My hike yesterday was pretty fun, though doing it in the evening would have been better for taking pictures. The sun was above and in front of me, so the colors looked washed-out a bit, and only a few pictures actually turned out good. I just did a little hiking, for about a half-hour or so, then I drove down to the old US-6 where the town of Thistle used to be. I drove up the slide area as far as I could, then I hiked the rest of the way. There was a fence at the top, and the Utah County Sheriff’s shooting range was on the other side, so I couldn’t go as far as I’d have liked to. After that, I got back on the highway and drove to the other side of the slide area and took some pictures of the houses that are still buried there.
Right when I got home, I got a call from my sister, wanting to borrow my truck to tow her Bronco back from near Wanship (near Park City), where her boyfriend, Mark, was broken down. I told her that my truck wouldn’t have been able to make it that far (about 150 miles) without blowing the radiator up and seizing up the engine, but she was able to talk my mom into using her 4Runner. I really doubted that the Toyota would be able to tow a full-size Bronco at all, let alone 150 miles up and down such mountainous country. My mom wanted me to drive her 4Runner, which I was more than happy to do. On the way up Parley’s Canyon on I-80, we were stuck in traffic for quite a while because of a car accident ahead. When we got to the scene, we just knew that whoever was involved was dead, and according to this news story, that’s definitely the case. Apparently, some guy was just hauling ass up the canyon, then suddenly veered off to the right, flipping his car over the jersey barrier and down a 300 foot drop. When we got there, LifeFlight had just shown up, and they had a crane hanging over the edge trying to retrieve the car.
We finally got to Wanship, where Mark had been waiting almost all damned day–what an awful place to be broken down. We picked him up at a Sinclair station, then got back into I-80 to pick up the Bronco. It only took us about 10 minutes to get the tow-bar attached to the Bronco and hitched up to the 4Runner, then we were off. I was astonished at how well that Toyota pulled the Bronco. I always thought of Toyota’s 3.0L V6 as gutless, but we did between 45 and 50 MPH all the way from Tucker to Soldier summit, which is probably better than my truck could have done if it didn’t have overheating problems. There was only one time when we had any sort of problem, but it was all my fault–I was pulling off to the shoulder to let the traffic behind us pass, and I hit the brakes a little too hard, and the shoulder was pretty soft, so the Bronco pushed a little bit and the rear-end of the 4Runner started going right while the front-end veered a little left, almost pushing the front-left tire back onto the pavement. It was no big deal, but it scared me just a bit.
We left Price before 4:00 in the afternoon, and got back just before 11:00 at night, so it wasn’t too terribly long of an ordeal, but I had fun, just for the experience of going somewhere new and doing something I’ve never done before.