Summer Trip

Now that the kids are home from school, we have exactly five days before Christian has to go back to work. We thought we would have at least a week. We hoped it would be about a week and a half actually, but Rialto is starting a week earlier than last year. I don't know how they get away with that. I remember when our girls had to go back to school at the end of August instead of September and they just keep moving it back. Summer vacation is no longer almost three months. It is only two months now. Why are the kids and parents, not to mention the teachers up in arms about that?! Between Christian's dwindling summers and BYU Idaho's weird schedule, we barely have time together anymore. We are not very happy about any of it.

Anyway, on day one, we spent the entire time getting ready for our big summer trip. Caitlyn had to change the oil on her XJ. Christian walked her through it last time, but she never actually did it herself, so we saved that until she got back to do...under Christian's supervision, of course. Our plan was to drive both the XJ and the TJ on this trip. They are the most capable vehicles but do not fit a ton of gear. Christian also wanted to take the the TJ with the top and doors off.

The rest of the day was spent packing and preparing meals and stuff for the trip. It's quite an ordeal.

On day two, we got up and packed our remaining items, namely personal items, refrigerated items and snacks. We then drove to Lancaster to pick up Ty, Caitlyn's boyfriend. We met briefly with his mother. Unfortunately, because of our tight schedule, we had to start our trip on Sunday so we missed his father who was at church early for meetings. 

We then headed up to Coyote Flats. It's the same place we went last year, but we really liked it and it met most of our other requirements. It is relatively remote, not too far, and fairly high in elevation so that it would not be too hot.

When we got near the trailhead, we had Caitlyn and Ty take turns driving the TJ as we knew they would have more fun in it. Ty was a little wary of driving it as he has never been off-road in a vehicle before and he also was afraid of damaging her dad's vehicle. The road itself was pretty uneventful. The trail is supposed to be rated "difficult," but since it was so damaged last year, the forest service must have fixed the road because now I would rate it as "moderate" at best and barely that. I think they fixed it a little too well because the other downside with the trail being easier is that more people find it now accessible which makes it more crowded, which will eventually make it more polluted and damaged.

Overall, it was a lot dryer than last year, so there were less wildflowers, but also less mosquitos! We camped at our old campsite, which is nice and big, but unfortunately not quite as flat as we would like.

Since we weren't doing much except traveling this day, we went all out on dinner. I had made Indian curry and some rice back at home a couple days before and froze it to help it travel for the trip. The night before, I made the dough for naan and retarded it in the refrigerator. After setting up camp, Christian helped me to portion out and then flatten out the dough to cook. Unfortunately, we forgot to pack our cast iron pan, oil and flour, so we had to make due. It was a pain in the butt, but surprisingly, they turned out pretty good!

On day three, we kind of had a mixed bag of activities. Originally, the kids were supposed to go on a hike, but no one was sure of what they wanted to do. We were really feeling the high altitude and wasn't sure if we should just acclimate for the day. We wanted to leave our camp ground set up but quite a few vehicles were milling around and driving by, so we were afraid to leave it unsupervised. 

In the end, Christian sent Ty and Caitlyn off to scout out a trail by themselves in the TJ. I guess they turned around when they hit someone else's campsite. After they came back, the rest of us took off in the Jeep while Caitlyn and Ty stayed behind to watch the camp. We took a different trail as we didn't want to run into the people at the campsite. We took a loop to scout out the lakes I wanted to see. It was a lot longer and rougher than we had expected.

The first lake we came upon doesn't really have a name. There were little frogs all around it. We continued down the trail a bit and ran into another lake. This next one was super neat. It's called Funnel Lake. The snow falls on the surrounding mountains. As it melts, the water drains down and fills the lake but at the edge of the lake, as it overflows,  a small waterfall is created and the water streams down the rocks and disappears into some underground creek.  It does not have a pool of water at the bottom, the rocks surrounding it is basically dry. It's strange but I could not find any information on it.

It was super neat but we knew that we had been gone too long and decided to head back when another vehicle pulled into the area. 

