Note well...




Ellyn Deirdre Mulrenin, 1949-2016

12/12/16. I just learned today that my beloved younger sister Ellyn died suddenly at her home. She was 67.  Ellyn was the first person I called after I returned from my recent trip because she was always concerned about the trips I took and more concerned about “the pooch,” as she affectionately called all my dogs.  During my last few days in Salina, Ellyn sent me a number of emails offering specific advice on what I should do, most of which I took because they were good suggestions. I just learned today that at the same time she was fiercely emailing other family members and friends inquiring about how they all could help me.  On my trip in 2013, when I did not post an entry on my blog for several days, Ellyn, without knowing that my silence was because I did not have internet or time to make a posting, contacted the Missing Adults group and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to report me missing.  I was not even aware in advance  of her concern during this or prior trips, which is the kind of person she was, always thinking of others without wanting to receive any credit or attention herself. 
Ellyn never returned my call the night I returned home, and all indications are that she died less than 24 hours after Donner and I returned home.  But I am confident that she listened to my message or read my blog entry for that night because she read every line I wrote.  So I am happy knowing that that she died knowing that I did return home safely from that fated trip and died without worrying about anyone but herself.  And as for this trip, what I now will remember most about it is that I lost my dear, beloved sister at its end. How sad that is for me.

I will not be making any more postings for this trip as my heart is too heavy and nothing I write could possibly be as important as my and my siblings’ loss of our dear, dear sister.  In the future, if I write anything more substantial about any or all of my trips, I will dedicate that writing to Ellyn. I just wish that I had been able to tell her how much value she added not only to my trips, but to my life.

Thank you all for reading this blog. Knowing that people were interested in what Donner and I were doing added value to what we did. I hope it added some value to your life.

ED

Update on Defender

December 11, 2016 - The Defender was picked up in Salina Utah by Joe of Inter-City Auto-Transport.

December 16, 2016 - The Defender arrived back in DC and is now at my mechanic's garage, Euro-Sport in Lorton VA. (John Kinter)

January 6, 2017 - John called and he is puzzled by the Defender's issue, but he has isolated it to the Distributor.  But, he said, there is a solution for this. I will not give up until it is found.

January 13, 2017. John called me and told me that the new distributor arrived last week but he could still not get the Defender running. However, after spending several days trying to track down the problem, he discovered that somehow the the timing mechanism that coordinates with the firing timing in the distributor was out of sync with the distributor.  He was puzzled by this because it could not have happened on its own and had to be changed manually. Puzzling indeed, especially since the Defender was working just fine just prior to the fuel pumps's failing.  

January 19, 2017....I picked up the Defender today and drove ti for the first time in exactly two months.  There is still work needed to get it to fire up and ride well, probably because of my need to replace the catalytic converter, which I knew as needing attention.

January 27, 2017...took the Defender back to my mechanic today for him to figure out why it is not firing up right away and some other thigns that need to get done.

March 29, 2017..my mechanic called me today and said the Defender is ready and drives beautifully. He changed the fuel pump rely and plugged in the fuel pump gauge, which somehow became disconnected.  I wonder how that happened? I said I'd be down to pick it up on Friday.

March 20, 2017...my mechanic called me and told me to forget about coming down to pick up the Defender. He left it out in the rain the night before and now it won't start at all. This is the same problem I have had about six times over 13 years. When it rains, water is somehow getting into the electrical system.

April 3, 2017. I did some research of my own and called my mechanic with suggestions to check ever single electrical connection from the fuel take to the fuel injectors.  Thirty minutes later he called and said he checked the connections beside the fuel tank and they were caked with mud and the connectors corroded green. He cleaned them out, reconnected everything, and the Defender started up beautifully.  Hopefully, a 13-year old problem solved. I pick up the Defender on Wednesday.  Keep your fingers crossed. I still need to do more work, but that'll come.


