For the past several weeks my truck has been making a rattling noise, coming from the front-end somewhere, whenever I hit a bump. It hadn’t bothered me enough to even look at the suspension until today. I made plans with Mark to go hiking this weekend, and I wanted to make sure the truck wouldn’t leave us stranded out there. I found the problem pretty quickly–the lower mounting bracket for one of the shock absorbers is broken, so the shock is just dangling from the top bracket and bouncing around. I already ordered the part from the Ford dealer–$55 for a simple steel plate with a couple of holes in it–and it’ll be here on Tuesday. I’ve been driving the truck like this for a while now, and there’s no uneven tire wear or any other problems, so I’m not in a big hurry to fix it. I think I’ll do the work myself since it looks like it will be pretty straightforward, but I’m not looking forward to crawling around on a cold concrete driveway.
The place where I want to hike this weekend is out near the Wedge, and if all goes well we’ll end up overlooking Buckhorn Wash from the top of a 1,200′ drop-off. The hike will probably be less than two miles, as long as the road is in good shape (and not too muddy). I also want to hike to a place near Castle Dale for the U-Dash game. That hike could be as much as three miles round trip, but there’s a small chance that I could drive much closer in the truck. There’s a faintly-visible road in the aerial photos of that area that could put us within 0.3 miles, though I wouldn’t mind a longer hike because it’s right in the middle of some fossil-bearing rocks.