Man In The Maze

by Rich Luhr, Editor of Airstream Life magazine

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Rain in the Canyonlands

Camping at the Canyonlands Squaw Flat campground has been idyllic.  The air smells of Juniper and desert sage, and from our shady site amongst the red sandstone formations I can see little lizards scuttling around each morning, hunting silently for tiny insects. The campground has been dead quiet, and the weather has been just about perfect.

The ranger we met at the visitor center said that later in the day there would be a chance of thunderstorms, possibly featuring hail, but as late as 11 a.m. there was hardly a cloud in the sky.  Still, we planned a light day of hiking the shortest trails in the park, so we could take it easy and get back to shelter if a storm popped up.

The women’s bathroom at the visitor center had a unique color chart on the wall, entitled “How dehydrated are you?”  Eleanor and Emma were a little mystified by it at first, since it only featured shades of yellow.  Then they got it.  The men’s room has no such chart.

These days Emma has finally graduated from a tattered purple backpack that suited her when she was five, to a adult-sized pack that has such niceties as a hip belt, lots of adjustment points, pockets, and a place for a water bladder.  Zoe the stuffed cat, however, still comes along on every hike with her head poking out of a zippered compartment.  We are happy to maintain that tradition for as long as Emma likes.

Like a lot of the big western parks, Canyonlands Needles district is mostly backcountry, but you needn’t go far to see lots of interesting things.  Just a short walk from the roadside are “Roadside Ruin” featuring a granary from about 1200 A.D., and Cave Spring, which features a century-old cowboy camp and ancient pictographs.

The fatigue I’ve felt recently was still with me as we did these simple hikes, and the heat approaching upper 90s didn’t help.  I finally gave in to the temptation that had been dogging me all week, and took a siesta after lunch, during the peak of the afternoon heat.  Then we attempted a longer hike, Slickrock Foot, which features four viewpoints along a 2.4 loop trail.  But as we began the hike a thunderstorm began to form to the southwest and menace us with flashes of lightning in the distance.  If it came our way, I didn’t relish the idea of being caught out on slickrock, entirely exposed and a mile or more from the car.  After going less than 1/4 mile, we decided to abandon this hike for another time.

That storm ultimately missed us, but it was a good idea to get back to the Airstream to secure the vent fans and awning in case another storm developed.  To stay close to home, we took the Squaw Flat hike that left right from the “B” side of the campground (about 500 feet from our campsite).

This hike crosses plenty of the famous Utah slickrock and also takes you through a variety of other terrain:  narrow crevices, under rock overhangs, through shallow washes lined with trees, and culminating with a steel rope handrail up a steep massif of red sandstone.  It packs a lot into a mere two miles.  I would have enjoyed it more if I didn’t have to keep an eye on the quickly-moving rainstorms that were passing by.

That evening during dinner one of the storms finally targeted us.  It was one of those moments when you are reminded of why you have an Airstream.  Our neighbors, nice folks with a couple of small boys, were forced to quickly clear their picnic table and huddle in their tent as the heaviest rain began.  We just kept on eating dinner, watching the tumultuous rain out the window and listening to the rolling thunder echo through the canyons.

As the rain cleared I could hear a newly-formed stream rushing by the back of our campsite.  A miniature flash flood had occurred in one of the little washes, and a couple of small waterfalls were pouring off the slickrock.  This brought out all the children, who reveled and splashed in the water for a few minutes until the waterfalls dwindled to drips and the stream reverted to a sandy wash.

In a place where only eight or nine inches of water fall annually, this little storm was a significant event. The soil was penetrated to only about 1/2” and the water vanished like a puff of smoke, but it was a life-giving event for every plant and animal in the area.  For us larger mammals, it brought lovely cool evening temperatures for our last night in Canyonlands.

