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Well, the annual Desert trip is all but a memory now. With having a baby under a year old at home nowadays it’s taken me longer than usual to post up the trip report. This year we piggy backed the desert trip onto the backside of the Overland Expo whereas, year’s past we made two different long distance trips. Our plan was to hit the Overland Expo then tootle up to the Utah Canyonlands for the rest of the week. We left home on May 15th and rolled back in 10 days later on the 24th. A pretty short 1,717 miles driven this year compared to last year’s 2,500+ mile trip to Death Valley.
The 10 day 1,717 mile loop
Thursday, May 15th: Drive 700 miles from Pueblo, CO to Mormon Lake, AZ
The first destination on the list was to hit up the Overland Expo at Mormon Lake, AZ (South of Flagstaff) for a few days of hanging out with friends and drooling over some ridiculously drool worthy adventure travel gear and rigs. It was a great time as usual! We hung out here Thursday night through Sunday. Funny story as we got lost on the way to Mormon Lake Thursday evening as we rolled into the area. Okay, we weren’t really LOST per se….but we were indeed temporarily without orientation. This is my story and I’m sticking to it but, the GPS told us to get off at Exit 211 off I-40 just East of Flagstaff for a shortcut down to Mormon Lake. We followed this dirt road that turned into a two track that turned into a goat trail for 10 to 15 miles where we missed a trail marker in the darkness. Next thing you know we are way the heck up in the pine trees and loosing daylight fast. The trees where so thick and it became so dark I couldn’t even see to turn around so we ended up camping right in the middle of the trail that night. I couldn’t get enough signal to get internet to see the SPOT in order to see exactly where we were but I was able to text my wife at home. She said we were an inch away from Mormon Lake Rd. Gee thanks honey! That really helped! Early Friday morning we packed up the truck and continued up this very overgrown trail while Mormon Lake Rd got closer and closer on screen only to lose the trail completely at an old abandon deer camp at the top of this hill. That really sucked as we had to back down at least 80 yards in thick trees with the typical steep drop off on the blind side of the truck. Anyway, we finally got turned around and back tracked about a mile then found the spot where I missed the right hand turn the night before in the darkness. 38 minutes later and we rolled into the Expo with a dusty truck full of fresh tree scratches and even a few broken tree branches stuffed into roof rack and backside of the hood. Can’t say that for most of the other shinny trucks at the Overland Expo!
We camped with the usual suspects at the Expo. Mosesburb, 1leglance, oilbrnr, my buddy Bill and a few other usual’s. You know, we’re the outsider guys that don’t have Range Rovers, pimped out Jeeps, few hundred thousand dollar EarthRoamers nor do we wear the Indiana Jones hats that seem to be standard issue with the expo crowd. We all drive old American iron
My buddy Bill doing up is famous fried chicken Saturday night. Expo is to the back country adventurers as Sturgis is to the biker crowd.
Sunday around midday a small army of us headed up to Flagstaff to check into the hotel to cleanup, regroup and restock for the rest of the week. Basically hit up the showers, laundry, Big 5 and Walmart. This hotel was the meeting place for the group of 5 of us to round up the wagons for the rest of the journey up to Canyonlands first thing Monday morning. Once we leave Flag, there isn’t any place to shop for groceries for the next 5 days. My buddy Bill from Pueblo, my buddy Ty and his wife from San Diego, and I all reserved rooms at the Hampton Inn then two other friends met us here at o’dark 30 Monday morning.
A room with a view….
My buddy Ty’s 2005 Ram 2500 Cummins/NV5600/Phoenix camper rig from San Diego. We did the Mohave Rd and Death Valley together last year. We’re old buddy’s from High School (he is a CO boy too).
Ah, yes…there we are! At the hotel! Checking nav systems before the wagon round up
The plan was to roll out of Flag at 8 AM as we had a 280 mile drive up to Utah to meet my buddy Ty’s sister who was meeting us at the Hite Marina at 3 PM then hit the lead-in trail head to the Maze District, which is basically right across the Colorado River from the Hite Marina. Everybody got up early and those driving up from Phoenix arrived early too so we got a good start ahead of schedule. The long drive with a parade of 5 of us up to Hite was uneventful. Very beautiful country out there!
A few weeks prior to us arriving here at Hite I phoned the ARAMARK general store at Hite to ask if we could park my buddy’s sister’s car there for a few days. The nice gal on the phone said no problem and she could even do better than that. We could take it to her house to leave for the week! Keep mind, the Hite is remote as hell so the workers at the marina actually live on site too. So does the local Sheriff, Park Rangers, etc. Around the corner from the general store up in the canyon is a small trailer park with about 20 trailers for all of the local workers. Perfect place to park the Prius for the week.
