I’ve been meaning to update my website and upload some pictures from last weekend, but this past week has been hectic and I’ve just now gotten a chance to do so. To start off, we all had a lot of fun last weekend. We piled into the truck as soon as I got off work on Thursday and hauled ass down toward Green River. When we got to the dirt road turnoff from I-70 where we were going to camp, our friends, the Hunts, were already there with their truck and trailer. They’d only been there for a few minutes, and were out of their truck assessing the damage to the road. The heavy rains from a few weeks ago had washed out the road badly in several places, and it didn’t look like anything but ATVs had been through since then. The Hunts led the way down the road while we followed. Their camp trailer has more clearance than ours, so they were able to make it through the first wash without doing any damage, but I had to get out my shovel and dig down the corner on the embankment so that I could get over it without ripping out the plumbing on the rear of my camp trailer. The next wash crossing didn’t look as bad, but it turned out to be much worse. It was really sandy, and the sand was soft and deep. The Hunts got stuck real good, and it took us about half an hour to dig them out. After that we spent another 10 minutes digging the embankment down on that wash so that I could drag my trailer over it, and I managed to make it across with no problems.
We were the only ones at camp that night, but as Friday wore on, more people came and we ended up digging several of them out of that sandy wash. One guy even had to leave his car on the other side while I ferried him and all his gear to the campsite.
Saturday was the big hike to the Million Dollar View cache. It was about 6.5 miles round trip and probably 5 hours or so, and the view was indeed spectacular. I still haven’t seen a penny of that million dollars, though. </gump>
That evening we had a potluck dinner, and I’m sure I would have stayed up ’til the wee hours of the morning around the campfire, but I started feeling sick and went to bed around 10:00. I felt alright Sunday morning, but I still decided to sit out the hike through Moonshine Wash. It got below freezing at night, and Moonshine was sure to be full of water, and I just couldn’t bring myself to bear that much discomfort. It sounds like the five guys who went had a lot of fun, but I think I’ll just stick to doing Moonshine when it’s dry.
It’s taken me until today to unload the truck of all our camping gear. This weekend I’ll have to drain the water heater and all the water lines on the trailer, then I’ve got some repairs to make. On our way out of our campsite on Sunday evening, the rear of the trailer dragged down an embankment on one of the washes and tore off the blackwater valve handle. I didn’t even notice it until we got to the RV dump–luckily we didn’t lose any fluids on the drive home. I’ll have to replace the entire valve, which is going to be a dirty-ass job, removing both the blackwater and greywater outlets and re-plumbing everything to the new valve. Well, you know what they say…