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Midwinter trip
WilliamA
Member Posts: 1,311
I'm in the middle of my midwinter trip. I brought my brother along this time. We've been at Usery Mountain State Park for 2 days and will be here until Sunday, then on to Ca and the Salton sea. Hoping to get into JTNP for a day or 2. Lots of photos later.
WilliamA
"When I am in charge, Starburst brand fruit chews will get their own food group....and where are all the freakin laser beams? There should be more laser beams..."
2021 Jeep Cherokee Trailhawk
2017 T@G XL
Boyceville, Wi.
Comments
check out Box Canyon and Anza Borrego/ Culp campground, both very near Salton Sea. Best Salton campgrounds are Mecca Beach and Covina. J Tree is reserve only
Sounds like a blast!
Sounds like fun! I'm sure the pics will be great. Enjoy!
Have fun @WilliamA perhaps next year for Tabazona.
All the calculations show it can’t work. There’s only one thing to do: make it work.
Have a nice trip, and yep, will be waiting for the pics as well!
William -- I enjoyed meeting you and Joe on Saturday at Usery. Have a safe trip!
2019 5' wide Boondock Edge w/ factory solar
Sunrise on the Salton Sea.
WilliamA
"When I am in charge, Starburst brand fruit chews will get their own food group....and where are all the freakin laser beams? There should be more laser beams..."
2021 Jeep Cherokee Trailhawk
2017 T@G XL
Boyceville, Wi.
There is something about mid-winter trips that goes beyond the average camping experience and gets into the realm of dreamstuff. This trip was more of that than even the average. I had invited my brother Joe to tag along with me and we made quite a time of it.
Note to self: LED headlights don't stay warm enough to melt ice off.
Anyone who has beat to windward out of the midwest in winter knows what "running the slot" means. We took off at 5:00 a.m. on Tuesday from my brother's house and headed to Minneapolis, Mn for the run south. We were trying to squeeze south between two weather fronts. We didn't quite make it. We ran through freezing rain (at 15 degrees) from Minneapolis to Des Moines, Iowa, then rain until we hit Emporia Ks. It turned to ice, then snow, then blizzard conditions from there to just north of Oklahoma City. We pulled into a truck stop in OK City to sleep for a couple of hours and then headed west on I-40. Just into New Mexico, we ran into hurricane headwinds and slogged along in 3rd or 4th gear until we hit Albuquerque NM. Rather than run the I-17 corridor from Flagstaff to Phoenix, we turned south in AZ and ran down the Mogollon Rim through Payson, AZ where I saw my first ever elk in the wild. Standing in the road, of course. It was a beautiful trip down the rim and one not to be missed. I'd run it before in the other direction but didn't know what it was. My brother, the Louis L'amour fan, told me about the history of the region as we drove. We got into Usery Park about 8 p.m. on Wednesday evening and went to sleep.
He had never been to the desert southwest so it was something different for him. We sort of retraced my steps of last winter in that we did: Usery Regional Park in Mesa, Az, then went on to Glamis, Salton Sea, Anza Borrego, Joshua Tree National Park, Petrified Forest NP, Painted Desert NP and then back. At the time we left, the government was still closed. I had hoped that we'd be able to get into a few of the national parks but didn't hold out much chance of it. While we were at Usery Park in Mesa, I read that the government had decided to go back to work for a few weeks so we cut a quick swath to the parks before they shut their doors again.
At Usery, we met Tonopah and had a great chat. He brought some photos of his new heater installation but we mostly just chewed on the fat for a bit. I thank him greatly for coming a long way to do that. It was one of the many high points for me.
The T@B (T@BAZONA19) rally was fun as I've grown accustomed to. The folks there put on a fantastic event and I highly recommend it for anyone looking to get out of the snow for a bit. You can get hold of them on the T@B forum or on facebook. Just do a search for "Tabazona". It'll come up.
Usery Mountain Regional Park Mesa, AZ
Parked the trailer/slept/got up/groceries/wash Jeep/relax....
Onto the Imperial Valley and Glamis. If you miss the dunes at Glamis, well....it's something to see. Stopped for photos, T-shirt, bumper stickers and bling....
Miles of offroad work and washboards...More on the washboards later....
On to the Salton Sea. I shamelessly admit to having a great love for the place, though I can't figure out why. All of the otherworldlyness, zany people, atypical landscape (Apocalypse! Mad Max! Zombies! Movie sets!) make me comfortable in some awkward way that I just can't put my finger on. I gave up trying to work it out and now just absorb the beauty, cool, weird folks and zen. Just think: Pink Floyd. You'll get the idea. I love it there.
Bombay Beach and a bunch of kids having a ball with CosPlay. They were doing a photo shoot...
Impromptu beach art. Ya gotta love a free-form Tesseract. Carl Sagan would have loved to have seen this. I think it would have made him smile, as it did me.
I also really enjoyed this junk-art Black Pearl. Wonderful!
On a more disquieting note, the south side of the Salton Sea harbors more than one ghost town where the ghost town preceded the ghosts. The town was laid out, sewer and water run, street signs put up, channels dug for lagoons and quays, then the town did not come. It's a deserted landscape with manhole covers and roadsigns in the middle of a land where nothing was ever built. It is.....Unsettling....to me anyway.
A huge harbor complex put in that never saw a boat. A few houses, but mostly just ghosts and decay....
