Sounds likely to me. That truck has had almost half a century to see the world. It could have gone far and wide in that time.
CK5
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The Story Of A Cummins Suburban (Lots Of Pics)
- Thread starter mosesburb
- Start date
Sounds likely to me. That truck has had almost half a century to see the world. It could have gone far and wide in that time.
So the next day our only other scheduled event on our trip is to occur. We are to meet someone in the middle of nowhere, at a given time, coming from vast distances in opposite directions, and even Verizon has no service for miles in any direction. Sure, why not?? Let's go!!
So we left the thriving metropolis of Tropic and headed east down Hwy 12. We took a side jaunt down to a scenic location:
I felt old when I had to explain what Kodachrome is, or was as the case may be. We took a side road through some camp areas and put to a massive monolith:
Remember the rain from yesterday?? We were on a dirt road going out to that point and I got out to lock the hubs as I had a sneaky suspicion that it was going to be needed. I was sneaky right on that one. The gravel surface we were on changed at a cattle guard to dirt. Clay dirt. The water had moistened the clay making mud, which was only an inch or two deep, but slicker than greased banana peels. It was a challenge keeping the truck on the road. I didn't want to spin the tires to clean them because it would tear up the trail and the tires would just pack up again. We made it out to the point and back. I stopped to take a picture on the way back. I climbed up on the roof rack and got what I think is a nice picture of the view:
Now an interesting thing happened right here. When I got back in the truck, my boy asked me where my phone was (I don't recall him ever asking that before). I said it is right here, pointing at the floor. But it wasn't there. I checked the dash, not there. I checked the end of the charging cable, not there. WTF happened to it?? I got out and looked around the truck, climbed up on the roof again, all for nothing. I was back in the truck wondering WTF I'm gonig to do now and for some reason I looked in the LH mirror and about 30 yards behind the truck, in the middle of the road, lays my phone. I jump out, run back and pick it up only to find that it is fine. No damage whatsoever. How the hell did it get back there?? Well, come to find out, that is where I locked the hubs going in and it must have dropped out of its latch and onto the ground. It just so happened I liked that spot and decided to stop and take some pictures, and my boy for whatever reason asked where my phone was at that point. Very strange sequence of events that all lined up to return my phone to me. Yay!!
There is some spectacular scenery in this place:
A natural monument to, uh, something....
Standing water and mud. Thought it looked cool:
More scenery:
I really liked this state park. It's a little off the beaten path, but worth the extra miles.
Scenic barn:
Escalante area:
Gratuitous truck pic:
Really cool view ahead:
More scenery (notice the wet pavement...)
We went over Boulder mountain in a torrential downpour. After turning east at Fruita, we came upon this:
More great scenery:
It is very difficult choosing which pics to post and which to pass...
More:
Ever changing compositions along this road:
More:
All of the rain has filled up normally dry stream beds. I told my boy that we are kind of lucky to see water flowing in this area.
Water flowing down the massive sandstone walls:
So that's about enough for today. Do we make our rendezvous?? Do both vehicles make the long distance journey and end up at this point in the middle of nowhere at the same time?? You will have to tune in for the next installment to find out exactly what happened.
So we left the thriving metropolis of Tropic and headed east down Hwy 12. We took a side jaunt down to a scenic location:
I felt old when I had to explain what Kodachrome is, or was as the case may be. We took a side road through some camp areas and put to a massive monolith:
Remember the rain from yesterday?? We were on a dirt road going out to that point and I got out to lock the hubs as I had a sneaky suspicion that it was going to be needed. I was sneaky right on that one. The gravel surface we were on changed at a cattle guard to dirt. Clay dirt. The water had moistened the clay making mud, which was only an inch or two deep, but slicker than greased banana peels. It was a challenge keeping the truck on the road. I didn't want to spin the tires to clean them because it would tear up the trail and the tires would just pack up again. We made it out to the point and back. I stopped to take a picture on the way back. I climbed up on the roof rack and got what I think is a nice picture of the view:
Now an interesting thing happened right here. When I got back in the truck, my boy asked me where my phone was (I don't recall him ever asking that before). I said it is right here, pointing at the floor. But it wasn't there. I checked the dash, not there. I checked the end of the charging cable, not there. WTF happened to it?? I got out and looked around the truck, climbed up on the roof again, all for nothing. I was back in the truck wondering WTF I'm gonig to do now and for some reason I looked in the LH mirror and about 30 yards behind the truck, in the middle of the road, lays my phone. I jump out, run back and pick it up only to find that it is fine. No damage whatsoever. How the hell did it get back there?? Well, come to find out, that is where I locked the hubs going in and it must have dropped out of its latch and onto the ground. It just so happened I liked that spot and decided to stop and take some pictures, and my boy for whatever reason asked where my phone was at that point. Very strange sequence of events that all lined up to return my phone to me. Yay!!
There is some spectacular scenery in this place:
A natural monument to, uh, something....
Standing water and mud. Thought it looked cool:
More scenery:
I really liked this state park. It's a little off the beaten path, but worth the extra miles.
Scenic barn:
Escalante area:
Gratuitous truck pic:
Really cool view ahead:
More scenery (notice the wet pavement...)
We went over Boulder mountain in a torrential downpour. After turning east at Fruita, we came upon this:
More great scenery:
It is very difficult choosing which pics to post and which to pass...
More:
Ever changing compositions along this road:
More:
All of the rain has filled up normally dry stream beds. I told my boy that we are kind of lucky to see water flowing in this area.
Water flowing down the massive sandstone walls:
So that's about enough for today. Do we make our rendezvous?? Do both vehicles make the long distance journey and end up at this point in the middle of nowhere at the same time?? You will have to tune in for the next installment to find out exactly what happened.
I like the "water flowing down sandstone" picture. It's something that I've just barely ever seen in person.
Great job as usual! Thanks for posting 
Great job as usual! Thanks for posting
DITTO...great pics again, and the background story helps put you there too!
I actually took a bunch of pictures of water running off cliffs, down normally dry washes, etc. The wet sandstone changed colors as well when it was wet. Our travel time would have been reduced dramatically had we been able to run local dirt roads instead of having to stay on pavement. There is a lot more water to come in the next installment. Craziness...
Great job as usual! Thanks for posting
Thank you. Glad you like them!!
Thanks!! I like including some narrative to give some significance to some of the pictures. That, and, sometimes funny stuff happens along the way....
So a quick recap has us heading down the road in the rain, to a point in the middle of nowhere, to meet someone we haven't talked to in almost 24 hours who is coming from even father away than we are.
The rain has been absolutely crazy at times. Dry washes are running fast. Normally dry silt trails/roads are mud bogs or grease fests. After leaving Capitol Reef we get to Hanksville and turn south. Running along I turn my 2m radio on and am amazed that I am receiving transmissions from the person we are looking to meet up with. I try responding, but he can not receive my transmissions. Come to find out that during an investigation later on, the radio had its settings changed to a monitor only setting when I loaned it to him for chasing a race in Mexico. Anyway, receiving these transmissions is very relieving. He was coming from Phoenix and now we know he made it to the area. We are still a bit over an hour out yet and I can't tell him that we are high balling it his way. Just for the hell of it I tried my phone and of course nothing worked. So we kept on boogying south and we stopped at Hite Marina overlook:
Now, if you're thinking there is no marina in the pic, you would be absolutely correct. If you look to the left of about the center of the pic, you will see a boat launch ramp that has been extended, but no longer is in a lake. The extended years of drought has removed the lake from the area and only the Colorado River still runs through the area. A little bit off the bottom of the ramp and to the left in the pic (about where the oval patch of dark green grass is now) used to be a marina where bunches of house boats were moored. Not any more....
