I ain’t Skierd but he was my inspiration. Late last year I was reading a thread by Skierd about his summer adventure on his dual sport motorcycle. He had ridden the eastern part of the Trans-America trail, a route across the U.S. that primarily uses dirt roads, developed by Sam Correro (http://www.transamtrail.com/about/). About the same time, my brother Eric had purchased a 1983 Toyota Landcruiser (the Coprolite). Eric called me with a mechanical question but the conversation turned to a potential trip involving the Coprolite. I mentioned Skierd’s trip and a plot was hatched.
The plan was to take the Coprolite from Eric’s home in Colorado Springs to Vandenberg AFB on the west coast using primarily dirt roads. Pavement would have to be used in some places but I (as the navigator) would do my best to keep the route off primary roads. Once we reached Vandenberg the dirt section of the trip would be complete and we would take the Pacific Coast Highway up to Oregon and visit my other brother, David, in Eugene. I was in charge of the route and Eric was in charge of the vehicle.
Eric did extensive work to the truck. He removed quite a bit of rust damage and welded in new sheet metal, fabricated his own rock sliders and bumpers, installed Old Man Emu springs (2.5” lift) with Hell for Stout shocks, replaced the stock carb with a Trollhole de-smogged version and did a complete re-spray in his garage. The engine is the original 2F with 254,000 miles.
Coprolite: Scientific name for the fossilized excrement, feces or droppings of ancient animals.
Neat rock cuts, the road is an old rail bed, hence the tunnels.
Some may laugh at the fact that I take pictures of what appear to be just piles of rocks but I live in Florida and this stuff is cool to me.
Old mine works in Victor CO.
We turned on to Shelf road between Victor and Cripple Creek.
We went through Red Canyon state park
We spent some time on Co rd 2. This road runs across the high plains (about 10,000 ft). It is smooth and the scenery is breathtaking. We saw several “off the grid” ranches.
We hit pavement from Salida CO to Mt Princeton Hot Springs. We then got on Co rd 322 to get to the Bristlecone Lodge. This building is owned by the U.S. Forest Service and maintained by a Christian youth group whose name I don’t remember. It is available to anyone who can get to it on a “take what you need, leave what you can, clean up after yourself” kind of arrangement. I was not prepared for Co rd 322. It was steep, narrow, and next to 500-600 foot drops. Eric had experience on trails like this but I was more than a little nervous. On one occasion we encountered traffic coming down hill and had to back up and find an area to pull off to allow them to pass. If anyone has seen the Road of Death scene on the Top Gear South American episode you get the general idea. We made it to the lodge before dark but just barely.
Elevation was about 12,500 feet according to the Garmin. A view of Mt. Antero from the back of the lodge.
Eric had bought a couple of cases of MREs off of Craigslist, they weren’t bad and they had the self-heaters.
The stars were spectacular after dark. Unfortunately we discovered the hard way that trying to sleep at high altitude can be unpleasant. I had a hard time getting enough air and the dry air made breathing even more difficult. I also discovered that the lower oxygen environment gave me a serious case of the creeps. This completely baseless anxiety made trips to the truck or outside to pee really scary. It was a long night.
The trip down Mt. Princeton was much more pleasant for me since I now knew what to expect. We started heading down at about 9am and there was no oncoming vehicle traffic.
We found that the road that I had originally planned to use was closed so we backtracked to Co rd 162 and took that route into St. Elmo.
St. Elmo has a few shops and the like but only one public restroom and it is nasty even by outhouse standards. You may want to do that business somewhere else. We caught the road to Tin Cup pass in St. Elmo.
Tin Cup pass is spectacular and would make a great day trip. We, unfortunately, were using it as a transit road. The road is incredibly rocky and was fun for about the first hour but it got old. We also encountered our first vehicle problem. We had stopped to have a snack.
After about a 20 minute break we started the truck and headed up the road. We made it about 50 feet, the truck died and we couldn’t get it to re-start. We coasted back down hill to where we had been parked before and got under the hood.
We decided from the way it had behaved that it was a fuel issue. Since we were at about 11,500 feet and the engine was pretty hot we thought that vapor lock was a real possibility. There was no fuel visible in the clear plastic fuel filter. Just for kicks we soaked some rags in the ice water from the cooler and used them to cool the fuel line and the fuel pump. Almost immediately fuel began to flow back into the fuel filter. We turned it over, it fired up, and we were on our way.
We had to park on a rock to look cool.
The road mellowed out after Mirror Lake. We went through the town of Tin Cup and proceeded on towards Cumberland Pass. This road was great, beautiful scenery and we weren’t worried about taking out the axles on boulders.
Heading back above the tree line.
Aspen trees always showed up at 9,000 feet.
We made our way back down from the mountains and started to worry about time. Tin Cup pass had taken much longer than we expected and we wanted to get to civilization. We needed cell phone signals and internet so that we could make some changes to our plans in Utah. The best bet we had was Lake City that was a pretty good distance away and the day was running out. Fortunately, the next road on the route was similar to Co rd 2 from the day before and we could haul ass (if you really consider 40mph hauling ass).
As we got closer to Lake City the road became more mountainous and we passed through some great canyons.
When we arrived in Lake City we decided that a hotel and a sit down meal were in order. We found a cabin at a reasonable price and went out and got some really good pizza. We got a decent night’s sleep and found these guys in front of the cabin when we woke up.
More to come....probably next Tuesday or Wednesday.