No reservations

As I mentioned in the previous blog, we left Dinosaur CO with no firm plan of where we were going to spend the next night.  This is not unusual for us, as we tend not to make reservations as we travel.  In this part of the country there are lots of boondocky BLM campgrounds that will serve for a night’s stay without much fear of the campgrounds filling up.

That is, under normal circumstances.  Unfortunately this is Labor Day weekend, a fact that I had overlooked when initially sketching out our rough travel plan a few weeks ago.  Labor Day, like Memorial Day, is one of the weekends of the year that always causes us problems, because everyone who owns an RV comes out and fills every national, state, county, and BLM campground for three days.

Added to that was the factor of climate.  We are usually heading back from New England around this time of year, and so air conditioning is less of a requirement than it is in the desert southwest.  At Dinosaur we were encountering temperatures in the mid-90s by day, with lots of sun, and as we worked our way down the border of Utah and Colorado it wasn’t going to get any cooler.  In this part of the country, altitude means a lot more than latitude, and we were definitely going down by both measures, so the primitive BLM sites would mean a warm evening.

Our drive down through western Colorado was filled with bucolic rolling scenery.  I had put all faith in Garminita, which is always a bad idea.  She chosen Rt 139 in Colorado, using her usual doctrine of “quickest” possible route, which in this case took us over an unsigned pass called Douglas.  Scenic and direct, yes.  My only tip that things were about to get interesting was a gate at the beginning of the climb, which the road crews use to close the road in winter, and a drop in speed limit from 45 to 25.  There were no signs indicating that a steep grade was ahead.

Well, the Mercedes has not yet met the grade it can’t climb with 7,500 pounds of Airstream attached.  It doesn’t climb quickly, but it always gets there.  In this case, we estimated Douglas to be about a 10% grade on the way up (heading south) and a 10-12% grade going down, with a peak elevation of 8,200 feet.  It easily was the steepest road we’ve ever descended, and equal to the dreaded Teton Pass (10%) between Jackson Hole WY and Idaho.  The only steeper one I’ve seen is the road into Tonto Natural Bridge State Park (AZ) at 14% and we didn’t take the Airstream down that.

We climbed and descended successfully, using second gear much of the time for engine braking on the way down, and managed to complete Douglas Pass without overheating, needing to turn off the air conditioner, or smoking the brakes.  Still, it would have been nice to have had a sign beforehand warning of the steep grade.

After this, while on Interstate 70 from Colorado to Utah, we began discussing our options for an overnight stop.  From a distance perspective, our ideal stop would be somewhere south of Moab.  That would allow us to pull in around 6 p.m.

We had our eyes on Canyonlands National Park’s “Needles District,” which we’ve never visited before.  But being the holiday weekend, it was iffy whether we’d get in there.  The National Park campground, Squaw Flat, is not very large and is entirely first-come, first-camped.  Worse, the entry road from Rt 191, which is the main highway heading south from Moab, is 34 miles long, so just taking a peek to see if spaces were available would take nearly an hour.

My second choice was Navajo National Monument in Arizona, but that would require us to drive over 300 miles and arrive around 8 p.m.  Hovenweep National Monument would be a slight detour from our route (about 20 miles) but like Navajo, the campground rarely fills because of its remote location, so we weren’t in danger of a shut-out.

We shelved the decision for a while and opted to take a scenic route from I-70 in Utah down to Moab, namely Rt 128.  We had no idea what a great decision this was until we got about 15 miles into it.  At that point, the road begins to follow the Green River through astonishing red sandstone canyons.  It is—and I say this as a guy who has driven a lot of scenic roads in the past few years—among the top ten most scenic drives we’ve ever done.  Absolutely spectacular.

Somewhere in this drive we stopped by the river to take a break.  I was opening the screen door to step out of the Airstream when a gust of wind caught the unlatched main door and slammed it against three of my fingers.  Ouch.  After icing the fingers for a few minutes I resolved to ensure that the door is always latched when open.  The throbbing fingers at least had the effect of keeping me wide awake for the rest of the drive.

