December 15, 2021. It's been three months since the last rig review, and in that time I've put another 10,000 miles on the Tacoma. With a nearly catastrophic failure, as well as a few great successes, it's time to dive into the good and the bad from the last several trips: Last Minute Rush (Oct 2021) Lowest Peak in the Park - aka Into the Owlsheads (Nov 2021) Highest Peak in the Park - aka Pushing into the Panamints (Nov 2021) Back for More (Dec 2021) Seemingly solved from previous Rig Reviews The Axle Housing is Cracked Oil Leaking from…
5 CommentsTag: Last MInute Rush
After two nights of restless sleep, I slept well at the Chemung Mine. Legend has it that a ghost haunts the property, but luckily for me it was a Friday night - one of the six nights each week that the poltergeist is a peacefully content. Apparently if I'd been there on a Saturday evening, things could have gotten interesting. I awoke only once during the night - right around 2:00am - when a flurry of snow was passing overhead, the tick, tick, tick of ice on the rain fly, rousing me from my sleep. I'm never happy about the…
12 CommentsHaving not gotten much sleep the night before, I thought I'd conk out and sleep through the night here on my ridge in the Pine Grove Hills. No such luck, however - instead I wandered in and out of sleep, a little worried that the wind and rain would pick up during the night. Neither of those things happened, and a few minutes before my alarm went off, I decided I'd read a bit as I waited for color to spill across the sky. With views to both the east and west, I knew that this could be a primo…
10 CommentsIt was a little before 2:00pm when I rejoined the main road through Mason Valley and headed north. I wasn't sure how far I'd get, but the views were great and though I wished for a little more blue sky, I really had no complaints as I crested a hill near the southern end of the valley, a grove of cottonwoods following the creek, below. Into the mountains. Always fun to zoom in and compress the background a little bit in situations like this. Apparently, I took a lot of photos here. A few minutes later I was driving into…
3 CommentsFor the last eight months or so, I've been trying to get us down to the area along the Nevada-California border to explore the area west of Walker Lake (Nevada) and northeast of Mono Lake (California). One of the highlights - I hoped - would be summiting Mt. Patterson. For some reason, it seems that each time I made a plan, something would come up - another trip, bad weather, all the National Forests in California closing - that kind of thing. And, as it got later in the year, I'd pretty much written off the trip - after-all, by…
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