Looking to the left of the previous pic. Most of the green used to be under water:
This area had been hit hard with rain not too long before we got there. Large chunks of cliff had been washed or broken off and now lay on the highway that has been under-cut by the swift moving currents in the pseudo-canyon you drop altitude in:
This is a major highway in the area, not some podunk back road like we usually travel on. More debris on the road: (the large white vehicle a few vehicles ahead of us was a large bus and if you look to the left of the bus you can just make out a guy in a black shirt--he was the spotter for the bus to descend the hill)
This one is kind of difficult to see, but there are several waterfalls happening in this pic. They are all the color of the cliff, so they blend in very well:
Further down:
I like this one. Just to the right of the middle of the pic is a vertical, light colored line. This is a tall waterfall as evident by the water hitting the rock below it:
We finally make it to this bridge. Neat bridge, but that's not the significance of it. This is to be the meet up point for our other vehicle:
After all the miles and tribulations, we made it!! Both of us!!
Those of you who have been following along will recognize this blue Suburban as the "other" Suburban in my life. I've been building it for the past few years. We travel regularly with its owners, my buddy Lance and his wife. They wanted to run with us on this trip, but had other obligations so we ran our trip and when they became available mid-way through our trip, we set up our "impossible meet-up" and managed to pull it off.
We exchanged greetings and checked out the bridge for a few minutes, then loaded up and headed down the road to Natural Bridges National Monument.
We went in and found a trail that led down to a really neat bridge:
The water was running red:
We hiked down under the bridge. This is looking back up at it:
More red water:
Interesting washed out hole in the wall:
Another super neat bridge:
We got out of there and headed down the road to Bluff where we had a room waiting for us in a lake that in normal situations would be a parking lot. We got some dinner down the road and started discussing our plans for the next day.
The rain has been absolutely crazy at times. Dry washes are running fast. Normally dry silt trails/roads are mud bogs or grease fests. After leaving Capitol Reef we get to Hanksville and turn south. Running along I turn my 2m radio on and am amazed that I am receiving transmissions from the person we are looking to meet up with. I try responding, but he can not receive my transmissions. Come to find out that during an investigation later on, the radio had its settings changed to a monitor only setting when I loaned it to him for chasing a race in Mexico. Anyway, receiving these transmissions is very relieving. He was coming from Phoenix and now we know he made it to the area. We are still a bit over an hour out yet and I can't tell him that we are high balling it his way. Just for the hell of it I tried my phone and of course nothing worked. So we kept on boogying south and we stopped at Hite Marina overlook:
Now, if you're thinking there is no marina in the pic, you would be absolutely correct. If you look to the left of about the center of the pic, you will see a boat launch ramp that has been extended, but no longer is in a lake. The extended years of drought has removed the lake from the area and only the Colorado River still runs through the area. A little bit off the bottom of the ramp and to the left in the pic (about where the oval patch of dark green grass is now) used to be a marina where bunches of house boats were moored. Not any more....
Looking to the left of the previous pic. Most of the green used to be under water:
This area had been hit hard with rain not too long before we got there. Large chunks of cliff had been washed or broken off and now lay on the highway that has been under-cut by the swift moving currents in the pseudo-canyon you drop altitude in:
This is a major highway in the area, not some podunk back road like we usually travel on. More debris on the road: (the large white vehicle a few vehicles ahead of us was a large bus and if you look to the left of the bus you can just make out a guy in a black shirt--he was the spotter for the bus to descend the hill)
This one is kind of difficult to see, but there are several waterfalls happening in this pic. They are all the color of the cliff, so they blend in very well:
Further down:
I like this one. Just to the right of the middle of the pic is a vertical, light colored line. This is a tall waterfall as evident by the water hitting the rock below it:
We finally make it to this bridge. Neat bridge, but that's not the significance of it. This is to be the meet up point for our other vehicle:
After all the miles and tribulations, we made it!! Both of us!!
Those of you who have been following along will recognize this blue Suburban as the "other" Suburban in my life. I've been building it for the past few years. We travel regularly with its owners, my buddy Lance and his wife. They wanted to run with us on this trip, but had other obligations so we ran our trip and when they became available mid-way through our trip, we set up our "impossible meet-up" and managed to pull it off.
