Builds Mike's 1978 FJ40 Turbo Diesel Refit Project and Cross Country Road Trip! (9 Viewers)

[Godfather90]

Day 7 Continued:

We hit some snow around 10k feet:

Kept going up:

My favorite view:

 

[Godfather90]

More of Day#7:

I couldn't help myself:

Mom got it:

 

[Godfather90]

More of Day 7:

This is the point that i already declared my trip a success:

Lots of free range cattle, and a few Beefalo:

It seemed like we had the whole park to our selves;

 

[Godfather90]

Day 7 continued:
we finally got up close and personal with the big boys:

I have a lot of video's of them crossing the street and coming up to us and making funny sounds, but you guys get the point. The Buffalo were really cool.

We drove across the north side of the park and stayed in a lodge on the north west corner of Yellowstone right on the Yellowstone river.

 

[Godfather90]

Day 8:

We worked our way down trough the park to Jackson hole for the night. This took all day with all the cool stuff to see on the way:

 

[absalom]

Watched and followed your progress on YouTube for sometime now, super excited to see that you have a proper build thread!!

Care to take on another BHW harness??

 

[Godfather90]

Ok All,

Sorry for being a lame-ass in my reply rate but I'm going to try and get you up to speed:

On the way to Jackson we saw some really pretty views so we stopped before dark:

Anyways after this we were dead set on seeing a Moose, so we drove through Jackson and went west and north up this road the locals told us we were guaranteed to see them. Needless to say we drove for hours down these unpaved roads and didn't see any! It was a fun time though that is for sure!

Day 9 coming up!

 

[Godfather90]

Watched and followed your progress on YouTube for sometime now, super excited to see that you have a proper build thread!!

Care to take on another BHW harness??

You can buy complete harnesses now from Fast Forward! They work with Malone software to reprogram the ecu and set you up a harness thats good to go:
Fast Forward Automotive

I wanted a few other things done to mine, but i did work with them a bit to complete mine.

I'm still getting it assimilated, I've been doing a lot of wiring lately on the truck.

-Mike

 

[Godfather90]

One last day 8 pic:

Day 9:

We got up early and headed north again, but saw this and had to take a look:

We went through The Grand Tetons NP on the way up:

Got back to Yellowstone and saw that grand prismatic madness:

 

[Godfather90]

Got to see this Celebrity just in time:

Lost of crazy colors:

These two looked funny:

Saw a bunch of stuff at the park, and headed west again:

My Mom was too nervous to camp this close to the bears, and it started to rain so we drove through another epic sunset:

We stayed in a Hotel in St. Anthony and left again in the early AM.

 

[Godfather90]

Day 10:

We had a long day ahead so we hit it early and headed west to Craters of the Moon:

We spent a lot more time here than anticipated (Mom didn't wanna leave) and i got a nice sunburn out here in this crazy place:

We found another cave there:

It was a nice place to break the day up, but I'm not a fan of this crazy hot and dry type of place!

 

[Godfather90]

After a few hours there we hit it again and ran into someones creation on the way:

I spotted it from like a mile back and knew it had to be an FJ. I have to say it had a face only a mother could love up close!

We had a big push this day and wanted to get to Oregon, as time was flying by during this trip.

We were planning to try to get to camp before dark that day (which never happens it seems) and found a site not too far into Oregon.

Much to my Mothers dismay we(she) booked us a place between the railroad and the slaughterhouse/cattle auction place that had a huge auction the next morning. The camp site was not the best, and the place was full of people ready for the auction the next morning. She wanted to leave but i made her stay! haha

The train comes through at 730am.

 

[Godfather90]

Day 11:

We got up with the Cattle and the train nice and early. As the light outside the tent increased i saw all kinds of shade spots on the outside of the tent. 100's of them. It took me a second, then i flicked the tent skin, and it all disappeared and came back a moment later. There were so many flies it was insane. Must have been the livestock?

Anyways we survived the night and had another huge driving day ahead of us.