Along this road are numerous BLM campgrounds, all of which seemed about 3/4 full but I wasn’t ready to stop driving quite yet and the outside temperature was hovering in the low 90s.  We pressed on through Moab (setting a new record for highest fuel price paid in our travels: $4.29 per gallon for diesel), down past a half dozen commercial campgrounds, Wilson Arch and the famous Hole In The Wall tourist trap, and then we faced the decision point, where Rt 211 heads west toward the Needles District of Canyonlands.

What to do?  If we took the turn we’d be facing a one way trip of 34 miles and no guarantee of a campsite.  From prior research we knew that there were three campgrounds down the road:  Squaw Flat (no hookups but the most appealing site to us for its in-park location), a commercial operation just outside the park entrance (unappealing sites but at least some hookups), and a BLM site called Hamburger Rock about five miles from the park entrance (no hookups).

A park ranger was sitting in his truck at the turnoff to Rt 211, so Eleanor checked with him and he said there were “probably” two open sites at Squaw Flat.  Good enough for us.  Nearly an hour later, we arrived at the entrance to Canyonlands and found a few empty sites and a handful of white-box Class C rentals being driven by Europeans on vacation. They were looping around the campground like it was a game of musical chairs, trying to choose a campsite.

Being fussy about which campsite you get is not a good idea when there are four campers looking at three campsites on the Friday of Labor Day weekend.  You don’t hesitate in a moment like this.  Amazingly, our luck held.  We snagged a really fantastic site before the musical chairs game ended, and a few minutes after that the campground was full.

This is a beautiful spot.  $15 per night, no water, no electric, no dump station, but it’s the scenery, not the services, that you’re paying for. Imagine a place right out of a Wiley Coyote/Roadrunner cartoon, with unlikely red sandstone formations, vibrant blue skies, twisted trees, and deep canyons.  The ranger talk we attended last night was held beneath a natural rock overhang.  Our campsite is bordered by trees and great boulders that Emma can climb.

We’re reasonably sheltered from both morning and evening light, so hopefully it won’t get terribly hot in the Airstream but we’ll still get midday light for the solar panels.  Not that we’ll be using a lot of power.  There is no usable cell signal out here, and no wifi at the visitor center.  No need to charge the laptops, phones, or iPad.  We are in a very remote and quiet place, perfect for Labor Day weekend in my opinion.

Dinosaur National Monument

After our long drive across Colorado it was nice to discover the peaceful setting of Dinosaur National Monument’s Green River campground.  I could have spent the day just hanging out there in the Airstream, despite the heat, but we had come to Dinosaur to explore and had budgeted only a couple of days to do it.  So we piled into the car in the morning with all our gear for hikes and photography and started our day at the new visitor center.

We had first planned to visit Dinosaur when we were full-timing back in 2006.  Coincidentally, that was the year the visitor center began to approach total collapse, and the park service closed it.  (The previous visitor center was built by the famous Fossil Quarry, and unfortunately began to disintegrate due to unsuitable soils beneath.)  For this reason we shelved Dinosaur for years, waiting for the new visitor center to be built, and finally last October it was opened.  So this visit has been a long time coming.

After all these I wasn’t disappointed.  Every point of this enormous park is beautiful, and the Fossil Quarry is fantastic to see. It’s hard to believe that all those amazing fossils concentrated into one small area, are real.  We chose to take the ranger-led hike along the nearby trails, which was also well worth the 90 minutes spent hiking in the heat.  Weather forecasts we had checked before coming were misleading; temps have been in the low 90s and so the only other people on the ranger-led hike were from Phoenix.

Even for us, the heat was enervating.  I couldn’t put my finger on why, but after just two miles of walking Eleanor and I had no interest in hiking any more.  That’s odd, for us, but we just decided to go with it and spend the rest of the afternoon auto-touring.  First Emma got her Junior Ranger badge at the visitor center (note the sweat marks on her shirt from her backpack), and then we drove out to Split Mountain where the rafting trips down the Green River terminate, and the Jessie Morris cabin, and found some petroglyphs here and there.