On the Road 8 - The final post (REVISED December 10)


On the Road 8 – With Donner


PART I –This Land is Your Land, this Land is My Land
 

My long 117-day, 13,541-mile (not counting air travel)  journey that just ended, On The Road 8 (OTR8), was planned to retrace in large part all seven of my previous road trips with my dogs Sonntag, Leben and Erde, and to take Donner and me northeast to the end of the road in Labrador, west across all of Canada, north to the Arctic in Canada and Alaska, and home again by way of the Alaska Highway, Inside Passage, the west coast to San Francesco, and across that 10 states that cut through all of middle America, pitching our tent every day in some of the most magnificent campsites on this planet, adding a few previously untraveled highways, byways and campsites along the way. The magnet to pull us to Alaska were my hope to visit the site just above the 68th parallel in Alaska where I scattered Sonntag’s and his sister Kessie’s ashes in 2001, and the three coveted permits I had to drive the magnificent Denali Park Road in mid-September. A few pesky issues at home delayed the start of the trip, signally that our ambitious plans would have to be scaled back some and saved for another day so we could to arrive in Fairbanks, Alaska, no later than September 11. On August 9th, we finally got underway.

 

As has become my custom on these trips, our first campsite was in New York State, at the foot

of the very mountain that once was home to my old Boy Scout camp, now a nature preserve, where my passion for camping was ignited. From there we travelled northeast through New England, ending up in Maine, where we celebrated the 100th anniversary of the National Park System at Seawall Camp in Acadia National Park.  Entering Canada in New Brunswick, because of the time constraint, I decided to save my rerun of the 774-mile (1164 miles with the Quebec leg added)  Trans-Labrador Highway for a future trip, and so headed north into Quebec.

 

Just as we were about to enter Quebec, the Defender chocked. Thanks to the help of a good Samaritan named Dennis, I worked through my options, and after a tow of 50 miles to the St. Lawrence River, we bivouacked for 10 days on the river until I was assured and confident that all was in order with the Defender for us to move on. If you read my blog entries for those days, you will see how serious I was about that decision.  I had to regain my confidence in the Defender before I headed north. I, wrongly, as it turns out, reasoned that on all my seven prior road trips, only once did we have a layover due to a Defender malfunction (In Newfoundland in 2001), and so the odds of having more than one layover on this trip were small.  Relieved that I had gotten my one layover for this trip out of the way, we moved on, albeit cautiously, 350 miles north to the little town of Chibougamau.

 

My original plans called for us from there to travel the 253-mile unpaved Route du Nord to James Bay, but, again, time was of the essence, so after a 40-mile trial run on that road, and a vow to return to finish it, I turned the Defender around and started the 2150-mile drive across Canada to Alberta and the Canadian Rockies, starting each day’s drive with Pete Seeger’s This Land is Your Land,  with Canadian landmarks substituted for the American ones out of respect for the equally magnificent Canadian lands. When I play that song now at home, my whole spirit is lifted up, and I am immediately transported back to the thousands of miles of road I traveled listening to that wonderful song, witnessing Seeger’s words right before my eyes. (Incidentally, when I was growing up, I could see Pete Seeger’s plot of land from my bedroom window across the Hudson River.)

 

Needing to bolster my confidence in the Defender’s readiness to go north before I reached the point of no return, I diverted our route 200 miles from Edmonton to Calgary to have the Defender serviced and checked out by a Land Rover dealer there.  My confidence restored, energized every day by Johnny Horton’s spirited  “North to Alaska,”  we headed north, passing through the absolutely splendid Banff and Jasper parks, driving Canada’s infamous Highway of Tears, and at the North to Alaska sign in Kitwanga, BC,  turning north to Alaska on the lonely but wonderful 450-mile Cassiar Highway, which ends on the Alaska-Canada (Alcan) Highway in the Yukon. 

 

On the Alcan, I had another decision to make: drive directly to Dawson City or take the 362-mile, rarely traveled, rough, dirt road roundabout route, the Campbell Highway. I opted for the latter and was rewarded with a rich landscape of nature at its finest. Over the two-day drive, we encountered no more than a half dozen vehicles in either direction. Solitude in as purest a form it can get.

 

Forty miles from Dawson City, another decision had to be made: drive directly to Dawson City on the Yukon River or take a side trip up and down the 417- mile dirt and gravel Dempster Highway to Inuvik, Northwest Territories, a road I traveled with Leben and Erde back in 2001. I decided to carry on to Dawson City, not only for time reasons, but because the new 70-mile extension of the road from Inuvik to the Arctic Ocean would not be completed until 2017, an excuse to return in the future.