We did stop to take a quick shot of the flora and fauna in the area. 

We finally got back and had a quick lunch while we discussed what we should do next. Christian was tired and the kids had been sitting around too long, so I suggested that they should just go on their hike. I actually jokingly said that they could just walk over to the base of Sugarloaf and head up since Caitlyn kept insisting that Sugarloaf was just a little morning jaunt. We climbed up there the first time we came to Coyote Flats and I guess she remembers it being a lot easier than I did but we parked part way up, so it was a bit easier. Christian decided to just lie down and take a nap, so the kids decided that thy would just walk up from camp as I had suggested. They took nothing with them but a bottle of water each. 

Christian woke up a short time later and went after them. We figured he would drive up back up and maybe meet them at the top. When Christian took off, I could see the kids were still heading towards the base so I thought that they would see each other and he would take them the rest of the way and they would go together. The next time I looked over, the kids had disappeared and so had Christian, so I didn't know if they met up. I stayed at camp and relaxed and read my book since my knee certainly isn't up for a hike. After a while, I decided to collect some firewood for the evening as everyone would be tired when they got back.

They were gone a lot longer than I expected. I started to get a little worried that they didn't meet up at all. But they did make it to the top.

It has a great view of the Palisades, but because all of the fires, none of our views were all that clear. From what the kids tell me, the reason they disappeared from view shortly after Christian took off after them was because the landscape dipped into this steep trough before getting to the base of the mountain. You can't see it from camp, it looks fairly flat from my vantage point. Overall, they didn't pick a very good line up the mountain...not sure there was a good one from where they started. They bush wacked up quite a bit of it, traversing a lot of rocks and boulders. Needless to say, Christian beat them to the top and waited for them with his camera and climbing on some of the bigger boulders to pass the time. Caitlyn was excited to find the peak registry. She wanted to find her entry from 2021. Ty was pretty skeptical of their climb as he's doesn't really hike up things without a trail. Emily was generally disgruntled and unimpressed with the hike. They went back down the way we climbed up the first time and Christian went back the way he went up to get the Jeep and pick them up. They definitely like the trail they went down better than the one the used to get up there. They piled into the Jeep and came back to camp. All of the kids are pale from Idaho and came back sunburnt. Emily actually got burnt before from riding around in the Jeep. Ty got burnt the worst as he didn't have anything covering his neck and ears. Christian had to introduce him to the shemaugh and he ended up wearing it for most of the rest of the trip.

On the morning of day four, we took down our camp, had breakfast and discussed what we would do next.   We were going to show them the lakes we found but Ty and Caitlyn decided that since we already saw it, that they were fine moving to the next area. First we went down to Bishop to get the kids some aloe for their sunburns. We also picked up some more sunscreen and ibuprofen too. We got then got some gas and icy drinks and headed over to Mono Lake. Ty had never been there.

Christian stayed with the Jeeps while the kids went to go see it as it is just a short trail but there were tons of people there. We've been there many times and Christian had no desire to be amongst all the riff raff. I went mainly to take a few pictures of the kids. It was hard to do as they were either standing right next to me or among other people. Some volunteer from the park service was there with a monocular trained on an Osprey nest and we all got to look into it. That was pretty neat.

Afterwards, we headed up to the backside of the lake. We have a campsite that overlooks the lake that we've been to several times. On the way there, we decided to take Ty to Bodie as he hadn't been to a ghost town before either. We tried to take a shortcut but the park services has kind of blocked off the back entrances. We found out why when we eventually got there. They are now charging $8 bucks a person to walk around in their little ghost town. That's $40 for all of us. We offered to have Caitlyn just go in with Ty and we'd wait for them outside. It isn't worth that much to go see it again but they declined. They didn't think it was worth it to go in regardless, so we just headed back out to our original destination...our campsite for the night.

There had been quite a few falling stars on the past couple of nights, so it was nice to sit out and just watch the stars.