On a more upbeat note and back from the fringe, I delighted in the fact that both Anza Borrego and Joshua Tree deserts were in bloom! My bro talked to a ranger who worked at Joshua Tree. He said he'd worked there for 40 years and had never seen it before. Didn't see that one coming.....I've heard of the desert blooming, but never expected to see it.
No visit to Anza Borrego should be without a walk through one of the amazing (claustrophobic) slot canyons. I also got lots of video of this one....
Joshua Tree National Park, Jeep trails, old mines, crazy rock formations, oasis', etc. I'm pleased and humbled to have been there twice now.
Lots of the namesake trees
Cool old Fairbanks/Morse gas engine
Giant air pump
Old Ford truck
To old hulks out in the desert. The park staff kept apologizing to us as it was so "cold". BWWWWAAAAAAA!!!!!!! That never gets old. The day my bro took this photo there was a 110 degree difference in temperature between here and home....
We couldn't get into Jumbo Rocks campground as it's now reservation only (even though it was mostly empty) so we stayed at White Tank campground for the duration of our visit to JTNP. As it turns out, I like White Tank better....
Trailer issues:
Broken antenna caused by wind bending the antenna over, then ice filling the void in the spring so it became permanently bent to a 45 degree angle.
Broken spare tire mount
40 miles of desert washboards and one of my welds failed. I'd love to blame it on anyone else, but it was me. I'll pull it off and re-weld, then gusset the mount. Build, test, repair, rebuild, repeat.... Honestly, the washboard were miserable and I'm pretty surprised now that we didn't have more trouble. I REALLY need to get some sort of shocks on the trailer. On some of the Jeep trails, it only came down to contact earth occasionally.
Bad brake magnet. I got a suspicious looking red light on the brake controller on the way back. We camped overnight at Winslow Meteor Crater RV park, where we pulled the wheel and drum and replaced the right side brake magnet. (I carry a spare magnet) That worked.
Cracked fender. Aluminum.....sigh.... That stuff makes me wonder why we don't see planes dropping out of the sky all over the place... Lightweight, yes. Resilient, no.....
Jeep issues:
Broken trailer harness mount. See my note on washboards. The thin bracket that holds the harness plug couldn't take the vibration. I will remove it (soon, when it's warm out) and drill the bumper where I'll nest the plug as I should have when I installed it. Think twice, work once....
Broken wire in trailer harness due to the dangling plug. I'll repair it when I do the bracket.....
Cheapest gas: OK....$1.89 per gal
Most expensive: CA....$4.37 per gal
WilliamA
"When I am in charge, Starburst brand fruit chews will get their own food group....and where are all the freakin laser beams? There should be more laser beams..."
2021 Jeep Cherokee Trailhawk
2017 T@G XL
Boyceville, Wi.
Thank you for this ince again, really nice repport!
And yep, washboard can be a major pain. I pretty much got all the co ponents for my air bag suspension, including a brand new dewalt multi cutting saw for very nice steel cut.
Now, I just ne to plan for the final design, the time and a little warmer weather.
What a great trip!
Bill
2017 T@G Max XL, New Jersey.
You can drive along 10,000 miles, and still stay where you are.
Great write-up. Thanks for sharing your trip.
19 T@G XL Boondock Edge
07 Lexus GX 470
Classic J Tree image. If you go north from J Tree to Route 66 at Amboy and keep going north on Kelbaker Rd theres lots of great camping in the Mojavi.
Neil,
Sorry I blew past your post! Duh... It was great to meet and catch up. On the downside, now youve got ME thinking about the Timbren upgrade....ka Ching!!!! Sigh...
Keep us in the loop on your suspension ruminations...
WilliamA
"When I am in charge, Starburst brand fruit chews will get their own food group....and where are all the freakin laser beams? There should be more laser beams..."
2021 Jeep Cherokee Trailhawk
2017 T@G XL
Boyceville, Wi.
I just did a photo dump from my phone and found this "in-process" photo of the water pump repair.
I'll be pulling the pump this week and reinstalling it with this connector:
I also plan to install this connector:
While the old connector is still usable, the new one has sealed wiring going into the plug and the old one doesn't. This one also has a longer "standoff" from the bumper so there's less sticking out behind the bumper. I plan to drill the bumper face to install this one. No more under the bumper on cheesy brackets.
WilliamA
"When I am in charge, Starburst brand fruit chews will get their own food group....and where are all the freakin laser beams? There should be more laser beams..."
2021 Jeep Cherokee Trailhawk
2017 T@G XL
Boyceville, Wi.
This is exactly what I would do! Good choice!
Got the pump rewired.
WilliamA
"When I am in charge, Starburst brand fruit chews will get their own food group....and where are all the freakin laser beams? There should be more laser beams..."
2021 Jeep Cherokee Trailhawk
2017 T@G XL
Boyceville, Wi.
Can I ask about your awning that appears to extend off your rear clamshell?
I built that awhile back. I thought I had a thread on that but can't find it. I'll run it down. It's probably the one modification I use most often. I forget that it didn't come with the trailer.
Found it:
https://teardrop-trailers.vanillacommunity.com/discussion/263/building-another-awning
WilliamA
"When I am in charge, Starburst brand fruit chews will get their own food group....and where are all the freakin laser beams? There should be more laser beams..."
2021 Jeep Cherokee Trailhawk
2017 T@G XL
Boyceville, Wi.