By late afternoon we were fading fast.  Back at the campground I toyed with the idea of jumping into the Green River to cool off, but it was so silty I’d have to shower afterward.  So we spent the rest of the afternoon in the Airstream with all of the fans running, taking cool showers and planning our next moves.

The fatigue never really let up.  I think it’s a form of post-traumatic reaction.  The next day we had a slow start, and after relocating the Airstream to the town of Dinosaur (about 25 miles east, much closer to the Canyon entrance to the park), none of us were in a hurry to go exploring.  We took a drive up the Harpers Corner Road, stopped for photos and dramatic vistas at a few points, but as the day wore on I just got less interested in exploring and thinking wistfully of laying in the Airstream for a nap.  I started to worry about having caught a virus, but nothing came of it.  In retrospect, we probably should have spent one of our vacation days doing nothing but reading books and napping.  The Airstream is a good place for that.

We have spent a lot of time over the past few years in remote western national parks, and nearly all of that time has been enjoyable.  One challenge we perennially face is food.  Eleanor always packs the Airstream with massive quantities of ingredients, but she’s not big on “convenience” foods if she thinks they aren’t healthy, and most of her ingredients require fresh produce and other perishable items in order to be prepared.  Knowing that we are going to be remote locations she pre-cooks and freezes some meals, but the freezer space is very limited in the Airstream and of course I always need a half-gallon of ice cream in there.  So we are usually looking for a decent grocery store or farmer’s market every three or four days.  That’s a challenge in a place like this.

Of course, if you can’t find a grocery store with fresh produce, you probably also don’t have a lot of good restaurant options.  That’s the position we found ourselves in the last two nights, plus we were tired.  The first night Eleanor managed to put together a smorgasbord, and the second night we drove 20 miles down to the oil field town of Rangeley to find an Italian restaurant.  We were lucky it was only 20 miles.  In other parks like Big Bend, Yellowstone, Great Basin, Navajo, Hovenweep, etc., the drive could easily be 50 miles or more.

Today’s plan is to head toward home base, traveling down the Utah/Colorado border toward the Four Corners region.  Today I awoke feeling fairly well rested so a long tow will be easy to do.  Of course, Labor Day weekend is upon us, so we’ll have to pick our stops carefully.  We have a few ideas for tonight’s stop but ultimately it will come down to happenstance.  It should be an interesting day.

Joe Skeen BLM campground, El Malpais

You’d think that after weeks of delays we would be ready to go, but it’s never easy.  Eleanor had too many things on her “to do” list the past few days (including finishing the curtains) and despite heroic efforts we ended up with a late start of 11:30 a.m.  This was a big problem because I had planned a 380 mile drive and now we’d be arriving at night, which is never ideal.

I considered going an alternate route (the Interstate), but that would have completely trashed our planned scenic drive and the choice of campsites along the mid-New Mexico section of I-25 is pretty poor.  So we got in the car and headed toward I-10 (the mandatory part of any eastbound trip from Tucson) and I figured I’d think about it for a while.

Except that we started having other problems right away, which were distracting.  First I got a warning from the car: “TRAILER TAIL LIGHTS OUT”.  I’ve seen that one before, and it has never been a tail light outage. It’s always the result of corrosion on the 7-way trailer plug.  After sitting in Vermont in the high humidity, the copper connectors get very tarnished.  We’ve had quite a few good thunderstorms this summer in Tucson too, which haven’t helped.  I unplugged the connection, gave it a perfunctory cleaning, and plugged it back in.  Problem solved.