And here we sit. And sit and sit some more….until Ty’s sister arrived. Yeah, she was driving a Prius over from Colorado Springs. Remind me of the Prius story later in the week. Ty’s Ram, My K10, Don’s Land Cruiser (okay, it’s really a Lexus ), and my buddy Tony’s green Ruby. Not pictured is my other buddy Bill’s white Ram. He’s hidden on the other side of my truck here.
Man, I am on my work laptop this week. It is sloowwww to get pictures from Flickr. This is going to take forever!
Monday, May 19th:
So finally my buddy Ty’s sister arrives in her cute little Toyota Prius at the Hite marina and we run her car up to the general store girl’s trailer and head out. We also fueled up all of our rigs at the Hite Marina at the super middle of nowhere fuel price of $4.56 a gallon while we waited for her. The two Dodge diesels paid more! At least water for the camper tanks was free. The Maze District trail head is basically right across Colorado River from the Hite Marina but it takes about 20 minutes or so to drive there due to the lay of the land. By this point it is already pushing 4:30ish so I figured we’d set up camp a few miles down the trail in BLM land before getting in to the Canyonlands National Park. Once you get into the National Park you must camp in designated areas and follow a complete different book of rules (no fires, no digging holes to bury dung, etc.). Well, my buddy Bill in the 2001 white Dodge Ram IS the trail boss always. I mean ALWAYS! He is always the guy to run at least 10 minutes ahead of everybody without ever looking back. All you see is his dust and diesel smoke trail. This guy has every topo map in the US pasted on his inner eyelids so it is best just to let him led the way and try to follow the smoke….even when he is wrong or like when he doesn’t use a spotter and ends up in a mess. Hehe, more on that later.
What I thought would be a few mile trip down the trail from Hwy 95 turned out to be a 20 mile ride well into the area and almost all the way to the National Park Entrance. At least the first 20 miles was a simple dirt road where we were still able to cruise along at 20 MPH even with the tires at 18 PSI and we found a great place to camp. This place would have been very easy to miss. In fact, we did part of this trail in 2010 and totally missed this spot or we would have stayed there then.
A few pics along the way in…
10+ miles of high speed dirt road then it gets slightly rougher. A LOT rougher tomorrow!
Ty’s San Diego based 2005 RAM in the mirror
Flip the Bird Rock…
Then we found this outstanding spot to camp for the night. A nice spot for everybody!
Cool water feature nearby. Several Bluejay’s were hanging out here
This little water puddle was quite big
Perfect picture window while cooking dinner
Getting our party on after dinner. A perfect 77 degrees with zero wind
Hehe, of course I had to drag out the fake rubber snake and wrap it around Don’s rooftop tent ladder. If you all remember my trip report from last year’s Death Valley trip I slid this same snake in my buddy’s sleeping bag. So here we are this year all sitting around having fun getting drunked up around the campfire and we see Don all drunked up over in the distance staggering towards us with his ladder fully extended balancing this rubber snake on the end. Here he is walking straight towards us! We’re like DUDE! WTF are you doing!? And he’s like “there is something on my ladder!!!!” while screaking like a 3 year old girl and we are like “WTF, are you bringing it towards us for!!???” Ah, that was so funny but I don’t think he thought it was very funny when he figured out the snake was fake. Wish we would have had a picture of him in stress. Guess he didn’t read the trip report from last year or he would have recognized the snake was a joke. The FNG always gets the snake. I guess the joke backfired because some a-hole stole my SPOT GPS messenger that night when I wasn’t looking so for the entire next day I thought I lost the SPOT somewhere on the trail and nobody at home knew where we were! I was SO PISSED that I lost the SPOT only to later find it in my Trasharoo the next night. Yeah, not sure I will continue with the snake joke anymore. I was pretty pissed off and ready to throw a full-on temper tantrum. I guess that is what I get….Paybacks are a bitch I guess! Maybe, we’ll do a spider next time and just keep a better eye on my junk .
This is funny too. So after the whole snake incident Don started having major buyer’s remorse on his parking spot choice for fear the Toy would roll off the little cliff. LOL Us drunkards had at least a 2 hour conversation about his parking spot then ended up pulling out spot lights to help him relocate his truck somewhere where he felt safer sleeping in the rooftop tent without the Toy rolling away. This picture was taken long before we moved his truck so he could sleep better. LOL
This is packing up Tuesday morning and where we moved his rig the night before. I happen to notice he never left the keys in the ignition during the week or we would have moved it towards some cliff….or stole his ladder. I think he sleeps with the ladder in his tent cuz we couldn’t find it that night or any night during the week. It would suck to have to get up at 3 AM for the beer return only to find your ladder gone!
That’s pretty much it for Monday, May 19th. The next morning we finally lock the hubs, use lockers and even get to use winches! Hope I can figure out how to post Youtubers!
