The Wretched Rebar

 10-26 

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This morning was a leisurely affair, as it always is in this household. We started with coffee (tea for me) on the patio, then migrated inside for an egg, potato, sausage, bacon, and cheese scramble after an hour of conversation. Another hour or two of conversation later, it occurred to me that I would need to get on the road soon if I wanted to beat the searing Phoenix heat. So, a bit reluctantly, I packed Jane up.

I cranked the motor over with equal mixtures of trepidation and hope. But Jane fired right up and sounded right as rain. No drama today, then, at least for now. I said my goodbyes and puttered down the driveway, but not without looking back. Bryan and Hottie – my “Colorado parents” – have always been such a wonderful, positive, supporting force in my life. I’m lucky to know so many people like this. But it’s always hard to leave.

Nevertheless, Jane and I had plans for the day, so leave we did. I navigated Phoenix’s vast network of highways with the help of Google, and then we were roaring down I-17 towards Tucson, free of the city if not the traffic. A short (and most importantly, uneventful) 1.5 hours later, we arrived at our destination: Picacho Peak.

Ahhhh, giant open highways all to myself

Picacho Peak in the distance to the right, a thorny crown of... well, you'll see

This place was supposed to be cooler than both Phoenix and Tucson, but somehow still managed to be a scorching 97*F when I arrived. Ugh. The ranger walked me through my options – basically just two trails, which led up to the summit in a 7-mile traverse – and I found myself glad I hadn’t come in the night before as I had originally planned. I suspect I would have spent a lot of time sitting outside in the sun.

It was nearing 1:30PM, so I loaded up on water and headed to the Hunter trailhead. The Hunter trail is 1.6 miles long, one-way, with a stout 1300’ elevation gain. The ranger warned me it would be steep and difficult, but it couldn’t be worse than Flat Iron was, so I wasn’t worried about a strenuous hike in the heat. No time like the present, especially when the present is the rapidly-approaching hottest part of the day, on a highly exposed steep sunny mountain!

What I found is that this trail is, in fact, way worse than Flat Iron.

The hike up to the Saddle – about 2/3rds of the way up the mountain – was hot but pleasant, with cool views and a neat self-guided geology tour. The afternoon timing actually worked for me here, as part of the mountain was in shadow which limited temperatures. It was an average (but steep), nice well-worn dirt trail.

A neat breccia

The end of the shady part... Saddle lies just ahead

But upon reaching the Saddle, I found that a madman had taken over.  A madman, it turns out, with far more rebar and steel cable than patience and trail engineering acumen.

First, the trail took a steep (and totally unnecessary) 400’ dive down a slippery rock face.

 

Mostly you just slide down this on your butt when you're going down

Oh good, "stairs"!

The worst-engineered "stair" I've ever seen, complete with 8 or 9 pieces of randomly staked rebar

Then, it jinked around to the south before ascending precipitously, bulling its way across the mountain with liberal use of rebar, steel cable handholds, and on occasion fence netting where cables were deemed insufficient to keep hikers on the mountain.

The cliffy side of the mountain...

...and the means by which you ascend it

Looking down a cable handrail... exactly as steep as it looks

A cool saguaro-filled bowl near the top of the mountain. Also, one of the few places where you could walk on a normal trail

Watching some hikers climbing back down this... whatever it is

Looking up the "whatever it is", mostly just a 30' long crack with cables run up it for some reason

Looking down on the saguaro bowl

Looking down on The Crack (lol)

Another piece of the trail with a strategically placed 2x6 for extra walking space

It was absurd. I mean, I’m not afraid of heights – and I’ve got Zion’s Angel’s Landing hike under my belt to prove it – but every minute of that hike had me questioning whether I really wanted to continue. Did I really want to trust my full weight to cables installed by a madman? The answer was definitely no. But as always, persistence won out over common sense (a trait I had in common with the madman, I guess), and I hauled my way up to the top of that damn mountain for some admittedly pretty cool views.

