the years.

We do, well, sort of. We always run a SPOT satellite messenger with the optional tracking feature that drops a bread crumb every ten minutes. This makes a "line" of dots, but at high speeds the dots are far apart and at trail speeds the dots can stack up. The track remains on their site for a few days then it disappears. This is very helpful for those not traveling with us to know where we are at any given time (within ten minutes). So if my boy and I head out somewhere by ourselves, my wife can see that we are still moving and her boy is ok.

We also run a netbook with two nav programs running. A Delorme map program that is similar to portable GPS units. Distance from here to there. Directions to nearest hospital, gas station etc. This also drops a point every so often so a route can be retraced if desired.

In addition to that, we run Ozi Explorer which is a really neat program that can run any map that can have at least three geo-referenced points on it. We run USGS 7.5" Quadrangle maps on ours. These also plot your location on the old maps and the dots create a line--a fairly precise line at that. There is some navigation ability on this map program, but it is much more labor intensive, but when the road you're on doesn't show up on "normal" GPS devices/programs, you can't be too choosey.

So there is a bunch of background info to not really answer your question. If you add all of this stuff together for any given trip, we do have a line, but to add everything together for an "everywhere we've been" is not really possible and would really be a jumbled mess that is very difficult to interpret if we could. I should learn how to extract our track files per trip. Those would be kind of neat to look at. Hmm.

Originally Posted by MaxPF

Did you remember to tell him it was also a Paul Simon song, so he could say "Paul who?". Yup, we're getting old.

He knows Paul Simon as well as the song, but I'm not sure he actually knew what Kodachrome actually is/was. Ironically, my spell check doesn't know what Kodachrome is either lol.