Well, the sun sure comes up early in the western side of the mountain timezone so we all get packed up pretty early Tuesday morning. From here we have an 8 hour drive to our next destination and that is only 38 miles away. Our destination is the Doll House, which we will spend the next two nights and one full day hiking around. From here on until Thursday it is full-on 4x4 city! Lockers and winches not required but sure make things easier. Time to start breaking stuff!
My buddy’s wife snapped this as we bailed out of camp Tuesday morning
A few miles down the trail we run across the sign… 20 miles to the Doll House, no biggie! Yeah, right…..this is why we came back 4 years later so we could see more of it. Those 20 miles will take 20,000 miles off your rig.
Another wall. In fact, this one is call “The Wall”. With a window to the other side too
Cool panoramic along the way. Kinda sux because it was taken with a Droid phone
The trail starts getting more interesting
This begins the first of many obstacles that get your blood pumping. Nothing but a speed bump for the Rubicon but for the 8,000 and 9,000 lb rigs it is more interesting. This one is a steep climb with a sharp right turn at the top.
Pictures never serve justice to the actual lay of the land
I can't figure out posting Youtubers again. Guess I'll have to continue on later
Tuesday, May 20th continued… As we continue on to the Doll House
This is an interesting tight off camber corner that requires 2 stabs. A big drop off on the side as well. Last time we did this section in 2010 we drug a trailer. Won’t do that again!
The pictures on the way out look much neater as it shows the big drop off to the side.
A few videos of the corner. If you listen closely you can hear the beginning of the front drive shaft CV starting to commit suicide.
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This one is the GoPro video at the same time
So shortly after the corner we stopped for lunch and to take a gander at all the racket under my truck we hear much louder racket coming from the hill behind us. A few minutes later her rolls up a brand new RAM 1500 with Red Colorado plates. Red plates in CO mean its a fleet vehicle, which also usually means that is a rental car. As the guy rolled up I quickly noticed the front valance, bumper and grill were all bent and broken. The entire passenger’s side had a large crease down the entire side and the mirror was hanging off plus a factory nerf bar laying in the bed of the truck rattling around. I can only imagine how the underside of that truck must have looked. I asked him if it was a rental and he said “ya” in some form of the English language and I said I hope you bought insurance! They were like 80 years old and from Germany or something. He said something about they tried to go to the Doll House but had to turn around after they couldn’t go much further than over the hill behind us. You can see the truck in this photo after he passed by. Crazy tourists
Remember I mentioned my buddy Bill likes to fly way a head of the group and barrel through stuff without a spotter? Well, this is what happens when you do that lol. That Dana 60 diff smacked the ground hard!
Almost like he was aiming to screw up here. Luckily, there was no damage to the wheel, diff or anything. Just his brused ego. The Lexus the first in line behind him so a tug of the winch yanked him back on track.
This is a video of the other Dodge passing through that same spot…but with a spotter
From here onto the Doll House the trail is basically a dry river bed for at least a mile or so with tons of obstacles. This dry wash could be a real mess if there was a gully washer nearby. The area opens up to a large grassy savanna that looks like something straight out of Africa but with these really weird pecker shaped rock formations.
This one is as we turned into the Doll House area to find our camp for the next two nights. Ole blue has some wounds that need licking!
The Doll House is very cool and looks like a place from a totally different planet.
With a little sliver of a view of the Colorado River
Our camp for the next two nights. Some great hiking in this area and just all around great place to hang out for a full day drinking beer! Basically from this spot to the nearest paved road is about 9 hours travel and even that would only get you to Hite. Hite to Moab would still be another 2.5 hours. This place is REMOTE!
So Wednesday morning we all slept in a little later than usual (the tall rocks that cast huge shadows was very conducive of sleep that morning) then after breakfast I crawled under the truck to see what the hell all the racket is all about at the front driveshaft as we couldn’t really see anything conclusive at lunch but it sure looked like the a bolt on the twin stick shifter was rubbing a CV u-joint cup before, which would explain why this damn ORD twin stick is SO HARD TO SHIFT!!! ERRR!!! Ah, nope! Wholy crap! Now at this point I find the front output yoke on the 205 had worked loose and all 8 u-joint cup on the CV were starting to pull out of the CV. What the hell is going on!? Well, I’ll tell ya…. This past winter I removed the old figure 8 205 and installed a round 205 and got rid of all of the Advance Adapters bits and while doing so I also change the front drive shaft to a later flat 4 bolt flange style CV instead of the old u-joint style CV. As it turns out these later CV’s have these really stupid bump stops all over the place that inhibit the CV angles. With the angles inhibited the CV got yanked apart to the point it pulled the nut loose on the front tcase yoke. Luckily, we were able to fix all of this on our nice little rock work bench. I also got lucky in that none of the u-joint cups, lock clips or needle bearings got lost on the trail someplace or I would have been screwed. As luck would have it my buddy Ty had just bought a nice Snap-On file set at a garage sale a few weeks before and still had them in the cab of his truck. Whew!!! So…we all took turns filing away all of those stupid bump stops. We had a full-on coffee and human powered machine shop going on for a few hours. It worked and got me home. When I got home I pulled the shaft again and finished grinding off the rest of those pesky then it dawned on me I bet my Polar Bear ’89 Suburban has the same BS. Sure nuf! It did too so I spent some quality time with a grinder on that shaft too! The real bummer here was I was well aware of these bump stops last winter when I installed the shaft and I even ground some off but, obviously I didn’t grind enough off. The front suspension flexes more than I would have ever imagined! (I’ll post some picture of the nubs that need to be ground off later as I am not near that camera at the moment).