Looking down the spine of the mountain

A picturesque saguaro

Neat drainages in the foreground, blue mountains marching to the horizon in the back

I don't know what this mountain is called, but I sure looked at it a lot

The same mountain, but this time with a massive train for scale

A super long train!

But then I had to go back down. Let me tell you, it is a special kind of hell to be climbing backwards, with no visibility of your next steps, using cables to support your entire weight – and doing it very quickly, because of course the cables are ripping hot because they’re metal and it’s sunny and nearly 100*F out. Boy howdy that was NOT fun. But it did have the effect of getting me down from that section 4x faster than I had gone up.

Pretty in the afternoon sunlight though, as long as I tried really hard to forget about all the rebar

Eventually I reached the Saddle and the shady side of the mountain, somehow without mishap. I sat down for a bit, in part to consider my life choices. But in part to wait for my campsite, which I could see, to start to fall into shadow. Might as well stay in the shade on the side of the mountain instead of setting up camp in the blistering sun.

After a while, I decided the sun was low enough and I proceeded down the rest of the mountain, my knees screaming the whole way. I have really done a number on them the past couple weeks. But hey, I’m getting to the end of my trip, so what’s a little more for the sake of a few last great views?

The best view of all

My campsite proved to be another great view, even if I could see the interstate from it.

Boy, that is RED

As night fell, I watched the saguaros darken to inky silhouettes against the vivid orange and indigo sky.

The trails might have been designed by a madman, but the campground certainly hadn’t. I sat out in my camp chair long after night fell, the Milky Way rising and wheeling through that wide-open sky that I love so well, an endless scroll of the heavens, tantalizing flashes of far-away unreachable realms. Moments like these are few and far between, especially as the human world continues to expand. But for now, it is perfect. Even if I can still hear the interstate.

Kelly signing out.

Peace in Phoenix

 

10-25

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I find that after an extended stay in one spot, all my stuff tends to migrate… everywhere. It’s a bit like experiencing one of those expanding foam dinosaur toys – you know, the ones that are stuffed inside this teeny tiny egg, but then you put them in water and all the sudden they become these impossibly large dinosaurs. My gear is all tetris’d into the car’s various nooks and crannies with extreme precision, so it appears to take up hardly any space at all – but then give it a little air, and poof! It expands.

And much like those foam dinosaur toys, it is very difficult to re-condense everything back to where it fits back inside the egg (or the car, rather).

So it was that I spent the majority of the morning puttering around, cleaning and organizing and packing (and repacking) and slowly stuffing the dinosaur back inside the egg. I’ve been playing this packing game for a full decade now, and I’ve got it down to a science. So really most of my morning was not consumed with actual packing so much as it was with cleaning up my camping gear while I had the chance, before the next leg of my trip.

…And with cleaning eggs out of a stainless steel pot. Having an induction burner to cook on for the week has been a fun diversion and an interesting novelty, but god help me if I ever have to cook eggs in a stainless steel pot again. The sticking is unreal. By the end of the week, I had had the thought to cook the eggs in more oil than usual, but that mostly just gave me a resulting additional film of firmly baked-on oil in the pot. I think I must have spent an hour over the past week just scouring the thing. I really didn’t want to leave a bad impression with my AirBnB host – this being a place I’d really, really love to come back to – so I spent some extra time on the pot again and got it mostly partly somewhat a little bit pristine.

Eventually I got tired of playing domestic, so I called it quits and hopped in Jane for the short(ish) drive south to Phoenix. On the way out of town, I encountered a very interesting (and gross) pile of haze, which was apparently the result of dense Phoenix smog getting trapped in the adjacent mountains. Ugh. But it did look cool.

We thrummed on down the highway, scrublands and strings of low mountains giving way to arid desert punctuated by spatterings of small sharp peaked hills (the remnants of ancient lava flows, in case you were wondering). Jane hummed along contentedly the whole way, and I tried not to think about the valves eroding a little more with every rotation of the engine.