 

Arriving late in Dawson City on September 9th, I checked my email for the first time in a week and found a message from Stefanie, a 24-year old German medical student touring Canada whom I had met on the Jasper highway, asking if she could join me for the Denali part of my trip.  Since she was the first (and only) person to take me up on my offer for someone to join me for the Denali drive, I agreed, and also invited her to join me for the 414-mile dirt and gravel Dalton Highway part of the trip to the Arctic, warning her that it would be risky, cold and dirty.

 

After a pleasant night camped right on banks of the Yukon River across from quaint, historic Dawson City of Klondike fame, Donner and I jumped onto the superb 79-mile dirt and gravel Top of the World Highway that connects the Yukon with Alaska, keeping my eyes peeled the entire ride for the wheel that in 2013 fell off of Sonntag’s wheelchair as it was lashed to the roof rack ladder on the rear of my Defender, with no success. From there, after another 105 miles over some rather challenging roads, we hopped onto the Alcan for the final 212-mile drive to Fairbanks where, two days after I invited Stefanie to join me, I picked her up at the airport at midnight, and she in effect dove from reading my blog on her computer screen into a two-week adventure she will recall for the rest of her life, as I will.

 

PART II – North to Alaska

 

The Dalton Highway. This was my fourth trip up and down the Dalton, also known as “the Pipeline Haul Road,” a dirt and gravel road that snakes 414 miles alongside the 48-inch oil pipeline that at one time carried 25% of the US oil production For me, there are three parts to the road, which starts 80 miles north of Fairbanks and ends in Deadhorse at Prudhoe Bay,. The first part road runs 244 miles from its start to Atigun Pass and is bordered on the west by the splendid Brooks Range and rarely-visited Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve (where I spent a month backpacking and rafting in 1996), passing through such landmarks as the Arctic Circle, Coldfoot and Wiseman along the way. The second part is the treacherous 4739-foot Atigun Pass itself, which was featured on two seasons of the History Channel’s Ice Road Truckers. The third part, the North Slope, runs 170 miles from the north side of Atigun Pass to Deadhorse and is bordered on the east by the magnificent but politically-embattled Arctic National Wildlife Reserve (“ANWR”). My goal was to reach the site about 50 miles north of Atigun Pass where on August 21, 2001, I scattered my beloved Sonntag’s and Kessie’s ashes, the same site of the National Geographic photo of Sonntag and me heading into our tent at night in the middle of a snowstorm exactly one year before. (68.32.59.71 N/ 149.29.17.63 W). For better or worse, the weather during our three days on the Dalton may not have been the best for sightseeing, but it was for drama. Fog, overcast, snow, cold and mud were the words that best described what we encountered, but that was just fine with me because I had experienced the Dalton before in better weather, and now I had the opportunity to see its bleaker twin.  I shared the rough driving with Stefanie, who was the only non-mechanic ever to drive the Defender, not out of need, but for her as an equal travel partner to experience the Dalton as an actor instead of an observer. We pitched our tent two nights right on the snowy Arctic Circle itself. On the second day, when we reached the very peak of Atigun Pass, the wintery weather conditions during foul, and despite having made it to parallel 68, just a few miles short my goal after almost 7000 miles of travel, we jointly decided that it was too risky to continue and so turned the Defender around to head back down the pass.  What happened next I described in some detail on this blog. Suffice it is to say here that the first couple of hundred feet or so heading back down the most treacherous part of the pass were somewhat problematic, but the Defender did what it was supposed to do and the three of us made it to safety without any incident of personal consequence.  When we reached our camp in Fairbanks at the end of the third day, only Stefanie will be able to describe my elation over what we had just accomplished or her own appreciation for being part of a once-in-a-lifetime adventure.