Here are more details of the driveshaft nubs that need to be ground down. For those of you running the 4 bolt flat flange type front drive shaft doing this massage with a grinder is a must or it will kill the CV or possibly damage a front output on a transfercase.
You can see where we made some progress with the small files on the trail. That little bit of added clearance helped for a while but it still needed more work when I got home.
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[/FONT] This is after some grinder attention
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[/FONT] As I mentioned above when I got home I was also curious about my ’89 Polar Bear Suburban’s front shaft. Sure, nuff! It was the same way. The only reason these nubs haven’t caused my any problems on the Burb yet is because it really hasn’t gone off road much plus the fact the cheap 4” springs that are in it are so stiff it doesn’t flex much anyway. This virgin Suburban shaft view gives a better idea of the bump stops before you take them off. Actually, you can see some witness marks where they have bottomed out before.
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[/FONT] Now this one is my old shaft when I was running a figure 8 1972 NP205 with the u-joint type front flange. I believe the industry called this one the “Saginaw” flange. They are strong, just very difficult to remove the shaft when you need to. This one never once cause any problems. Not sure why they added those bump stops to the later flat flange shafts.
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[/FONT] I’ll post more on the trip report when I get time….
One of these days I need to finish up this trip report. Been so dang busy with work and having a toddler running around that I haven't had time to finish this story
Nope! To think you have twins ones to chase after. The only time I can get anything done is during the week when she is at daycare and on the days my work email/call load is low which hasn't been very often lately
Finally a little bit of time to continue on with this trip report. I left off at Wednesday, May 21st.
As I mentioned above Wednesday my buddy Ty, his wife and sister took an all day hike down to the Colorado River. After the shaft repair the rest of us decided to stay behind and do 12 oz arm curls instead. Here are a few pictures Ty got from the hike down to the River.
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[/FONT] A few dugouts rafters have created to gain access to the shore
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[/FONT] Long walk back to the top of those mesas where we are camped
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Wednesday night we had a great dinner and sat around shooting the breeze then headed off to bed pretty early for an early morning wagon round up. From the Doll House to the next waypoint where we plan to camp at Hans Flat is a full day’s drive in 4 low most of the way. From Hans Flat to the highway would be another 40 miles of dirt after that. [/FONT]
Thursday morning heading out. Don (Oilburnr) leading the way
[FONT="]Nice view out the windshield for an early morning drive[/FONT]
More of Thursday morning headed to Hans Flat from the Doll House.
It is always interesting how much different the trail becomes when you run it backwards. Returning back on the same trail was a completely different venture. This was one of the first interesting spots after leaving the Doll House.
Video never really captures the actual lay of the land. This spot looked much more interesting in person.
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GoPro view of above.
Neat flexy picture from that spot
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As we continue on through the hairy corner. The two little rigs (Jeep and Land Cruiser) bounce right through these sections without batting an eye while the 3 large trucks had to use more finesse. [/FONT]
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This is one of my favorite pictures from the entire trip[/FONT]
Listen! No more front shaft bang bang!
GoPro of that one
Well this is embarrassing. I couldn’t get the damn twin stick out of 4 high so I ran with it. Yeah, that didn’t work out very well. I killed it! Then the hot beast didn’t fire on the first crank, which was odd.
GoPro of the same
One of the main things to replace before the next big trip are the SHOCKS! Wow! After about an hour on the trail the shocks get so hot they basically don’t work at all. You can see the truck swing an sway like crazy. Makes me sea sick! More work to that stinking twin stick needs to be done too. Once that 205 gets warm, it doesn't want to shift. Probably just the nature of the beast 205 exaggerated by the twin stick.
Love seeing your trip reports. If you have time and desire, it would be cool to see a more detailed map of these sections that you are posting pics of (not sure if your spot system makes that easy to do or not).
), and my buddy Tony’s green Ruby. Not pictured is my other buddy Bill’s white Ram. He’s hidden on the other side of my truck here. 
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That there is some beautiful country