In a short time, I entered the distant western suburbs of Phoenix – although it appears that it’s not so distant anymore. The last time I was here was a full decade ago, and my destination was way on the outskirts of the city. Now, it’s been consumed by suburban sprawl – and the few remaining open tracts of land already feature carefully manicured roads ready for development.

I found myself a bit surprised upon successfully reaching my destination – sure, Jane is usually very reliable when out on the road, but man that was a prime opportunity to really ruin my day. Nevertheless, arrive we did, and she wasn’t even making any new, louder, or more horrifying noises!

So where was I? Well, I was at Bryan and Hottie’s house! They’re friends, but more accurately they’re family, not by blood but by long friendship. Bryan and his wife, Hottie (who has just always gone by that name, apparently) were my landlords when I lived up in Colorado, and we became close friends in the years I was up there. It’s been more than a decade and we still keep in touch, and every time we catch up it feels like no time at all has passed! They now mostly live in Phoenix, so naturally I had to visit while I was in the area. And, importantly, Bryan has his own stable of vintage cars, so his house is a trusted stop for repairs.

I pulled up and of course we got to chatting, and the time slid by effortlessly as Jane cooled peacefully in the shade of a desert willow. When we realized that afternoon was rushing headlong towards evening, we got to work on fixing Jane up. Bryan had retrieved a few new rocker arms from his local Autozone for me to install, and was fully prepared for a long, messy job. Imagine his surprise when I had them popped on and adjusted in 10 minutes flat!

Two rockers are clearly... well, off! Is this where the phrase "off your rocker" comes from???

Rocker removed, looking at the nice carved valve tip and the chunk taken out of the spring cap... yikes. Best ignore that.

New rocker put on, and now you can barely see the damage! Out of sight, out of mind.

The second one was even worse because clearly it had been having issues for quite some time, given the multiple wear marks on the spring cap. Can't say that I'm super observant sometimes...

End result: two new rocker arms as a patch until I can get home - and then I'll need two new valves since the tips aren't square anymore. Alas.

Each rocker arm cost $13, so my total investment was ~$30 (well, ~$50 considering I opted to keep a spare handy) and less than 30 minutes of time. Now all that remained was to put the valve cover back on, start the car, and find out of the repair worked. We both held our breaths as I turned the key and the starter spun to life, crabbing as it persistently attempted to rouse the V8. A scant couple of seconds later and the motor fired and roared throatily, bellowing its triumph to the suburbs of Phoenix – and doing so without a single suspicious tick. Success!

I love these kinds of jobs. The perfect satisfying on-the-road repair! Enough to make you feel very competent and pleased with yourself, but not enough to be an annoying time-consuming fix.

Jane now being back to ship-shape, Bryan and I decided that some fun was in order, and he had just the ticket. There was a cruise-in happening locally, and with a Halloween theme to boot. I thought about bringing Jane, but ultimately decided to let her rest in favor of taking out Bryan’s Yenko Camaro (a clone, but a good one). So off we went.

At the cruise-in, multiple people hit me with, “Well if you’ve got a classic Mustang, why didn’t you drive it here?! These cars deserve to be driven!”, so I immediately regretted not bringing Jane. Although my excuse of “Well I had to drive like 16 hours from home to get here in the first place” was impressive enough, I guess. Ah, well. We had a blast looking at cars and Halloween costumes, then headed off to a local brewpub for dinner when we got hungry. After that we returned home to watch Christmas movies (Hottie starts the Hallmark Christmas movies on loop in October). All in all, it was a fantastic little slice-of-life kind of day, a welcome brief departure from the usual drive-hike-drive-hike-drive-die flow of my road trips.

Tomorrow, I’ll get back on the road and continue south on my way home. But for now, this is perfect. Until then… Kelly signing out.

The Spectacular Sunset

 

10-24 

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Well, it’s my last day here in Sedona – tomorrow, I’ll be hitting the road to head down to a friend’s house in Phoenix, beginning the long journey home.

