Maiden Voyage: Grande Cache, Alberta. I should note that Grande Cache was also Penny's maiden voyage as well!
Laura and I loaded the Escalade up on Thursday morning and headed for the mountains. Grande Cache is about a 4.5hr drive from our place, so it is no small journey. We were one of the last to arrive, as most of the rest of the group had already headed out on Monday or Tuesday and had a couple day's wheeling in at that point. We unloaded the truck and set up camp in the municipal camp ground. The forecast was for hot weather, with the potential for rain a couple days later. There is a lot of fire smoke in the area due to wildfires in BC.
Our first run was to be "A Walk in the Woods" followed by "Bill's Ridge" and finally a run up "Grande". I've completed all three trails multiple times in the past. A Walk in the Woods is a tight and technical trail, even for a Jeep. It's a real challenge to avoid rubbing up against trees which are all too happy to destroy quarter panels and panes of quarter glass. Bill's Ridge is actually a really easy trail that begins after Walk in the Woods and follows a ridge along the top of a mountain for several kilometers just below the tree line. This trail is named after an older gentleman named Bill who was one of the pioneers of the group that set out to creating many of the trails in the area. He passed away 5 or 6 years ago and there is a memorial plaque for him where we always stop to appreciate the view and eat our lunch. Grande is a short run, but extremely steep in excess of 35 degrees straight up on loose dirt and shale in places. The trail leads up to an antenna tower array at the top of Grande Mountain with incredible views in all directions.
We set out in the morning with a full tank of diesel and some concerns of the body damage that could result from running Walk in the Woods. It's about a 35 minute drive from the camp site out to the switchback haul road that leads up to the trail head. The Escalade was driving absolutely great, no warning lights, all the gauges right where I wanted to see them and driving like it was on rails at highway speeds. The truck is perfectly geared with 4.56s and 37" tires, spinning right at 1800rpm producing peak torque and maximum boost at a comfortable 65 mph. No vibrations, tight steering with no wandering and nice quiet exhaust. Everything I hoped for out of this build! When we arrived at the switch back, we stopped to air our tires down and then departed to make the climb up the switchback haul road. It was a very hot day, with the thermometer pushing 90F outside (which sucks with no A/C, that's definitely on the list to fix before the next run!). As we neared the top of the haul road, one of the Jeeps in the group boiled over and lost a bunch of coolant. Her rig is an older TJ with a 5.3L/4L60e swapped into it and has always had problems keeping cool. I think the cheap rad and small electric fan is just too small to keep the V8 cool without a lot of airflow from the highway. We stopped to check it out and top the coolant back up. I noticed my electric fans were actually running for once, the first I'd heard them ever come on. After we finished checking it out, one of the guys points at my Escalade and tells me that I have a puddle under it as well! Sure enough, there was a pile of coolant pouring out onto the ground. I was certain it hadn't overheated, and the fans were running. We popped the hood and quickly discovered the problem. My surge tank hose was rubbing against the side of my passenger side cooling fan. Which had just turned on for the first time and rubbed a hole clean through the hose. I knew our day was shot, so we put some hose clamps on either side of the hole and hoped that there was enough coolant left in the system to keep the truck cool on the way back to camp. There is a second steam hose running from the rad to the surge tank, so I knew it would still be able to expand if needed. When I started the truck back up, I had an under boost code (which I've seen a couple times before). This puts the engine into limp mode and severely limits power. Checking the freeze frame data, I found that the engine was only a 20 kPa (like 2 PSI) off target. This can be caused by a minor boost leak, or the big 4" exhaust I installed. My fix was to adjust the tolerance for under boost to 200 kPa (which is common practice in the LLY tuning world) and the code didn't ever come back again. We made it home without any further issues, except for warming up to 215F when we got stuck behind a semi on a long steep grade who was crawling right in between two gears. Either my engine was screaming in 2nd or bogging in 3rd. After I finally passed him, the truck cooled back down and was good the rest of the way home.
We unhitched my Denali from the trailer and headed into town to find a new rad hose, or at least a 1" barbed hose mender and some hose clamps. We tried all the places in town aka, the only hardware store in town as the auto parts store had closed due to the crappy economy in the area. Grande Cache is a coal mining town, and the mine was shut down by the Government for a couple years. It recently re-opened, but the damage to the town is done. It's mostly a ghost town now. Unfortunately this meant we had to drive an hour and a half south to Hinton to get parts, just to drive an hour and a half back to camp to install them. I wound up just installing the hose mender and not replacing the whole hose. It gave me a better install angle which kept the hose away from the fan and also provided something steel to rub on the fan if it happens again. Also prevented me from having to dump all the coolant to replace the hose. I had to add about a gallon of fluid afterwards to get it topped back up. I was not overly disappointed not to have spent the day in my Caddy beating it up on a tight trail in 90F weather with no A/C while choking on heavy fire smoke.
The next morning we decided to run up Grande, as the previous day ran late and folks just called it a day after Bill's Ridge. The weather was much more favorable, with the temperature closer to 75F instead. The weather station at the top of Grande was reporting high winds and 50F. We started the steep climb up, and I quickly noticed that my temperature gauge was starting to climb. Since we were not in a good place to stop to check it out, we just rolled the windows down and cranked up the heat in both the I/P and the rear HVAC systems. This helped, but the truck was still getting hotter and hotter as we climbed up. We got to a good mid-point lookout with some relatively level terrain where I could hop out and check things out. I quickly noticed that my fans were not running despite the engine temp at 250F. We decided to pull the fans out to check the wiring was okay and I immediately discovered the problem. I'd forgotten to put the temperature probe into the radiator. It was literally just hanging down inside the fan shroud. I got lucky it never got caught up in the fans and destroyed! After installing the probe in the rad, the fans started running and my temps stayed right on target at 200F for the rest of the run. We made it up to the top of Grande Mountain without any further drama and I was feeling damn good about the build!
On our way back down, we had a rock ledge to drop down and I guess I didn't quite line it up right. The Jeep behind me reported that I had a back tire nearly 6ft in the air as my suspension unloaded and rocked onto the front axle haha! My wife didn't screech, but her gasp and wide eye'd look said enough haha!
After we got back to camp, the rest of the group decided they were going to run a trail named Carnage Canyon. This trail is named after me, as it is the canyon that I tin-canned Penny's quarter panel, broke a quarter glass, rock dented my hood and my arb bumper, plus slashed a tire and wound up on my back bumper with 8ft between my front pass side tire and the ground. I decided it wouldn't be a good idea to take the Escalade in there, plus there was some bad weather building anyways so my wife and I stayed back. We checked the weather reports and saw it was supposed to pour rain all night / the next day, so we made the call to end the trip a day early after a single trail run and head for home. Tenting in the rain sucks anyways... It started pouring an hour after we left and never stopped all the way home.
Attached are the few pictures I have. One of the guys did take a video of me climbing a hill, and I will post it when/if I get it from him!
All in all, I'm pretty happy with how the rig performed! Some tweaks are needed with the spring rates and suspension height. I need A/C badly. And I need to get a smaller pulley on my P/S system for better assist at idle with my foot on the brake. Also, one of the guys may have named my truck for me: Myrtle. He laughed and said it was because it was such an ugly name, but such a beautiful rig. I'm not sure if it will stick or not yet, time shall tell! My wife likes calling her Myrtle the Turtle, so I suspect that it will haha!