But it wasn’t.  The Prodigy brake controller began acting funky.  It is very sensitive to mis-wiring or poor connections, usually flashing “n.c.” when the connection is loose.  This time it reported “c.” which means “Connected—all is well” but when I pressed the brake pedal it refused to activate the trailer brakes.  Nothing happened.  Normally it would report the number of volts being sent to the brake, but the thing just kept saying “c.” at me like it as being willfully stubborn about not wanting to work.  Then it would flash a brief moment of voltage, and go back to doing nothing.

It also began reporting that it was off-kilter intermittently (which shows up in the display as “–“).  The accelerometers in the Prodigy require that it be mounted within a certain range of angles.  It has been mounted in the same position for three years, so I knew it was correct, but today it decided that maybe it wasn’t.  All of these odd behaviors baffled me, and I began to think that our trip was going to be delayed while we went 20 miles out of our way to go buy a new Prodigy.

Then the car reported “LEFT TRAILER TURN SIGNAL OUT,” and I decided the whole thing was the result of crappy corroded connections.  So we stopped and I broke out some emery cloth and very meticulously scraped all the connectors on the 7-way plug until they were at least a little shiny.  Ten minutes later, we were on the road and all the weird symptoms stopped.  I need to do a more thorough job later with something better than emery cloth, and perhaps a little liquid electrical contact cleaner.  Otherwise I’m sure the problem will re-occur after another few rains.

With all going well at last, I decided to stick with the scenic route plan.  The real trick with scenic routes is to remember to fill up the tank before you get into the remote country.  We made a stop in Safford AZ (about 170 miles into our drive) to get 14 gallons of diesel and a few hours later in the boondocks of New Mexico I was very glad I did.

One highlight of the trip was Mule Creek a.k.a AZ-NM Rt 78.  The road winds a bit and there is a 40-foot restriction on trucks and the speed limit drops to 30 for much of it, but it was beautiful and worthwhile.  Then we picked up Rt 180 northward (a little bumpy and uneven in spots but generally OK), and then Rt 12 to Rt 32 to Rt 36, which are good roads.  All the while we were climbing, eventually peaking out at 8,200 feet, and as the sun dipped lower and summer thunderstorms drifted along the horizon we enjoyed fantastic skies and rainbows all the way.

I was racing against time but you can’t really go terribly fast along this route.  60 MPH was about the max, and most of the time it was 50 or 55.   When we got to our final leg on Rt 117, the sunset was upon us and the light began to get dim.  Still, we were treated to some really great scenery along the edge of El Malpais National Monument and the Acoma Reservation.  Rt 117 demarcates the border between these two properties. Along the southeast are impressive bluffs of sandstone, and to the northwest are plains studded by volcanic mountains.

Our stop for the night is a little BLM campground along Rt 117, called Joe Skeen.  It is free and provides no services at all except for pit toilets.  It’s barely marked at the roadside, and the entry road is rough.  I figured that being mid week it would be empty, but we were surprised to find most of the spots taken by tent campers.  Only two sites were left, both of which were drastically unlevel.  It was almost completely dark at this point, and I couldn’t see Eleanor at all when she tried to help me back up, so we finally left the Airstream cocked in a campsite with all of our leveling blocks under the curbside wheels, and called it “good enough”.  It was a messy parking job but there seemed to be no other place we could go in the campground that would be any better.  Even with a small mountain of leveling blocks under the wheels, inside the trailer we still had a little curbside tilt.

Eleanor’s pre-cooked meals are already coming in handy.  She brought out a smorgasbord of leftovers and new goodies (cold chicken, Indian rice, grilled zucchini & mushrooms, etc.) so we were able to eat quickly and keep the dishes to a minimum.   Good thing, since with the time zone change it was now nearly 9 p.m.   I went to bed early, with confidence that we would have a very quiet night in this remote and rustic campground.  The long day of towing for this trip is over, and from here on in our travel should be much more relaxed.