I have to say Oregon was not as i expected, it was the hottest part of the trip thus (over 100*F) far and very dry and windy. On our way out we were grumpy and needed coffee badly. We tried to look a place up with good reviews, but got let down when they were closed. While bickering back and fourth and driving away we found a place along the rout and pulled a quick U turn. I saw lots of old school farm trucks in the dirt lot and though that this had to be a place with good coffee. We went inside and it was filled with real life cowboys and farmers! It was awesome! I never would have expected that.

We had a great long conversation with two older farmers at the table next to us, had lots of coffee and some good breakfast. it turned our day back around, and we got spooled up for the big drive.

Here is some of the stuff we saw on this day:

Our early morning angry (sad?) neighbors yelling at us:

The land was very dry, but there were these very interesting watering systems that the farmers explained to us. I thought it was very cool how it worked. My interpretation was that the farmer would put in a request for a certain quantity of water, and it would be delivered to him via a complex system of culverts and levees and these kind of ditch-like rivers. The water would show up days after he ordered it in some cases, because of the transit time through all these channels. Super cool.

We had a very long section of the trip where there were no diesel stations. It was so bad that my needle was on empty for over 60 miles before i reached a fueling station! I was ready to bust out the Jerry can out back for the first time, but we happened upon this museum/fuel station in the mountains:

 

[Godfather90]

There was some cool tractor out front:

We stopped in Bend for lunch:

We hit the road and drove through a few hundred really hot miles to get to Crater Lake NP:

 

[Godfather90]

Now we saw the smoke all the way back in west Yellowstone, but I had it in my mind to see this place with the cruiser for a very long time. I would have expected to say that the smoke would hinder the parks allure, but i really don't thing it did.

 

[Godfather90]

I think that the smoke really made the experience very different than it would have been. it left a lot to the imagination, the shear size and depth of the lake were very mysterious. It made it seem extra cool. The smoke blocked from seeing the main attraction, but also gave us a chance to really soak in the hidden beauty of this place.

For instance, i never would have noticed this tree and what it looks like:

I have to say after a few beers at altitude this tree almost killed me.

But in all seriousness, i loved seeing the park like this. It was completely empty, we got prime camping location in the park, and it was beautiful to see.

We ended this awesome day with some wine, a camp fire, lots of trees in a private camp site, and rocking out to music my mom hadn't heard since she was a kid.

 

[Godfather90]

Day 12:

This day i approached a little differently. Throughout the trip our routine was to pack in as many cool activities as possible and then at the end of the day i would turn to mom and be like... where are we staying? She would always panic and there would be a little argument but we would find a place and that would be that. I would do it this way because primarily i was worried about the reliability of the the truck and weather i could make certain distances or not. At this point a was pretty confident that the old girl would take us where we needed to go, so we booked the stay for all the remaining nights of the trips. This lead to a large relief in stress.

We found this really cool camp in the redwood forest of California, so i pointed the tires that way. Here's what we saw:

This is the point at which the fire got really crazy. We saw many camps filled with fire fighters sleeping in tents. you could tell these guys were out here busting ass fighting this fire. it was really awe inspiring to drive through. it was like some war of the worlds scenery, neither of us took many pictures of it though.

 

[Godfather90]

The ocean breeze cleaned the air for us at the coast thankfully.

I was really really excited to show my mom the redwood forest. I had been to Sequoia and knew the size of the tree's, but knew that there would be all kinds of cool prehistoric looking vegetation my mom just would die for.

If my mom were a plant, she would be a fern.

It was the closest thing she could do to taking it all home with her. The cameras went crazy!

Look at her go!

I think this was before she realized that there would be over 100 miles of this, and that we had a place to sleep among all this beauty.

 

[Godfather90]

Here's some more, because i just want to look back at this thread at some point and see these:

some of these trees were just plain ridiculous:

Even the poohouse was epic:

 

[Godfather90]

We broke through to the sea right before arriving at our camp: