Permanent Vacation

Moving east across Nevada, I was chasing a storm system. The first night out I pulled off the road in heavy rain, in the dark, to get some sleep in the front seat. It was very uncomfortable, but with the rain definitely better than my old ride (Yamaha Star 950). Woke up to find I had not been washed away by an ephemeral stream:

Not bad. Nevada is in a "basin and range" geological feature. For those who haven't seen it, imagine:

…and repeat that dozens of times.

Highway 50 bisects the state. It is "The Loneliest Road in America", but still a little crowded for my taste. After refueling I found a parallel route up in the hills.

Pictographs at Toquima Cave. The link has a good description of pictographs vs petroglyphs. They are at sites scattered all over the American southwest.

Down in the next valley/basin, this white cone in the middle of nowhere is Diana's Punchbowl.

It's not clear to me whether the cone was built up like a volcano, or whether the surrounding desert eroded away around it. Anyway there is a hot spring inside it. And yeah, someone went down there and planted a couple plastic flamingos.

The fun thing about unprotected sites out in the desert like this is that you can drive right up on it. There are two maintained gravel roads in this valley. The north/south road traverses the valley. The east/west road goes to Diana's Punchbowl, because there is nothing else.

I was still following a storm system across the state, so I got the Jeep dressed up in a bit of mud while driving across some fields on the way out of there.

More mustangs on the range. These will be the last for a while.

Running over the next range, this is Ryegrass Canyon.

And Antelope Valley. Both in the middle of nowhere.

Farther east, these are the Ward Charcoal Ovens. Back in the mining boom from the 1870s to the 1910s these popped up all over the southwest along with railroads and mining towns. People gathered wood in the mountains and reduced it to charcoal over several days in the ovens. Burning wood so that you can burn it again later seems crazy, but apparently charcoal burns hotter, the better to smelt minerals.

Nearby is the East Ely Railroad Depot Museum. They have an impressive collection of historical locomotives. (A passing steam locomotive is a lot louder than you might imagine.)

Back on the road—sort of. This is what's left of the road out to Lexington Arch, at the south end of Great Basin National Park. There used to be a gravel road and a parking lot near the arch, but it was washed out by Lexington Creek. Perfect scenario for the Jeep.

This is in a national park on a holiday weekend (July 2-3), and I had the place all to myself. The north end of the park, with paved roads, was packed.
The arch:

I went up a neighboring canyon to get at the arch from above. It was a nice drive:

…which ended here. I think I could have made it over this spot, but the trail disappeared a little farther up. Not worth it. On the way out, I was pleased to see a lady come along in a Rubicon and turn around at the same place.

Heading on into southern Utah. I guess it's really cheap to build roads out here. I can drive these flat gravel roads comfortably at 45 miles/hour. Come to think of it, I never saw a posted speed limit or any other sign.

The white rock at the end of the road is Crystal Peak. It doesn't look like it, but that is volcanic rock.

When white rock erodes, you get streams full of white sand.

Nearby in southern Utah, here is Renegade's first drive into a volcano. The area is called Tabernacle Hill. This was another nice, empty place on a holiday. One or two other cars showed up to check out the lava tubes.

The view from atop the central cinder cone. The road is visible coming in from the left side. There is a nice, bumpy road leading out to this place from the highway.

Later in the day, I camped on the rim of this canyon. The place was spectacular, and there was only one other person camping out there. This was on July 4, when big national parks like Arches were turning people away due to lack of space. I'll omit the details, because I'd like to keep this one to myself—and I need to get moving with this travel-log.

This is the dramatic entrance to Black Dragon Canyon in central Utah. The road zigzags around until it funnels into the canyon between these two ridges. There isn't room in there for both a road and a riverbed. There were a few tricky spots where the riverbed has asserted itself.

At a wide bend in the canyon, one wall has a gallery of ancient pictographs. There are lots of these around the Southwest, and it's cool to find them out in the middle of nowhere.

Coal Canyon, on the west edge of Colorado. There is a mustang preserve here, but the area open to off-roading is not popular with the mustangs. Go figure. The route follows a stream bed, like many trails out in the desert.

A fresh rock fall diverted the stream/trail at this spot.

We found some tight spots, but my buddy in the Ranger had it worse. It's not the biggest truck in America—apparently it is pretty big for Europe—but it's big and expensive enough that he spent a lot of time worrying about beating it up.

I'm happy with the small footprint of the Renegade. I see a lot of small, rugged OHVs out on the trail, but they are often not street-legal or not geared for highway travel. The Renegade is in the sweet spot.

Coal Canyon is at the east end of the Book Cliffs range. Coal Gulch is twenty miles west of there, in the same range. A lot of places in Colorado are named after what they pull out of the ground. This started out as an easy run up some graded dirt roads. (It looks like they are maintained for whoever is extracting natural gas in the area, now that coal is passé.) Then a storm rolled in and soaked the top half-inch of the surface. The road started to stick to the tires rather than to itself. Facing a total loss of traction, we stopped to wait it out.

This is what a dry stream bed looks like an hour after a flash-flood. The fresh mud shows that it was three or four feet deep. We weren't foolish enough to cross it at flood stage.