The last time I'll wake up to this incredible view... alas

I decided that this would maybe be a good time to investigate the source of the mysterious ticking in Jane’s motor. Better the devil you know, and all that.

I called Charlie – my “hot rod dad” – to bounce some ideas off of him and work through the problem. Charlie knows just about all there is to know about classic cars – he’s taught me a ton over the years (including how to rebuild motors!) but he’s also the guy who brought Jane back from the dead and gave her a second lease on life after 2013’s wreck. In short, he’s Jane’s secondary mechanic, and the number one “phone a friend” choice for all things relating to Jane.

We went through a few scenarios and possibilities, and I eventually settled on starting with a basic lifter adjustment. The nuts on those studs, being 60 years old, occasionally do back off. And they’re easy enough to get to. I pulled the valve covers and turned the motor over a bit at a time, readjusting each rocker arm at a neutral position to ensure the lifters were being contacted but not too much. Too much, and valves hang open, severely reducing your engine power (and who wants that?!). Too little, and they tick. Well, after adjusting a few, I got to one that seemed… oddly wobbly. And it was off-center from its position, which I noticed also had the discomforting side effect of carving a little gouge out of the valve spring caps, as well as the valve stem tip itself. Yikes.

See how that one in the middle is kinda... wonky?

Upon closer inspection - note the chunk carved out of the valve spring cap to the left of the rocker tip. Yikes.

I pulled the arm and found that it was simply super worn – again, a side effect of being 60 years old with an untold number of miles. Okay, source of the tick found! But what to do about it? Well, there’s just about nothing in Sedona as far as auto parts goes. But Phoenix… well, that’s a major classic car city! I concluded that the boogered rocker would probably be fine for the trip down there – not like I could do anything more to fix it here anyways – so I went ahead and reassembled it. All told, this took me about an hour to accomplish. That’s 50 minutes dicking around thinking and planning, and 10 minutes of actually just doing it. That’s the way these things always go.

“The devil you know, the devil you know,” I repeated in my head. With Jane back in one piece – and the devil identified – I headed to O’Reillys for a can of Rislone lubricant to add to the oil as extra insurance, poured it in, and set off about the rest of my day. You’d think I’d be more worried about these kinds of things, but Jane and I have been doing these trips for a long time, and we know each other well. As long as I know and acknowledge the devil – and make some rudimentary attempt at fixing it if possible – she always gets me home.

I headed over to downtown Sedona, intending to wander around for a while before taking a sunset Jeep tour with the famous Pink Jeep Tour Co. I do say “intending”. I arrived downtown to find people milling around in disarray, with half of the shops on the main drag unusually dark and silent. The Pink Jeep Tours base of operations was, naturally, exactly in the middle of the chaos. I made my way over there to find that they were “most definitely closed for the rest of the day” due to a transformer which had exploded in their shop, knocking out most of the block and causing quite a bit of damage. Well, bummer, there goes my Jeep tour!

I hoofed it over to another Jeep operator nearby before anyone else had the foresight to do so, and was able to book a replacement sunset tour with them. Score! But, it was a much shorter tour, so I had some time to kill.

I decided to fill that time with a root beer float.

While sitting outside with it, I happened to get a quick burst of texts from my friends at work. They’re always very careful to not drag me into work stuff when I’m out on a trip, but, you know, sometimes the office drama just can’t wait. I got filled in, then in turn filled them in on how my trip was going (fantastically) and how much fun I was having (a ton), and for a brief time I was surrounded by the warmth of their friendship. Then they said their farewells with a few wistful comments about missing me, and vanished into the ether, as people far away do. And I was left there to my float. Alone.

