Mark's Off Road Warehouse Fire Thread (9 Viewers)

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Heading back out to the desert shortly, I’ve been reminiscing. This shot was taken 39 years ago this month, when our daughter was six months old. She’s in the lap of a much stockier, much younger me.

If you look closely at the K5 underneath the gas cap you can see the gash in the rear quarter panel from where I boxed both sides of the truck driving through the Little Sluice of the Rubicon…in 1983.

 

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Well, my latest backpacking trip is now ‘on the books’. Quite the adventure, as most backpacking trips should be. What’s that old saying: it’s not an adventure until something goes wrong!

In this case, I fell in the driveway of my shop on Monday, landing on hands and knees, managing to fold back both my thumbs, and tweaking my left shoulder( though I didn’t realize how bad until I was halfway up the canyon with my 34# pack!) While more-rational 64 year olds might reconsider backpacking under the circumstances, I still live by the motto that when your aspirations meet your limitations, the one you embrace defines you. So I chose to go anyways.

I left home in the early afternoon Thursday the 10th with plans to meet an old friend (owner of the MM40) in Ridgecrest for an early dinner before heading to base camp. Weather was pretty warm for early April (mid 80s) and when I finally got to Chris Wicht Camp it was 6:30, and still almost 80, even though it is in a canyon with a mountain stream, and almost a thousand feet higher than the valley floor. It’s Death Valley, duh.

On the way up from Ballarat, I spotted only one occupied campsite, with a motorhome, enclosed toy trailer, a side by side and a quad. It struck me as unusual because there is not much in the way of legitimate riding opportunities in the near area in my opinion. That, coupled with the fact that Chris Wicht camp has a dark history of nefarious activities made me suspicious. Nonetheless, I removed the passenger seatback as planned and deployed my bedding as planned and laid down for the night after getting a good shot of the Karma Cruiser with the full moon in the canyon. There was only one unoccupied vehicle at the trailhead campsite.

 

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About 8:30, I heard the rumbling of an ATV coming up the canyon. Then I realized it was two. Sure enough, it was the vehicles that I had seen at that campsite. My heart rate went up, as I tried to second guess their motivations for coming up at night. Vandalism? What would they do when they discovered that the Landcruiser was occupied? Would this be my last night on Earth? My imagination was running wild.

Well, they stood by their vehicles for about half an hour, talking quietly, with an occasional laugh. I made a couple of small noises from inside the truck, enough to make them realize there was someone in it. Of course they wouldn’t know if I was armed (I wasn’t) and I had the advantage that I could see them clearly in the light of the full moon, but they couldn’t see me in the interior of the Landcruiser.

About half an hour later they fired up their vehicles and left again. Once my heart and my head settled back down, I concluded that they had simply been too hot to sleep down in the valley, and had just come up the canyon where the stream was flowing, to get some cooler night air while they waited for the valley to cool. Nonetheless, between the heat and the anxiety, I got s*** for sleep before starting the trek.

 

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I got up at first light, had a couple of bowls of cereal and hit the trail by 6:40. By 8:20 I had scaled all six waterfalls and had passed the hillside spring that used to be called Brewery Springs, which meant I only had 3.5 miles left to get to the ghost town. But those miles took almost three hours.

It was hot. A lot hotter than I had anticipated. And for the first time in over a decade, it turned out that I didn’t have enough water. Only the week before I had done an 11 mile round trip hike, with 3000’ of gain, and used less than my 2.5 liter reservoir. And I was only going up today, knowing I would be filtering stream water once I got there.

But I was sweating. A lot. A lot more than usual. I could feel my energy waning, but couldn’t figure out why. Something wasn’t adding up.

Then I decided to check my heart rate. It was 140bpm, which is unusually high for me. I’m usually running between 120 and 130 under similar conditions. So I figured the heat was affecting me, and I would just go slower and drink more water. Then I started to feel a cramp in my left leg that was unusual, and I was quite sure that I was dehydrated. I was dog tired by the time I reached the cabin they refer to as the Hanta Hilton. I spent the next two hours cooling down and hydrating.

 

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When I felt better, I threw on the pack and resumed hiking up the canyon to the springs that originally fed the now-dry town (when I packed it in 2014 with @Brian Waag you could still pump water in town in the maintenance shed behind the Hanta Hilton)

When I took the first pull on my hydration straw, my heart sank: empty. I had to march up canyon, in full sun, dehydrated, with nothing to drink. I slowed even more, so that it was nearly half an hour before I reached the stream 5/8 of a mile further up the canyon. And I had that whole half an hour to wonder what would happen if I didn’t make it.

I spent the next half an hour luxuriating in the essential vitality of that stream, slowly drinking a liter and stowing four more on board, with plans to return for more in the morning. Then I headed back to town, and to the best of the cabins, The Castle. And why not stay in the castle? After all, I was the king of the city that day: the only one up there! I had not for a moment considered the possibility of complete solitude, April being the peak of packing season for the area. And yet, there I was.

 

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I spent the rest of the day resting, considering my options for the rest of the trip against my current condition, as well as reminiscing about my previous adventures in Panamint, starting back in 1991 winching Landcruisers up the waterfalls with Marlin. And now Marlin is gone. Here’s a picture of Marlin taking one of the waterfalls in his now-famous red truck that @Otis shared recently:

And I contemplated.

As the years roll on, every year at some point you end up mentally wandering through the ghost of an old garden party. As you slowly stroll through the yard, your hand casually brushes across the back of empty chairs while you remember who sat in those chairs at the party. Maybe you remember something funny they said or did. Eventually you realize that it is a metaphor for your whole life.

The evening set in quietly and temperately. There were a lot of supplies left in the cabin, including a half dozen solar powered LED lights, which I made use of, along with a cot and a couple of nice air mattresses.

 

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When I got up, I felt pretty good; nowhere near the kind of stiffness or achyness i expected. I made some coffee in the pre-dawn while I considered my options some more. I knew the rational choice was to head back down the canyon, rather than continuing on to the next, even more desolate canyon, in my current condition. I started loading up the pack again, only to discover when I went to tie my flip flops to the outside of my pack that BOTH of my hands were cramping up pretty badly. This cemented the decision to head home.

I was on the move by 6:30, and back to the falls by 9. I was even more surprised that I hadn’t met anyone going up the mountain by then, knowing it was another hot day, and that any seasoned packer would have started before sunrise. I met the first couple at the top of the falls, and a second about 15 minutes later. All I could think of was how hot they were going to have it for the rest of their pack. And I passed four more before I got back to the truck at 10:40. Smh.

I so thoroughly enjoyed how the Karma Cruiser ran, both on and off the road that I decided to take it off the market! I have 30 years worth of sweat equity in that truck. It performed so well, it re-earned its place in my stable.

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I had a surprise visit from my old friend @Land Cruiser Junky last Thursday. It's a little wild to think that Mark's Off Road has now been open 35 years, and that I've known people like Gene that long.

He retired and moved to Tennessee a few years ago, but still gets out to California occasionally. This trip had to be extra special though, because he drove one of his Landcruisers here, which I think is about 2200 miles! It was the blue FJ60 that I used to own back in about 1998 that was/is part of the Karma Cruiser story: the same one that I ended up giving him in 2009. Obviously still running strong.

I managed to snap a picture just before he left. I realized after he left that it was a more important photo than I imagined when I took it, because I think it's the only one of the two trucks together.

What I gave...and what I got.

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FWIW, I just did a little sleuthing and found that the story of the Karma Cruiser is in the January/Feb 2011 edition of Toyota Trails.

 

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42 years ago…