 

Denali National Park. This was my fourth time in Denali. The first time was in 1992 when I backpacked in the park, during which at one point I was about 16 miles away from the hapless Chris McCandless (Into the Wild) who was in his last days. The second time was in 2000, when Sonntag and I spent three days in Teklanika campground on our way back from the Arctic. The third time was in 2013 when I was fortunate to have secured two permits to drive the entire 90-mile Denali road after the season ended.  Before this trip, thanks to a couple of dozen family members and friends, I was able to secure passes to drive that road again over three days. Stefanie and I left Fairbanks the morning after we returned from the Dalton and arrived at Denali just in time to set up camp at Teklanika that night and prepare for the first of our three drives thru that luscious landscape that is home to the tallest mountain in North America and her attendant mountains, and flora and fauna that is nothing less than breathtaking. Driving the 90-mile dirt road is a challenge in many places even for experienced drives, but everyone who drives it is rewarded with an experience that will stay with them forever.  Of the three days we drove the road, one day was as perfect as it gets, one day was just the opposite with snow, and the other day half of each, confirming my decision to try for secure enough permits to justify, if not reward, the 8000-mile or so drive there and back from my home in DC. It would be futile for me to try to describe what we saw because driving the Denali road seizes not only your visual sense, but all your senses, and emotions as well. Driving up to ten hours each day was never boring, riveted as our eyes were to the road and all that its lush borders offered, and it offered a lot, constantly on the lookout for grizzlies, wolves, moose, caribou, mountain goats, Dall sheep, and the many other species for whom this is home. Whether we saw those animals or not was not important; what was important was knowing that they were there, and that if we saw them, it was in their own homes, doing what their natural instincts directed them to do. Stefanie’s reaction to all of what she experienced was nothing short of elation; my experience was twice that because I not only experienced what she did, but also the joy of sharing this drama with someone who might never have had the chance otherwise. As for Donner, well, he took in all the new smells at every stop, smells that probably exceeded by a wide margin anything he ever experienced or even imagined.

 

During the Dalton and Denali outings, Stefanie and I talked when we were not silenced by what we were experiencing. During our talks, one of the things we learned that we had in common was how much we enjoyed the aria, Nessun Dorma, from Puccini’s last opera, Turandot, especially Calif’s determined vow in his final words, Vincero (I will win), so we adopted that as the music framing our joint experience and played it over and over again to heighten what we were experiencing. It fit the drama quite well, and what awaited me down the road as well. Just listen to that aria and imagine natural beauty of equal magnitude all around you. It was intoxicating.

 

PART III – The Long Journey Home

The biggest problem with driving your own vehicle on a road trip that takes you 7000 miles from your home is that you have to get yourself and your vehicle back home.  This is the story of that return for this trip.

The Alcan Diary

 

After Denali, we drove the 265 miles to Anchorage for Stefanie to catch her plane. While there, I learned that my September 25th ferry to Bellingham, Washington, had broken down and the next ferry would be on September 29th to Prince Rupert, Canada, and from there I would have catch another ferry to Vancouver Island, so I delayed my departure a few more days to prolong my goodbyes to my travel partner of two weeks. On Saturday, September 24th, I set out for the 317-mile drive to the Alcan via the Glenn and Richardson Highways, camping for the night at the deserted Eagle Trail camp. The next morning, it took about 30 turns to fire up the Defender, but I attributed that to the below freezing temperature and nothing more.  Whatever the real reason, I figured, in less than 500 miles I would be boarding the ferry and then be in reach of garages where the Defender could be checked out again.

 

On the Alcan from Tok (AK) to Beaver Creek (YT), just after entering Canada, the Defender ran into a deep frost heave, made worse by a huge pothole lurking at its bottom. I never recalled the Defender taking such a large hit, but everything seemed to be okay, so I drove on.  My campsite goal for the night was Destruction Bay, about 122 miles from Beaver Creek, although I did not know if any of the Yukon camps there were still open or, if they were, whether they would permit tent camping. Back in 2013, when I tried to camp there, I was told that no tent camping was permitted within 50 miles on either side of Destruction Bay because of the huge presence of grizzly bears. At around 5:00 p.m., with sunset approaching fast, I decided to look for an open campground before I entered the 50-mile grizzly zone, but found none, so I decided to move on. If there were no open campgrounds in Destruction Bay or tenting was not permitted again, I would do what I did in 2013, move on until I get out of the 50-mile zone on the other side of Destruction Bay and bivouac somewhere for the night.

 

No sooner had I reached the 50-mile point to Destruction Bay, when I felt the Defender starting to slow down while ascending a long, gradual hill, and could not get any acceleration from it. I dismissed it as nothing more than the limitations of my 3.9-liter engine and drove on. Then the engine sputtered three or four times. Uh oh, a problem. Then I got acceleration back. Close call, but what was that?  Several minutes later, the same thing happened again. Hmm, I don’t need this, not now, not here. What’s going on? Then everything was alright. Whew. Close call again.  I glanced at my GPS and saw that I was 38 miles from Destruction Bay, where I knew there was a gas station and motel, so I decided to not accelerate any more than I had to, hope that I saw the last of the problem, and maybe I could make it to Destruction Bay. Then it happened a third time. My immediate suspicion was that maybe when I had filled up the gas tank at Beaver Creek, 84 miles back, I had forgotten to replace the gas cap, a contingency I was prepared for with two extra gas caps, so I pulled onto the Alcan’s narrow shoulder (with steep drop-offs beyond that) to check that. I had replaced it. Hmmm, what else could it be?  When I got back into the Defender, it had stalled. I tried unsuccessfully to restart it several times. $#%^*, I have a problem.

 

The first thing I did was to jot down the geographical coordinates of my location: N 61°36.0200 W 139°29.4685. From what little I remembered of the area from my several prior Alcan trips, I was 38 miles from a gas station and motel at Destruction Bay, 108 miles to little more at Haines Junction, 263 miles to about as much in Haines, Alaska, where my ferry would be waiting in a few days, and 210 miles to Whitehorse, the capital of the Yukon, where I only guessed that there would be a few more services. I am prepared for this, and there is a solution, were my next thoughts before I exited the Defender. I set out my three reflective triangles on the empty highway, and pulled out my satellite phone, which I rented for exactly this kind of thing.  After two unsuccessful attempts to reach AAA, I finally got one representative on the phone, but she was so uncooperative that I hung up and called again.  This time I was insistent: After giving the representative my AAA number, I gave him my geographical coordinates, telling him I did not have much time to talk, but to send a tow truck. After he told me that AAA did not service that area of the Yukon, I congratulated him on AAA’s now servicing the Yukon and ended the call. (To his and AAA’s great credit, a truck did arrive four hours later from 100 miles away, but I sent it away for reasons I explained on my blog.)

 

There is no way the I can summarize what took place over the next two days before the Defender was towed the 210 miles to Whitehorse, and then over the following five weeks as Donner and I camped in two different campgrounds in Whitehorse, and then in the unheated storage room of a motel,  in snowy weather that reached as low as 13° at night, waiting for the Defender’s problem to be diagnosed and repaired,  so I refer interested readers to the ALCAN Diary on this blog starting here. I will save my many thoughts about that saga for a future writing so that others may learn from my experience. Suffice it is to say here that I was prepared for this kind of thing happening, knew my priorities, and refused to give up hope for the Defender, which had served me well for 23 years.

 

Five weeks later, Donner and I were on our way to catch the October 31 ferry to Bellingham, Washington.

 

The Inside Passage

 

There are two ways to get back to the lower 48 from Alaska, drive back (e.g., 2264 miles from Anchorage to Seattle) or drive to Skagway (812 miles) or Haines (756), and take the ferry to Bellingham, Washington, over the Inside Passage. There was no way in the world that I was going to drive to Seattle over the long, empty Alcan and equally problematic highways after that with diminishing daylight hours and in conditions that had already turned wintery by mdi-October, so we took the once-weekly ferry. Although I really did not want to subject Donner to almost five days on the ferry confined to the Defender on the car deck, except for perhaps three walks a day in the five ports we would be visiting  or on the car deck, I had no choice.  Before I got on the ferry, I blogged that I hoped I did not have to go through a repeat of what I had been through in 2001 and 2013 when the purser came over the load speaker and announced, “Would the owner of the German shepherd dogs please report to the car deck, your dogs are loose.” But that is exactly what happened, twice. Poor Donner got so spooked by the solitude and loud ferry engine noises that he twice crashed through the rear panel of my canvass roof and the metal gate mounted over it, the second time somehow unhooking the leash I restrained him with.  Fortunately, he was not hurt during the drop from his narrow escape hatch to the cement floor of the car deck almost five-feet below.

 

Because of my concern for Donner, I could not enjoy any of the amenities of the ferry, if there even were any, including the Inside Passage itself. But one thing I did enjoy was 24 hours of conversation with a 36-year captain of an Alaskan fishing boat, Dustin Jones, whose trove of sea stories was as abundant as were his obvious love of his craft and descriptions of the tough life on the sea.

 

The ferry was supposed to arrive in Bellingham at 8:00 a.m. Friday morning, just in time for me to keep an appointment at had that morning in Seattle at a Land Rover specialist to give the Defender a complete checkup before my long ride home across the lower 48, but because the captain held the ferry up at a Canadian port for almost five hours so one of its crew members could see a doctor for a medical condition, I could not keep that appointment and still another trip-delaying  setback hit us on this trip. But I did manage to stop by the specialist’s shop late in the day and returned on Monday for the checkup, for which he gave the Defender the green light. Emboldened by the Defender’s positive checkup, my new 4.6-liter engine, and my penchant for not giving up, I had to make another decision: do I continue with the original trip down the west coast to Yosemite National Park, and then head home by way of the Nevada high desert camps, or cut diagonally across the US and make it home in seven days? 

 

Take Me Home, Country Roads

 

Before my journeys begin, I map out the general outline of the routes I hope to take, but sometimes I do not make final decisions on some routes until the last minute, and I do mean the last minute, like at the highway intersection requiring me to turn left or right. And so it was with the return trip from Seattle. I literally made my decision at I-5 when I had to either go north to I-90 or south to loop onto highway 101 to drive the glorious west coast highway to San Francisco.  Confident in the Defender, and eager to complete my planned trip, I turned south, met up with the coastal road soon after, and spent the next six days and nights getting back into the stride of and basking in being on the road, pitching our tent in some old campgrounds and some new ones along the way. In Fort Bragg, I ran into another road camper, Sarah Smith, a 21-year old bush pilot from Ontario, and and for the following week we joined up, sometimes by design, sometimes by chance, at different camps along the similar paths we were taking, comparing notes of our respective lives on the road and talking about much more.

 

The reward for my decision to go south came at Yosemite, a park I always dreamed to visit, but never imagined I would because of its remoteness. We spent three days taking in a lot of what Yosemite had to offer, including the gorgeous drive diagonally across the park en route to Nevada, which road I understand closed because of snow until May just hours after we got on it, saving me more than a day’s travel.

 

In western California, and then in Nevada, the scenery changed dramatically, as did my preferred musical selection. This time, the song that would start each day’s drive would be John Denver’s Country Roads, a song, by the way, that was conceived and played for the first time at a night club (Cellar Door) just blocks from where I lived at the time and where I live now. We had reached high desert land, characterized by wide open desert valleys framed in the distance, sometimes on all four sides, by mountains that were usually reached by straight empty roads stretching for miles as ar as the eyes could see. Even the most jaundiced traveler could not help but envision stagecoaches, the Pony Express, the U.S. Calvary and even some Indian tribes hustling across this dramatic landscape. 

 

The first night I pitched the tent in exquisite, remote and completely empty Berlin Ichthyosaur State Park, fulfilling a promise I made to myself two years before to camp there someday, and I was not dissatisfied that I did. But on the following morning, for the first time since I left Whitehorse, I was nervous about firing up the Defender, thinking it high not start, but it did. Still, an hour later, on the road again, I opted to not drive the 56-mile dirt and gravel and minimally maintained shortcut to route 50, and took the longer, 150-mile paved road instead, still unnerved by a feeling about the Defender and what it might take to convince a tow truck driver to drive the 200 miles from Ely, Nevada, to fetch me on that shorter problematic road if something happened. For the first time on any of my long trips, I had reined in my tolerance for risk.

