Author Archives: cjengel

To California

October 11, 2012

We crossed into California in darkness camping out in chateau frontier at a vista point somewhere around elevation 5,000 feet. We woke up to a pretty fantastic view of Mount Shasta which sports several alpine glaciers including the Whitney glacier, which is the longest in California.

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You have no idea how hard it was to put that photo there. This is the first post written completely on our Nexus 7, so there is a little bit of a learning curve that we are working on at this end.

Anyways, it was a cold morning so after a quick cup of coffee cooked up on the tailgate, we quickly headed outh. The next stop was the Oroville Dam, which was constructed in the 1960s as a flood control structure and is also used to generate hydroelectricity and provide storage for drinking and irrigation water. This dam doesn’t get the respect it probably deserves since it is an “earth and rockfill dam” which just means it is made out of soil rather than wood or concrete, but it is the tallest dam in the USA, at 770 feet, which is about 44 feet taller than Hoover. Well now that your eyes have glazed over with boredom, here are some pictures:

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Here is a half apology to those who skimmed that last section- there will be more dam posts as our tentative route through the south west has us picking up 2 more of the top 4 tallest dams in the US. Something to look forward to!

We ended the day by arriving at Jenny’s parent’s and a wonderful home cooked meal of vegetarian chili.

Crater Lake

Day 10: Crater Lake

We decided to take a detour to Crater Lake before visiting my (Jenny’s) parents in California. Crater Lake is a national park and dogs are not allowed on the trails, so we decided to do just two shorts hikes so Lucy wouldn’t have to be in the car for long on such a warm day.

The first hike was to a lookout point, but unknown to us, it had a fire tower!! Chandler and I have tried to hike to fire towers before, only to find them not there or destroyed. Finally success! Fire Tower Tour 2012!!!!!

The second hike was down 700′ to the lake. Chandler wanted to swim. I was recovering from a head cold and opted out, plus I am a wuss.
Here is Chandler “swimming”.

This was a very beautiful area to visit with really neat roadside geology. Here is a picture of some fumarole things. They were formed by gasses passing up through deep layers of glowing volcanic ash avalanches. Minerals in the gasses hardened columns within the debris which were then revealed after a creek eroded a channel and eventually a canyon through the volcanic material. I read that on an interpretive sign, so I’m kind of an expert.

Canada Continues and back in the US

Day 4: Muncho Lake to Pullout on side of road near Prince George

Another long day of driving, about 650 miles. Nothing exciting happened, but we made some friends along the way.

 Day 5 – 6: Vancouver!!!

Made it to Vancouver pretty late in the evening on Friday. Kat and Sam were super accommodating and let us crash at their place on super short notice- thanks again! Unfortunately Kat had to work on Saturday, so she missed out on #35 at Phenom Penh, which is a really killer cambodian restaurant downtown that I have recurring dreams about.

Day 7 – 8: Blasting through Washington to Portland, OR

We headed south on Sunday, crossing the border without issue. We bee-lined through Washington, and spent the night with Jenny’s aunt south of Portland, OR. We hung out and had a little fire with Jenny’s cousins and their kids, then parked the truck and trailer and crashed for the night.

On Monday we celebrated Canadian Thanksgiving by changing the brakes on the truck. I was a little sketched out by how much the brakes heated up while descending some of the passes in BC, so I decided to change the pads for some cheap peace of mind. The brakes were actually in pretty good shape, despite 63,000 miles on the truck, but the new pads went on and that was that. We visited with Jenny’s other cousin and her new son then said our goodbyes before driving to Wilsonville to have dinner with Jenny’s best friend Lindsey and her husband, Dickalus (Sorry Nick, couldn’t help ourselves). After some libations including whiskey desert, we randomly decided to do some riding the next day at Sandy Ridge, so we drove out there and camped out at the trailhead.

Day 9: Sandy Ridge and Portland

We did a pretty fun ride which was basically a pretty decent climb on a paved road, followed by a few miles of downhill single track. For the most part, the riding was non-technical and fairly flowy, which our hard tail XC bikes handled really well. However, at the top there were a few rock bridges that were fairly randomly inserted in the trail which was too much for our bikes/skill and were enough to draw tears. I end-oed pretty fantastically after making it through one mildly technical section. Below that, the trails were fun.

Jenny and her whip

The scenery was decidedly “sandy” partially due to the current drought/dry year, and was less of the old growth, rainforest Oregon stereotype that we expected. We cruised back to Portland to have dinner with our friend Kelly. While we were parking I ran our bikes which were mounted onto the roof of our trailer into a low tree on the side of road and completely destroyed the fork on my bike. I am not sure how it managed to break into four separate pieces, but it did. The rest of the bike and the trailer were relatively unharmed. Luckily I have a rigid fork with me that I can put on there, so we are not done riding… We had a solid dinner with Kelly, then drove south.

Canada

Day 3: Near Whitehorse to Muncho Lake

More driving! We covered about 440 miles today, stopping for breakfast along Teslin Lake- mmm greyish yellow over easy eggs. There was a little bit of road construction here and there, one particular stretch of steep loose washboarded gravel was particularly unnerving with the trailer in tow. This picture makes the hill look about half as steep as it really appeared.

“Fun” gravel road section

Near the end of the day we stopped at whirlpool canyon where we debated if we would survive a run with the venerable SeaHawk II, which is probably the most elite level inflatable raft in the “extreme pool toy” class.

Jenny, Lucy and Chandler, undated photo

The water looked fairly low and probability of survival seemed high. Unfortunately (or luckily?) the SeaHawk was left in good hands back in AK.

Whirlpool Canyon

Lucy worked on some geological investigations.

Lucy looking stoic

When she was done, we drove to Liard Hot Springs for a quick soak. We saw bison around the hot springs, and took possibly the worst photos ever taken of them. Sorry.

Blurry bisons, no those ones in the foreground aren’t dead, just sleeping (I think)

We spent the night in a nice, secluded highway gravel pit above Muncho Lake that night. We were entering a mountainous part of the route, and had gained some elevation, so it was very chilly that night.

Gravel pit above Muncho Lake, cold!

The Trip Begins

This post is a little dated. The trip began almost two weeks ago, but we did not settle on a “blog” name until tonight. I guess we are “bloggers” now. Enjoy. The first few posts are a condensed version of the trip so far, from Anchorage, Alaska to Granite Bay, California.

Day 1 Anchorage to near Tok, Alaska

No photos today. We started our trip from the driveway of our old house in Spenard after Chandler’s last day of work on October 1, 2012. After the obligatory 3 stops before leaving town, we drove north to head south, ending up somewhere outside of Tok around midnight. We spent the first night camped out in the back of the truck in a pullout. The temperature dipped into the high teens, and in the morning, the inside of the truck topper was covered in ice. To Canada!

Day 2 near Tok to outside Whitehorse, YT

Our drive south was pretty direct, motivated by the sub freezing night time temperatures in the back of the truck and the near freezing daytime temps on the road. We stopped periodically for quick breaks mainly for Lucy the Dog. The truck and trailer handled the hills admirably, only occasionally complaining in second gear near the tops of a few mile long 8-10% grade hills. Dinner tonight was at the slightly puzzling Canadian phenomenon of “Boston Pizza” which seemed to be nearly as ubiquitous as McDonalds in the cities of western canada. I guess they are around in the states as well, but I don’t recall them being as visible. We caught up on our baseball news including learning of the unsurprising rolling-over of the sox to the yankees in a final wimper to punctuate a memorable season. We spent the night at a rest stop near a bridge just south of Whitehorse.

Truck and trailer before crossing the US/Canada border, October 2, 2012