We exchanged greetings and checked out the bridge for a few minutes, then loaded up and headed down the road to Natural Bridges National Monument.
We went in and found a trail that led down to a really neat bridge:
The water was running red:
We hiked down under the bridge. This is looking back up at it:
More red water:
Interesting washed out hole in the wall:
Another super neat bridge:
We got out of there and headed down the road to Bluff where we had a room waiting for us in a lake that in normal situations would be a parking lot. We got some dinner down the road and started discussing our plans for the next day.
Awesome pics, with a very cool story as usual, Nick. Thanks for taking the time to post up the coolness. 
You need a build thread for the Blue suburban. It looks different each time it appears.
Yeah, I guess those signs are actually serious?? Same here though. I've seen plenty in my time, but never at this concentration level.
Awesome pics, with a very cool story as usual, Nick. Thanks for taking the time to post up the coolness.
Glad you enjoy them and thanks for posting up!!
You need a build thread for the Blue suburban. It looks different each time it appears.
Yeah, I don't see that ending very well. I'm 14 months behind on my own thread.... That, and, I didn't take many pics of it when I was working on it as it was his and he was going to do a thread. Let's just say I'm much more current on mine. By several years.....
So as of the last installment, we were holed up in a motel with a very viscous parking lot. We had an idea that after we met up, the next day we would head into an area not too far away and run some trails to visit some sites along the way. Having just dealt with wet Utah dirt/mud/red moly grease masquerading as dirt, I was not really liking the idea of traveling on anything other than pavement anywhere near where we are. My buddy was still thinking it would work, but eventually agreed with my assessment and another plan had to be hatched. I'm not sure where it came from, but he got the crazy idea to call the Canyonlands National Park, Islands in the Sky visitor center and inquire about weather conditions in the area. Well, come to find out, all the weather that we dealt with the past couple days had missed that end of Canyonlands completely. They had gotten some light rain a couple days ago, but nothing worth worrying about. Ok, so then he inquired as to whether they had any camping permits available for the White Rim Trail. Interestingly, some of the permit holders had heard of the rain in the area and cancelled their permits so they actually had a couple permits available. Amazing. Usually, White Rim Trail (WRT) camping permits are sold out several months in advance and here we are calling the same day and finding they are available. Wow. We'll take two. Unfortunately, the only way to get the passes is in person. No reserving them over the phone, online, nothing. They did say we could go the, IIRC, USGS field office in Moab and get some there which is probably 45min to an hour closer than the Islands in the Sky visitor center. We are nowhere near Moab at the moment and the permits are first come, first served. We've got some boogying to do, NOW. So we start boogying. We pass this old cool looking gas station and I think I take a picture of it every time:
We make it to Moab and get the permits, grab some fuel and head up to Canyonlands. We check into the visitor center and then hit the road to the WRT. It's a short jaunt, we reach it, air down and we are on our way.
Starting down Schafer trail toward the WRT. An amazing chunk of rock sluffed off the cliff sometime in history but left a really amazing scar:
Schafer Trail is really pretty amazing in and of itself. It is a shelf road hanging on the side of a sheer cliff. This is a link to Google Maps satellite view. If you move it around and zoom in a bit, you'll see blurry looking areas below the trail. They are blurry because they are vertical and difficult to focus on from outer space.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/I...05c8fa9!8m2!3d38.4597959!4d-109.8209613?hl=en
Ok, so from this point on, it was really difficult picking which pictures to post up from the literally thousands I took. Most are just generic scenery, but some may have some reason behind their capture. Anyway, on to the scenery..
I think they're following me:
We found a trail that we could follow down and reach the Colorado River. We came upon a flooded area of the trail and not wanting to deal with shoveling a truck out, I decided to park and hike around it:
Upon reaching the river we found it to be running very high and fast with tons of flotsam and jetsam in the water from the storms:
The monolith on the right is called the old woman and the wash tub (or something like that):
A lizard dragging its tail makes a neat track in the sand:
Two examples of the Suburbansaurus specimen in their natural environment:
Some neat erosion to the rock:
So we made it to our campsite, got set up and settled in for a very bug-filled evening. The sun going down treated us to some spectacular views and colors:
So that's it for today. Stay tuned to see if we meet someone famous on the trail and unintentionally engage in a race with a guy on a bicycle. We may not do that, but we might....you never know...
