At the end of April I went on another off-road trip to Southern Utah. This one, organized by Tom Ferrin, was going to be a 2 week trip. I opted for the first week so that I could get back to Sacramento for my planned trip to the UK. As it turned out, my trip was even shorter than a week.
It was a Saturday morning departure where everything went according to plan - Tom was the first to leave from Mill Valley, Andy and I joined him as he passed through Sacramento and Dan joined us as we passed through Reno. Four humans, four Land Cruisers, not the most efficient means of transportation, but it is fun.
We drove straight through on the Saturday and reached the far east side of Nevada by Saturday evening. We camped in the Great Basin National Park in a nice spot we have used before. It was still cool and there were banks of snow around. I, of course, was the only one camping on the ground, the others were inside or on top of their well appointed vehicles.
Burr Trail |
Horse Canyon |
Tom at camp in Horse Canyon |
After lunch we headed back up to join the Burr Trail and that’s when my problems started. Getting onto tarmac again and leaving the dust behind, Andy commented on a puff of smoke from my exhaust. Stopping to take a picture at the top of the downgrade, I also saw smoke - not from the exhaust but from the front left brake pads. Something was seriously wrong.
Of course the other guys just love this sort of problem and pretty soon we were removing the wheel and checking out the damage to the brakes and bearings. It was not good, the lock washer that basically holds the front wheel on had backed off and the wheel was really being held on by the brake pads - hence the smoke and heat.
Roadside Repairs |
The trail down the grade was good but the drop was significant. Fortunately for me that we discovered this problem at the top of the hill and not on the way down. That could have been a different story altogether.
I crept down the hill - the most spectacular part of the Burr Trail checking the front wheel with some frequency. It held up just fine and it held up just fine all the way to Hanksville.
Dan, Andy, Tom |
I chose the last option and drove very slowly the 230 odd miles to Salt Lake City. Cutting short my trip but that’s what circumstances dictated. It was a bit of a tedious drive to SLC but I made it around midnight and got a room not far from the Toyota dealership.
Next morning I took my truck in and explained what had gone wrong. They investigated and found that even without one of the two lock nuts, things were still nice and tight. They fixed me up and repacked things with grease and I was all set to continue on by 10:00 am.
Given that I was early and had never explored Salt Lake City I decided to look around. Of course what do you do in Salt Lake City - you look at the Mormon Church stuff in the downtown area. I went around the museum, looked at the Tabernacle and then went into the Genealogy Center. I wasn’t expecting to find much but they were most helpful and they have an entire floor dedicated to UK genealogy records. What they did provide was free access to Ancestry.co.uk and there I found all sorts of interesting things starting in the 1911 census and going back in 10 year increments to around 1851 when all traces of my forebears disappeared. I should get more serious about that and dig into things in more detail.
The most remarkable thing I found was that my Grandfather White was working in a shoe factory when he was 14 years old, and my Olivent Grandparents by 1911 already had 8 children but 2 were already dead. They went on to have 11 living children I think.
After spending more time than I anticipated researching my ancestry, I left SLC in the late afternoon and made it as far as Elko for the night. I struggled to find a hotel in Elko. It is in the middle of a mining boom at the moment and hotels are pretty scarce when you drop in at 8:00 pm at night. Eventually I found a vacancy and I was set for the night.
The following day it was a pretty easy drive from Elko into California and home.