I was stir crazy. I'd been back from our didn't-go-quite-as-planned trip to Colorado for two weeks and it was time to get out again. And this time I wanted it to be with @mrs.turbodb. Knowing that she'd be unable to resist a trip back to the Alvord Desert - and for our first time, Steens Mountain - I knew that would be our destination. It'd be a relatively short trip - four days total - but I figured that even at that, we could do a couple things we'd wanted to do for quite some time: We could get to…
Leave a CommentTag: trip start
First post of a trip, good place to start reading.
September 15, 2019. It was 2:00pm when I parted ways with Pops in eastern California - our relaxing trip into the Sierras just the start of a 3 week journey for me. The next two weeks would be adventuring to - and then through - Wyoming and Colorado with some of the normal folks - Mike @Digiratus and Monte @Blackdawg (and his dad Steve), and also a new face to me - Brett @Squeaky Penguin. I've been wanting to meet Brett for quite some time now, so I was definitely looking forward to the opportunity. But here I am getting…
Leave a Comment
Well, it's not every day that I get to go camping with my dad, and it's not that often that I camp in the same spot for more than one night. I mean, I guess we camped in the same spot two nights in a row on the Idaho BDR when a brake caliper seized up, but that was clearly an exceptional situation! Plus, after last year's adventure - my first time experiencing one of Pops favorite spots in the Sierras - I knew this was a place that I wanted to return. Likely, for years to come. It really…
Leave a Comment
August 27, 2019. Most of the trips I do require a full day - or more - of freeway driving just to reach the trailhead, so you can imagine my delight when we decided to do a trip on the west coast. Sort-of. At least, our meeting location was only four hours away - in the tiny little community of Mazama, WA. From there, we'd head north - to British Columbia, Canada - where we planned to run The Whipsaw Trail and then make our way north and west to Molybdenite Peak - before turning south again for the United States.…
8 Comments
July 31 - Aug 1, 2019. We hadn't been back from our adventure on the Idaho Backcountry Discovery Route (IDBDR) long when we decided that we should really get out with the child. After all, we had this nice 4Runner for her to sleep in and the last time we'd gone had been - to our surprise - the "best day of [her] life," according to her. Hoping to best our previous success, we figured that this time, we'd pair the camping with a nice restaurant for dinner and some pick-your-own peaches the following day. Oh, no naive we were to…
1 Comment
We've run two Backcountry Discovery Routes (BDRs) in the past - Oregon in 2017 and Washington in 2018. So, when it came to planning for this year, we decided that we'd run what we thought would be one of the coolest BDRs out there - Idaho. Little did we realize that it would mean spending most of July in the beautiful state - we had, after all, just finished exploring the southeast and then the central parts of Idaho a couple weeks before we'd planned to embark on this south-to-north traverse of the state. Not that we were complaining - this was clearly,…
2 Comments
Every year, during the month of October, a really great thing happens at Microsoft. Teams of all sizes - from just a few folks, to organizations thousands strong - rally around a common cause. Every year, that rallying cry gets stronger - millions of dollars stronger than just the year before. And every one of those millions is matched by the company - dollar for dollar, as high as it can go. Last year, over $163 million dollars and 760,000 volunteer hours were donated to various charities and causes that employees cared about. That is the power of the Microsoft…
Leave a Comment
July 4, 2019. We always seem to get our trucks reasonably level when we're out in the woods, but something about the level driveway we'd parked in made for an extremely easy night sleep. Or maybe we were just tired from our previous three days - gallivanting around the southeast parts of Idaho. At any rate, we were up late (for us) when Ben @m3bassman opened the garage door at 8:00am - our planned departure time giving us plenty of time to get dressed, eat breakfast, and get the tent put away. In fact, it was still a few minutes…
Leave a Comment
The day started out just like any other. Well, any other where the previous included a 12-hour drive from home to the starting point of our next adventure. So let's back up for a moment... We'd arrived at Bruneau Canyon Overlook just after 10:00pm the day before - our drive from home behind us, capped off by dinner with Ben @m3bassman, Kirsten, Mikey @pizzaviolence, and Amber at their local taco joint - Enrique's - a place they'd recommended a year before when we spent Two-and-a-Half Days in Idaho. Having grown up in California and with a few great taco trucks at…
11 Comments
Having wrapped up the dual battery install approximately 12 hours before departure time, we were off the next morning for a couple relaxed days of camping and hiking in one of our favorite areas of the Cascades, near Leavenworth, WA. Not only would this be the first trip with the redundant power - a good thing since we didn't plan on much driving, it would also be the first time we'd see the newly painted wheels in the great outdoors. Well, those look great, I think. We arrived at camp just after 1:30pm - on a Wednesday. This is key,…