We make it to Moab and get the permits, grab some fuel and head up to Canyonlands. We check into the visitor center and then hit the road to the WRT. It's a short jaunt, we reach it, air down and we are on our way.
Starting down Schafer trail toward the WRT. An amazing chunk of rock sluffed off the cliff sometime in history but left a really amazing scar:
Schafer Trail is really pretty amazing in and of itself. It is a shelf road hanging on the side of a sheer cliff. This is a link to Google Maps satellite view. If you move it around and zoom in a bit, you'll see blurry looking areas below the trail. They are blurry because they are vertical and difficult to focus on from outer space.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/I...05c8fa9!8m2!3d38.4597959!4d-109.8209613?hl=en
Ok, so from this point on, it was really difficult picking which pictures to post up from the literally thousands I took. Most are just generic scenery, but some may have some reason behind their capture. Anyway, on to the scenery..
I think they're following me:
We found a trail that we could follow down and reach the Colorado River. We came upon a flooded area of the trail and not wanting to deal with shoveling a truck out, I decided to park and hike around it:
Upon reaching the river we found it to be running very high and fast with tons of flotsam and jetsam in the water from the storms:
The monolith on the right is called the old woman and the wash tub (or something like that):
A lizard dragging its tail makes a neat track in the sand:
Two examples of the Suburbansaurus specimen in their natural environment:
Some neat erosion to the rock:
So we made it to our campsite, got set up and settled in for a very bug-filled evening. The sun going down treated us to some spectacular views and colors:
So that's it for today. Stay tuned to see if we meet someone famous on the trail and unintentionally engage in a race with a guy on a bicycle. We may not do that, but we might....you never know...
Excellent pictures as always.
So does your son have some sixth sense about your phone?
Do you plan to swap in a grill like your friends so you can put LED trail lights in it? Or maybe its already done and we haven't seen it yet?
So does your son have some sixth sense about your phone?
Do you plan to swap in a grill like your friends so you can put LED trail lights in it? Or maybe its already done and we haven't seen it yet?
awesome stuff as always man. Thanks for sharing.
You need to submit the high rez version of this pic for the calendar. Just beautiful.
You need to submit the high rez version of this pic for the calendar. Just beautiful.
awesome stuff as always man. Thanks for sharing.
You need to submit the high rez version of this pic for the calendar. Just beautiful.
Yes, it is definitely a calendar shot.
ekajkrats
1/2 ton status
Thank you for sharing. Your commentary is awesome.
Wow, spectacular views! We definitely gotta make a trip out there.
Thank you!!
Not that I know of. He has never asked about my phone prior or since that I can recall. It was such a strange situation.
No and no. I do have some Rigid Industries LED assemblies for it, but haven't had a chance to try fitting them to the truck yet.
awesome stuff as always man. Thanks for sharing.
You need to submit the high rez version of this pic for the calendar. Just beautiful.
Thanks, I'll see what I can do.
Yes, it is definitely a calendar shot.
You're just piling on...
Thanks!! Glad you like the chatter.
It is an amazing place. This trip was really neat for my boy (as well as the rest of us), but for my boy, everything we saw was better than the last ting we saw, culminating in this run. It is literally like driving around inside the Grand Canyon with some side journeys through Monument Valley. It is absolutely impossible to capture the grandeur of any given area of this place in a picture or even a series of pictures. I have seen trip report after trip report of this place but until I ran it for myself I had no appreciation for how spectacular the area actually is. The trail runs basically a level layer of White Rim Sandstone and zig zags around large canyons that have eroded back up into finger canyons that the road skirts around with giant red rock cliffs forming a wall to the other direction. This has been one of the most difficult posts to do because there are so many fantastic pictures.
Great stuff as always!
Thanks man!!