At this point the stream bed was easy to drive. It had a few inches of running water, but the bottom was solid from being scoured clean all the time. The problem was the thick layer of slippery mud deposited on either side of the stream bed. The Renegade got bogged down for the first time, and I learned how to rock it back-and-forth looking for a solid bottom. I also learned to close the windows when spinning the tires in mud. Believe me, black mud looks bad on the light-grey ceiling of this vehicle. Looks fine on the exterior, though.

The Ranger had the advantage here, maybe because he followed my tracks, but probably because he's heavier.

A quick shout-out to Colorado National Monument: There is no off-roading here, though the wilderness above it has plenty. It has good opportunities for hiking and climbing.

And Canyonlands National Park, which is bigger and more amazing than just about everything else.

It's a long, sad story, but we hit these trails leading down to the White Rim in the Ranger. Renegade stayed home.

Poking around on the Grand Mesa, east of Grand Junction, Colorado, we went down a dirt road and found this hidden waterfall. Nice spot to cool off in the middle of summer. (Yeah, it was summer. I'm getting caught up finally.)

In the canyons south of Grand Junction there is a nice slick-rock trail that is set aside for off-roading.

But it was a work day and I couldn't sneak away for too long. Didn't try the whole trail, but just getting in and out of the area in the rain was exciting enough.

The Gunnison and Colorado Rivers merge in Grand Junction. The next big valley to the south is the Dolores River, which also empties into the Colorado. Dolores Point is near the Utah border and apparently a destination for Jeeps coming overland from Moab.

On the mesa above Dolores Point there are a few sketchy dirt tracks and this unusual, bare spot in the desert shrubs.

…oops. Ok so that is my first time driving a car on an airport runway. Security was lax that day.

Farther up the Dolores, I forded the river on foot—the Renegade wouldn't have made it. It is a lonely part of the world, but mama and baby bear had passed through in the morning.

Moving southeast, up the San Miguel River into the Rockies. It's not really visible, but in the foreground is the Ames Hydroelectric Generating Plant, "one of the first AC hydro-electric plants ever constructed" (in 1890).

The road to the plant is paved, but beyond that going farther up the canyon was a nice trail.

I didn't get photos of the part with the Renegade-sized mud pits, but it was a fun drive. Here are some pretty waterfalls along side the trail. This place is just down the road from Telluride, which has some well-known (more accessible) waterfalls.

The highlight of traveling in the San Juan Mountains is the Ophir Pass trail, visible here heading up and out of the valley. On the west is Ophir in a really pretty valley. The east side opens up to…more and more mountains and valleys.

Ophir and Telluride each have a road leading in from the west and a trail exiting via a pass in the east. The towns forbid ATVs on the streets so it doesn't make much sense to drive the passes on an ATV. But there are plenty of street-legal Jeeps and a surprising number of motorcycles crossing over.
The approach is pleasant, then it starts to get rocky.

Up on the talus slope it's just loose rocks with not much room for error. The constantly crunching rocks make a nice audio accompaniment to the drive. There is a half-mile stretch with no room to turn or pass. But visibility is excellent up at the main switchback, so everyone can wait for a turn.

I would not try this on two wheels. It's a hard ride, but most of the folks on sport bikes made it. A group of us got together to turn around a couple of stranded bikes with this trusty method: drop it on its side, drag it around 180°, then stand it back up.

Top of the pass:

View back to the west:

There are plenty of side-trails to nowhere in and around Ophir, though many of them are blocked off for hiking and biking. Some of the streams run golden-yellow, not from the usual mud but from minerals leaching out of old mines.

Over on the Silverton side of the mountains, this is Porcupine Gulch, one of many spots where a ragged trail runs up to an abandoned mine. They have some serious switchbacks here.

It doesn't look very well guarded, but anyway I didn't find any treasure in this mine. It's blocked up about ten meters back.

Farther up the valley north of Silverton, there are plenty of passes and peaks for everyone. I had this one to myself—maybe because it was getting late and smart drivers were getting off the mountain.

This is looking up and over Hurricane Pass. The sign says "Elevation 12,730 Feet". The view down into the next valley was enticing, and there is a faint dotted-red line on the map of the area. I have had good luck with dotted-red lines so far. I planned to drive it until I saw scary sign about "4x4 required" with "locking axles" and so on. Maybe I'll go back when I am better prepared and the sun isn't setting.

Instead I ended up with an impromptu camp-out at the end of this ugly trail. I have tried sleeping in the Renegade a few different ways, and they were all very uncomfortable. But in this case it was better than rolling out a tent on the rocks, in the cold mountain air.

With nothing else to do as the sun went down and the moon came up, I popped out the sunroof panels and set up a tripod on the roof. I never really tried astrophotography before. Maybe that is because in most places you can't see stars. The sky is brilliant in Southwest Colorado though. And luckily, the smoke from California wildfires was blowing farther north.

So I finally got some use out of the sunroof. The motorized MySky panel is poorly engineered, as amply documented elsewhere in the forums, so I usually don't mess with the sunroof at all.
And here I am waiting out the Renegade's first hail storm (this was back in September) the next morning, really glad that I didn't roll out the tent.