You might be thinking, “Kelly, you’re always alone on these trips!” and you would be right, mostly. I’m the extroverted loner type, really, always happy to stop by and see friends when I can, but also quite happy to be on my own. But very rarely do I feel lonely. But in that moment, I did. I missed my friends and the little escapades we have together, even the mundane ones like going to lunch at work, or going to the wine and dessert bar for cake and gossip. Life is just more fun with them in it. How odd, to be missing the little things like that, while out on an adventure in one of the most beautiful towns in the American Southwest. I suppose, looking back, that maybe it had been a few too many days since I last talked to someone face-to-face.

I was shaken loose from my thoughts as my phone chimed with an alert to remind me to report over to the Jeep tour – I know myself well, and if I don’t set a reminder, I’ll definitely forget to go places on time! I finished up my float and headed over, where I joined a large crowd of people milling around waiting to load into their Jeeps. Apparently, this operator had called in all of their drivers to handle the sudden deluge of extra tourists for this one night.

I hopped in the back of this extra-long Jeep they had, and off we zoomed for a sunset tour in Sedona back country. Clouds had gathered all afternoon, promising a great sunset – the first here in Sedona, really, considering the previous few days have been pretty cloudless.

The tour had advertised a two-hour “mild off-road” adventure, so I was prepared for some bumpy rutted roads but not much else. Certainly not the true off-road adventure I had hoped for with Pink Jeep Tours. But hey, the closer it got towards nightfall, the gladder I was that I had chosen a sunset tour. The lighting was just spectacular.

Unfortunately, the tour ended up being pretty disappointing on the “off-road” front. In fact, we went down a completely normal dirt road, which turned out to be substantially better-graded than many roads that I have taken Jane down in the past ten years. As we drove along, I was kind of kicking myself – I could have brought my really awesome car out this way and enjoyed it much more, AND then I would have been able to stop for photos whenever I liked. As it was, I had to be content with vaguely blurry photos I snapped while jouncing around in the back of the Jeep as it blasted down the road.

I liked this lone tree at the top

Eventually, we stopped at a little pullout, and I thought we might do some hiking out to a cool overlook or something. But no, we just stood and yelled into a canyon (which did admittedly have great echo capacity) and posed for some photos with the red rocks. I made the best of it.

A silly pic with the guide

I was feeling pretty sour by this point. Not that the tour had been terrifically expensive, but I just would have enjoyed it more by myself, with my own car (yes, even though just a few minutes earlier I had been lamenting being by myself a bit). But as we headed back – apparently that one stop was all we had time for, somehow – I started to see the really awesome light filter in. Oh, yeah. It was going to be one of those showstopping sunsets.

The sun dropped lower and the cliffs lit up, glowing emberlike in a hue that was quite impossible for my camera to capture. I did try, but that was just one of those times when… well, you just have to be there.

Like I said... my camera really couldn't capture this color

Finally, the sun dropped beyond the horizon, and Sedona’s fabled red rocks descended into shadow, becoming nothing but dark silhouettes against an increasingly vibrant sky. Cotton candy clouds drifted into interesting soft patterns, then coalesced into streams of fire coursing through the firmament. And we roared along that road under that incredible vast atmospheric painting, the wind cooling but not yet cold, the radio belting out some classic rock song underscored by the low hum of conversation from the other occupants, the crisp-warm-sharp-dry woodsy scent of the desert wafting past on unseen air currents, and suddenly everything was right again. It was one of the best ways to be reminded of how glorious this planet we live on can really be.

Plants for extra pizzazz 

We arrived back in town just after dusk, and I headed back to the AirBnB for my last home-cooked (in a kitchen) meal for another week. I had a fantastic steak (although I did set off the smoke detectors a bit, and had to exile the steak pan out onto the deck while my host sent worried queries asking if I was okay). After my meal I sat outside, listening to someone in the neighborhood idly playing a guitar, their mood apparently matching my own. The notes rose over the pines and the junipers, picking their way through the crisp cold air, no doubt reaching the red rocks around us but not quite loud enough to bounce back.

It had been a good last day in Sedona. There’s still so much hiking I’d like to do and so many things I’d like to see in this area, but I can always come back. And I will.

Until then… Kelly signing out.