On the morning of the fifth, and last day, we broke camp and headed back home. We had a long way to go and Ty's family wanted to have dinner with us when we brought him back, so we had to make it back at a reasonable hour. We were a little concerned about having dinner there after four days of camping, but they insisted that it would be fine so we accepted their invitation.

We stopped by Alabama Hills briefly for lunch and to show Ty around a little bit.

We didn't have too crazy of an adventure, but Ty survived relatively unscathed. Luckily his sunburn toned down some before he got back home as did the girls', but I think they will peel some before it's done.

Ty's mom made us a big pork chop dinner with potatoes and apples. That was pretty fantastic after being out camping for the past four days. We got to get to know his family a little bit, although I think they mostly talked to us rather than with Caitlyn. She wasn't contributing more than she had to. Mostly Christian and Ty's dad chatted if I'm gonna be honest! But we were happy to find out that they are very normal people and we got along pretty well. Ty's mom also made this really fancy cheesecake with raspberry sauce. It was really good too but I felt like I was going to have to roll out the door by the end.

We left a little later than we intended but it was good to get to know them. Of course, we ran into some problems with road closures and stuff in trying to get home again so it took us even longer to get back. We were all dirty and exhausted and Christian had to get up early in the morning to start work the next day.

July - Part 2

We've been taking a lot of video and stuff on our day trips, trying to get back into recording our adventures as we hope to make a neat one of the trip with the kids at the end of the month. However, we have been having problems with the 5K video from the newest GoPro. Christian had been using proxies in order to edit his videos but at some point, they stopped working or the program wouldn't use them or something. It's been a while since we have upgraded his computer, so during Prime Day, we ended up ordering a new mother board, processor, memory and fans for his computer. Later, we ended up getting him a new power supply as well. Maybe next year or so we will be able to get him a new video card as well, but this new system is at least useable for now.

The XJ got a transmission oil change, tope engine clean and new spark plugs. Everything seems to be running well now and sounding great except it doesn't start up right away when the engine is cold. We are hoping that it is just a matter of retraining the computer since we haven't driven it at all since it was parked and had a bunch of things changed on it.

We went on one last day trip the week the kids were supposed to get out of school. This time, we were supposed to go on a trail to Surprise Canyon, but when we got there, we decided to just go explore the Inyo Mountains instead. When we got there, there were a bunch of idiots doing the Badwater 135. It's supposed to be one of the world's hardest races. 135 miles from Badwater (the lowest point in the Continental United States) to Whitney Portal (the trailhead for the highest point in the Continental United States), during one of the hottest times of the year. Anyway, they were running up our road. The sides of the road was covered in their "support cars." And there were a bunch of other volunteers or media people standing around in the middle of the street when we got there. We were pretty irritated. 

At the same time, we saw a bunch of F-18 fighter jets diving into the Northern Panamint Valley. We ended up taking a side road towards where they were doing that, but by the time we got through the throng of people and aired down, they finished their diving approaches there and it was getting seriously hot. My Shemaugh wasn't doing enough for me. I wasn't feeling too good and I wasn't trying to run some insane race through it. We ended up airing back up the Jeep and heading back up into the Inyo Mountains where we were headed before we got side tracked by all the people. It was a lot cooler up there. It was such a relief!We didn't have an exact trail or destination. We were just exploring to see what there was out there and maybe see if we can find the back road to Cero Gordo. We checked the maps after we got back and figured that we just barely missed it. The road we were on would have taken us there but we thought that it was going too far in the wrong direction, so we turned around to try another branch of the trail. The GPS coordinates showed that the right branch of our trail that would have taken us where we wanted to go was just around the corner from where we turned around! We ended up at an old mine where the road seemed to stop.

We turned back and took another side trail to see if it would take us back to the highway as it was getting late and we didn't want to get back as late as we have been from these day trips.

Our road took us into the Santa Rosa Flats which was really nice. We startled some coyotes as we drove by but it was beautiful and no one else besides the coyotes were there.