6 Comments
An astute reader may recall that we'd headed east a few days before Memorial Day - not just to explore Hells Canyon, but to meet up with Mike @Digiratus, Monte @Blackdawg, and Devin @MissBlackdawg. At least, those were the folks we knew; we were also rendezvousing with @BabyTaco Gage and his wife, and a couple of their friends - long overdue if you ask me. From our current location at Hells Canyon Dam, it was some 5 hours north to Lewiston, ID, where we'd all planned to meet for lunch, so we were up early - for sunrise if it'd…
1 Comment
Summer in the Pacific Northwest is hard to beat. So, I wouldn't blame you for wondering why - with a week of sun and 75°F in store before Memorial Day - we were headed for the inclement weather of the Oregon-Idaho border and Hells Canyon. So let's start there. In what I believe to be a tradition that I've stumbled into, Monte @Blackdawg and Mike @Digiratus generally get together for a trip every Memorial Day, and this year the plan was go meet up in Lewiston, ID for a few days of puttering around and enjoying ourselves in the outdoors.…
Leave a Comment
With all the recent work on the 4Runner, I wasn't the only one who wanted to put it all to the test. Upon seeing the storage/sleeping platform, @mini.turbodb had declared, "We need to go camping right away!" I don't know if she's been well-trained or it was just a wrinkle in the space-time continuum, but it was music to my ears. So, we found the first weekend that we possibly could and scheduled a single night camping trip to one of our favorite "quick getaway" spots outside Leavenworth, WA. And then we watched the weather. As the weekend drew near,…
2 Comments
April 25, 2019. It'd been several weeks since my last trip and as usual that meant I had a bad case of the shakes. Spring is such a frustrating time from an adventure perspective - the weather seems so nice, and yet everywhere interesting is still covered in snow. And, the winter staple - the desert - is getting hot. You can imagine my delight when a check of the weather showed that the Alvord Desert - a place we'd visited for the first time last October - was going to have weather in the mid-70's. From my perspective, we hadn't…
1 Comment
Just before our two trips to Anza-Borrego, Monte @Blackdawg reached out to see if we were interested in a late-March trip to Canyonlands and some hiking of a few nearby slot canyons - perhaps even some that we'd attempted in our F.U.Rain trip last year. Not really realizing how close it was (5 days) to the completion of our trip, and definitely not realizing the work that would need to be done to the truck between trips, I responded in the only way I knew how. Interested.turbodb As it turned out, it was a mad dash between trips. I had…
2 Comments
Oh man, was this going to be fun. A trip like no other (so far). A trip with a twist. A trip that was actually two. Let me explain. For a while now, Anza Borrego Desert State Park in California has been on my list of places to explore. Like Death Valley - which we've visited quite a bit and recently hiked for three days - it's a great place to visit during the winter because temperatures in the summer can get rather unbearable - so much so that certain roads in the park are closed from mid-June to September. The…
Leave a Comment
The Day the Tent Closed...with Us Inside Before it even began, the trip was off to a rough start. See, we'd planned - if you can call deciding to go on a trip just a few days prior to departure, "planning" - to leave two weeks earlier, but inclement weather caused us to push the trip back. Even so, the weather report was iffy just a few days before the new date - something we decided we'd ignore so we could get out and explore. Plus, by pushing the date, we'd gotten a couple of friends - Ben @m3bassman, Zane @Speedytech7,…
6 Comments
With Christmas vacation in full swing, we've been having a great time. There are lots of new toys to play with around the house, there are activities to keep us busy during the day, and the newly introduced household chores - and associated weekly allowance - have @mini.turbodb in high spirits. Oh, to be eight years old. But, when @mrs.turbodb suggested that we get bundled up and head up into the mountains to get in some sledding and enjoy the snow, the child was having none of it. "I hate the snow, it's too cold." - The words spilled out…
2 Comments
Excited to test out the rear shock relocation I'd just completed with the help of Zane @Speedytech7, I headed north toward Las Vegas to pick up @mrs.turbodb who was flying in for a two-ish day trip along the Old Mojave Road - a historically significant trail through the Mojave National Preserve in southern California. Passenger acquired, we made a quick dinner pit stop at The Habit Burger - a place we'd never been before but had heard had amazing burgers at drastically low prices ($3.50). The burgers were actually quite good - I'd recommend them over any other fast-food burger -…
3 Comments
"Let's go somewhere." said @mrs.turbodb after I'd been home just a short time from my previous trip. That was of course fine with me, and so we set about finding a place to go. It was going to be cold and rainy on the Washington coast, so we set out looking for somewhere warm. Now, we only had a few days, so that limited our options - essentially to adjacent states. Oregon was our best bet for warmth, so we started looking for options there - and it didn't take long to fill out the itinerary. Ever since visiting the…
2 Comments