As those of you who have been reading these blog posts know, I'm heading north to Alaska with my travel trail I've named "Discovery" --- well, "Discovery II", to be exact, as I traded in the first Discovery, also a Lance 1685 travel trailer, in early 2015 to get a newer version with a setup for 4-season living and solar panels for boondocking, i.e., living off the grid. I have a few backpacks planned along the way, so as it's been a few years since I've carried a backpack with tent and sleeping bag, I thought I'd set the tent up inside my house. Why? Because the tent, a North Face Tadpole single person one, hasn't been used in years, and I wanted to make sure it was still in working order. And I also needed to know if I remembered how to set it up; I didn't want to find out that I forgot when I was out in the woods, and spend an hour with tent poles flying in all directions. As you can see from the photo, all's well that ends well --
The sleeping bag, backpack, and sleeping pad are still good to go, too, but I will have to figure out how to use the MSR stove as I bought it, but never got around to actually using it. But the backcountry areas I'm considering going into are challenging and beautiful. I've been to a few before -- NE Nevada's Jarbidge Mountains, the Ruby Mtns south of Elko, Mt. Moriah in the Snake Range just north of Great Basin Nat'l Park and, time and weather permitting, the glorious Convict Canyon near Mammoth Lakes in the eastern Sierra -- but I'm also keeping my options open as to new hikes, too. My last backpack was about 10 years ago, and I camped at the trailheads in my truck's camper shell, but time and age have made climbing out of the back of the truck early in the morning a task that my back no longer handles as well as before, so it will be a real joy to come back to a house on wheels, with an actual shower and four walls. Can you tell I'm really looking forward to this trip? And another thing that's changed from those backpacking days of long ago -- I live in the fabulous Chiricahuas, and have Faranuf. Before I was living in southern California along the coast, and it was never fun to run the "freeway gauntlet" of crossing the LA basin to get home. Now, I live in an area where there's no traffic, and it's easy-peasy to get back home, though a little bit longer of a drive. But knowing I'm coming back to Portal and the east side of the Chiricahuas makes any minor inconveniences worthwhile.
The day before I took off, it's as if the weather was saying "don't go, look at what you'll be missing!" --
And the sunset was even more spectacular --
But I know it will still be there, waiting for me...
Day One of North To Alaska was, well, uneventful, which as I'm just driving to Tucson, about 150 miles to the west, is a good thing. I left Faranuf at 6am --
There was, thankfully, no dust storms in the San Simon Valley along Interstate 10. If it's windy, the dust from empty land, along with acres of pistachio and pecan orchards along the interstate, can create conditions where there are actually signs along the road warning to pull over and turn off your lights if the warning lights are blinking. And now that much of the land is being ripped up to make room for MORE water-intensive orchards, there's even more dirt to be blown around. But on this day, it was calm, and the views ranged for miles. The 2 rest stops along the interstate before Benson have been closed for months, but now they've been reopened; here's my favorite (because of the scenery, not the quality of the bathrooms), in the Dragoon Mountains' Texas Canyon --
I had to stop in Tucson to have a leaky propane line fixed. (I just found out it's the propane regulator.) When I was at Texas's High Island I'd noticed a propane smell near the propane tanks, then a hissing. Not good. I futzed with the lines and the hissing stopped, but apparently it was still leaking, and I may have been lucky that nothing happened on the long trip back home like, theoretically, an explosion. When I lent Discovery to Rob and Deb, my friends who own the Rodeo Tavern, Rob, in doing a pre-trip check, found it was still leaking, so he couldn't use the propane tanks. Luckily they weren't out with the trailer for a long time, but I HAD to get it taken care of before the Alaska trip, otherwise no stove, and, without electricity, no refrigerator. So about a week before I made an appointment at Lazy Days RV in Tucson to have it checked and repaired. And Lazy Days is a Lance dealer, too; the closest to me in Portal, though still over 150 miles away. It's a huge place; whenever I have to get the trailer serviced, I drive around trying to find the service center, which is a pain when you're pulling the trailer, but Lazy Days is as big, and as planned-out, as a small city, so in no time I dropped the trailer, told the service rep what I needed to have done -- and now I'm at my niece's apartment, doing this blog entry. I'll be picking up Discovery tomorrow (Thursday) morning, and head out for the REAL start of North To Alaska With Discovery. Meanwhile, I smell a Panda Express down the road. Well there isn't one in Portal...
No comments:
Post a Comment