Birds, bats, bugs, bulbs

Waking up each day with the birds chirping and the cool morning air streaming in the windows has been a great part of the Guadalupe Mountains experience, for me.  It has been such an antidote to the heat that we’ve found everywhere else.  I had been pining for a tenting trip up our local mountains in Arizona just so I could sleep in the fresh forest air without an air conditioner running, and had even pitched the idea to Eleanor.  After four days in Guadalupe, the need has mostly faded.  Being here has been terrific.

Our Sunday plan was really more of a wind-down.  Our ambitions have weakened each day as we’ve settled into an increasingly lazy pattern.  After puttering around in the morning we headed over to the Visitor Center so Emma could complete her research to achieve both Junior and Senior Ranger patches, plus a Guadalupe Mountains National Park badge to add to her collection.  Eleanor says this is #65.

We also walked the Pinery Trail, but it was just a 1/3 mile nature trail which ended at the ruins of a Butterfield Stage stop.  This is what I meant by not much ambition.  We really should have gotten an earlier start and hiked McKittrick Canyon, which is about eight miles east of the campground.  Although it runs about four or five miles, it’s not a terribly hard hike since it follows a stream through a canyon (thus not much elevation gain).  It has a good reputation for scenic beauty.  We’ve left it for a future visit.

Back at the campground we did finally meet up with the other Airstreamers who parked right next to us despite the largely empty RV parking area.  At first I thought it was because birds of a feather flock together, but I think now that it was really just so that they’d be in the shade.  The trailer turned out to be a 1974 Trade Wind.

We spent the afternoon in the Airstream, me reading,  Eleanor making a big lunch and mixing up cold soft drinks, and Emma doing various kid-like things such as hunting interesting insects.  I took a few shots of the more curious or colorful bugs and butterflies she found.  It was rather warm in the afternoon but not intolerable even without air conditioning.

By 5:30 we had accomplished our primary goal of not doing much and took the car north to Carlsbad Caverns National Park.  We had always wanted to do the  9.5-mile scenic loop drive (a rough gravel road) but never had because on all of our prior visits we’ve had the Airstream in tow.  This was our chance, and it fit right into our program as a low-stress “activity” that required us only to look out the window.  Of course, we did step out of the car long enough to check the Rattlesnake Trail from an overlook and ponder whether we’d want to hike that one on our next visit too.  It looks interesting.

The real point of driving 45 miles up to Carlsbad was to see the evening bat flight.  This is another thing we’d missed on our prior visits.  If you’re interested in bats, it’s well worth the time, as a park ranger spends about 30 minutes answering questions and then everyone goes quiet as thousands of bats begin to stream out of the cavern.  It takes two hours for all the bats to leave, but after about 30 minutes it’s too dark to see them anymore.  No photos or even cell phones are allowed, as they disturb the bats, so if you want to see this you need to show up in person.

It was the right call to stay boondocking in Guadalupe and dismiss the Siren’s song of full hookups at White’s City (nearer Carlsbad).  Our elevation was the key to comfort; at White’s City it was running 10 degrees warmer.  And when we got back at night, the stars were absolutely amazing.  I can’t recall such a vivid view of the Milky Way galaxy in years, even in other famous “dark sky” parks.  Speaking of which, Bert Gildart has written and photographed a great article about Dark Sky Parks which will appear in the Fall 2012 issue of Airstream Life.

I’m really happy with the LED lights we recently installed.  They’re working perfectly, and so efficiently that lights are no longer a factor in our power budget.  We can leave as many of them on as we need, and it’s rare that they even consume a single amp.  Since we’ve also put in an alternative to the power-hungry furnace (a catalytic heater), this leaves only the laptops, vent fans and water pump as major power consumers.  There’s not much we can do about those items, and they don’t really matter much when the sun is shining.  After four nights of boondocking, we are leaving with 79% of our battery charge still available, and in a few hours it will be back up above 90%.  Based on this success I’m planning to order more LEDs to outfit the rest of this trailer and the 1968 Caravel, when we get home, which will be Tuesday.