Eventually, we made it back out to the road, only to once again, run into the folks running the race towards Lone Pine and the end of their race at the Mt. Whitney trailhead. We had originally thought to go into Lone Pine to pick up dinner, but as the runners would be running along parts of the 395 to get there, we decided to just head back home and maybe pick up a snack somewhere along the way.

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At the end of the semester, one of Caitlyn's professors offered her a position as a TA next semester for the class she was finishing. Caitlyn was kind of on the fence about accepting the position. It's a business class, not computer science and apparently Caitlyn had her before in a lower level business class. As she aced them both and remembered Caitlyn from her first class, she must have liked her enough to offer the position to her. After much contemplation, she finally got back to the professor about accepting. I think she was secretly hoping the professor offered the position to someone else already. She was a bit apprehensive about the amount of reading she would have to do to help grade papers and being a TA in an upper level business class where the students may be older than her. Christian and I thought it would be great experience for her and knew that it would be good for her resume and possible other jobs as the professor is a department head and can get her more hours or positions if she was interested. She is also concerned about her work load next semester and didn't want too many hours, just in case, but she will have a job and some income, which will be good.

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The kids' last day of finals was on Wednesday. They finished packing and cleaning and headed out Thursday morning. They landed in St. George by late afternoon and spent a bit of time with Austin and his family. They got to go swimming.

Pictures courtesy of Caitlyn

The next morning, they stopped by to see their Aunt in Mesquite. While they were there, Christian looked up the road conditions for them and found that there was a major snafu on the 15 outside of Nevada. It was actually completely closed in a couple of places. The worst was a semi-truck carrying lithium batteries that was on fire near Baker. It had actually been burning since 6:am with no end in site. We had to have them leave and take a round-a-bout way home. 

However, just outside of Las Vegas, they had some car trouble. Emily's Jeep was running rough and her check engine light came on. It was 110 degrees F out and Emily had to go out and troubleshoot her Jeep as  our young girls were stranded on the side of the road outside of Vegas! We were so stressed out. Luckily, Christian gave her a code reader and they were able to figure out the problem. There was a problem with the intake air temperature sensor and Christian had her see if it was loose or disconnected. He had to located the general area for her by searching on the internet. It was indeed disconnected. The idiots at the Jeep dealership that did the work on her engine reconnected it it but obviously didn't snap it in and it jostled loose. We were so stressed out. To add insult to injury, her aunt had stocked them up on cold drinks and she had a giant lemonade on her door. When she went out in the heat to frantically figure out what was wrong with the vehicle, it got knocked over and spilled all over the footwell on the driver's side so it was all a sticky mess for the rest of the trip.

After she reconnected the IAT sensor, the car ran fine but she couldn't clear the code. She cleaned up the car as best she could at the time and they basically had to take the 95 down through Nevada and then across on the 62 through 29 Palms. That's the simplified explanation. They actually had to switch on many roads to get back. Luckily, they were in the car together and one can help navigate while the other drove. Christian and I were on pins and needles and couldn't do anything except sit at our computers, monitoring their progress home for the rest of the afternoon/evening. Their shortest day of driving ended up longer than the day before!

July - Part 1

This past month was somewhat more eventful than usual. Both in a good way and a bad way. First, we came back from our trip, only to be sick for the next 2 or 3 weeks. That definitely sucked. So we didn't do a ton the first couple of weeks of the month. Because of time limitations and the amount of work that needed to be done, Christian still forced himself to go out almost every morning to work on Caitlyn's car. First, he worked on the alignment of the vehicle. We found that the front axle was not as bent as we had thought and we ended up putting shims in instead of swapping axles out. That would be way too much work than we have time to tackle (especially when we aren't feeling well and only have until noon each day when it gets way too hot to do anything).  We did find out though, that the alignment was a LOT off of what it should have been and that was the reason it ate through the tires so badly.

Christian also checked the fuel pump but did not find anything wrong with it, so the other really big thing we had to tackle was pulling out the wiring harness again since the XJ was having problems on the Cedar Pockets trail last month, which was the real reason for the stalling problem we were having. He found that the crappy wiring loom we got from the auto store and Amazon, failed miserably against the heat of the engine and transmission. We think that the wires got damaged and was shorting out when we were jostling it down the trail. Christian had to take it all apart and inspect every inch of it. He ended up replacing a bunch of short segments of it, then re-wrapping it and covering it with proper nylon loom. In addition, he got special heat shielding for the hottest and most damaged part of it next to the transmission. 

We also found out that the valve cover gasket was leaking pretty badly, so he had to replace that. 

During the afternoons, when it was too hot to work outside, and when Christian didn't have to do research on or do internet searches for replacement car parts, he went back to work on his Voron. He got the print head done and started on the electronics.

After a couple of weeks of sickness, we were healthy enough to try to take a day off from the Jeep "mines" to actually go drive it...or at least drive the TJ. We replaced the oil pressure sensor that we had a problem with. In addition, we got an air dam to cut down on some of the most turbulent wind problems we had when we have a very bad head wind in the TJ with the top down. We drove out to San Bernardino to investigate the Pilot Rock Trail. Unfortunately, the Vista Fire obscured most of our views.

The Pilot Rock Trail itself was also a bit disappointing. There was a lot of garbage along the trail plus some graffiti. It's the reason I usually avoid the San Gabriel Mountains...too close to all the city riff raff that shouldn't be out in the mountains in the first place, as they do not enjoy or respect the wilderness. They destroyed much of the San Gabriel Mountain areas years ago and it looks like they have moved on to  the San Bernardino Mountains. 

It was a fairly short trail though, so we went back through to take the Willow Creek trail over to Deep Creek. We found a somewhat challenging route that gave access to a nice little secluded spot at Deep Creek. It was really beautiful! Don't get me wrong, there was still a bunch of trash there, but not anything that did it too much damage yet. It was really hot out, so we dunked ourselves in the creek. It was really nice. There were a bunch of small fish in there too and they didn't seem to mind us very much as they would just swim around our ankles.

We definitely wanted to bring the girls back here. We knew Emily especially would love this place. We even planned to bring garbage bags to help clean up the area to try to discourage people from doing even more damage. However, we found out about a week or week and a half later that due to the fire, which they still haven't put out, they closed this trail. What's more, they have closed it for the next year! Why? I have no idea. I can tell you that it has nothing to do with the fire the closed it under as the fire is about 20 miles away on the other side of the 15 freeway. We are not happy about it at all.

Christian continued working on Caitlyn's XJ. We had to order more wires and loom which we did not have sizes for in-stock. Meanwhile, Christian fixed an exhaust leak on the TJ. The next week, we took off for another day trip. This time we went to Hunter Mountain and Hidden Valley in Death Valley. We stopped by to look at the Boxcar Cabin while we aired down the tires, but we kind of regretted it because the ground was littered with nails all over the place. We were lucky that we didn't get a flat.

It was a beautiful day. There were still wild flowers out and it wasn't too hot as we were up in the higher elevations, for the most part.

We have found that if we wrap our head with a tactical shemaugh, soaked in water, we can endure the heat a lot better. It might have gotten us in a bit of trouble, as we were doing so well, that we decided to drive through the lower valley to exit Death Valley instead of going back out the way we came in. It was quite a bit hotter down there. We stopped by to see the Ubehebe Crater, which was pretty neat since we've past by from a distance before but I've never stopped by to see it. You used to have to hike a little way to see it back when Christian went with his dad many years ago, but they have built a road and parking lot right up to it now. We aired back up here.

We drove by Badwater and would have stopped to see it better but as there were still a surprising amount of people visiting here, we drove on.

By the time we got to Jubilee Pass on our way out of the park, the car was overheating a bit (as were we). We pulled over briefly to let it cool down and refresh our shemaughs.

The sun was setting but we still had quite a few hours before we would make it back home, so after we cooled down, we continued on our way home.