 

My target campsite for the second night in the Nevada desert was a park I had not visited before, the Great Basin National Park on Nevada’s border with Utah.  I pulled into the camp long after the sun had set and only after a focused search for the camp that involved my getting out of the Defender several times using my flashlight. The camp was isolated, completely devoid of any light except for the stars and a full moon, blanketed with snow and ice, and empty.  The cold was so bitter (it reached 11 degrees that night) and the snow and ice so formidable that I decided to sleep in the cramped rear of the Defender, although in the morning I regretted making that tradeoff.

 

The next morning, after my customary morning walk with Donner, I got into the Defender to fire it up, but it would not start. At first I thought it was a dead battery because I noticed that Donner had accidentally hit the button for the driver’s seat heater during the night, which also explained why it was not so cold in the Defender that night. I tried my battery jumper box, but with no success. I then called 911 to ask for the rangers to come by with their jumper cables, but also to check on my safety, but was told they would not be on duty for several more hours. I called for AAA to send a tow truck from Ely, 100 miles away, and they dispatched one. But two hours later I learned that the truck had to turn back because the driver’s wife’s store in Ely had been robbed during the night and the driver had to return to help her get things in order. Another truck was dispatched and arrived five hours after the saga started, and the driver confirmed that it was not my battery but something else, so he towed us to Ely.

 

I spent the afternoon in Ely circling the Defender as the mechanic methodically went thru his diagnostic checks. Finally, shortly before 5:00 p.m., he confidently declared that it was the ignition coil - make that my new ignition coil - but would probably not be able to get one until Monday, three days later. As good luck after bad luck would have it, I had an extra coil in my supply box and after it was installed, the Defender was up and running again. That night, for the first time on all my road trips, I “bivouacked” in a nearby motel so I could be near the garage if the Defender did not start in the morning.  It did start, and we were on our way. Our goal for the day: Salina, Utah, 222 miles distant, where we would jump onto the very road that would take us 2100 miles home, I-70, and then Green River, 109 miles beyond that.  “Country road, take me home, to the place where I belong…I get the feeling that I should have been home yesterday,” I sang along with John for most of the ride that day.

 

In Salina, I made one stop, right at the entrance to I-70. I got out of the Defender, snapped the below picture, and then sent it to my blog with the following posting:

 

Day 103, Nov 19, Saturday, 2:45 as it is happening
I figure that on this great, maybe epic, journey, i traveled more than 250 highways and biways.  As soon as i send this posting, i will get on the start of I-70, my last highway, which will take me to almost my front door, still 2130 miles away, in few days.
 
I miss all those roads i traveled already.
 

 

As devoted readers of my blog now know, there was to be no I-70 that day for the Defender, or any day after that for that matter, and certainly no ‘I will be home in a few days.’ The Defender did not start when I got back into it. Nor did it start the following week after the local mechanic installed a new fuel pump, which he diagnosed as the problem.  As with the Alcan saga, and with it my stay in Whitehorse, and the St Lawrence saga before it, and the Ely saga after both, I will save the lessons of the Salina saga for a future writing, referring impatient new readers to this blog to read my Salina postings of the days that follolwed, starting here (with the above posting).  Suffice it is to say here that even if the mechanic had gotten the Defender up and running again, I would not have driven it back to DC, not with diminishing daylight hours, the more difficult roads ahead of us, very unpredictable and likely problematic weather, and my need to restore my confidence in it once again. Instead, after two weeks in Salina, I decided to ship it back by an enclosed auto transport trailer sometime after December 8th.  As for Donner and me, we flew back to DC from Salt Lake City on December 4, 117 days after our journey started, a journey that was not without its own problems, as I wrote on my blog that night (click here). 

 

Before I commit my reflections about this rather interesting journey to writing, let me repeat what I wrote on day 103, that I miss all those roads I traveled already. But let me  add here that I also miss all the campsites we pitched our tent in, all the people we met, especially the many who offered us help along the way, all the dogs we (both Donner and I) met, especially the beautiful Summer in Whitehorse, who died shortly after we left, the solitude, the nature, and all the challenges and adventure we experienced, even though I do not take these trips for either.  I will also soon miss writing this blog each night, giving me the chance to collect my thoughts about the day's events and share this incredible adventure with those who are not as fortunate as I am to take one like it, let alone eight like it, for that matter..

 
PART IV - REFLECTIONS

 For want of any better word, I am calling this section Reflections, although at times it will probably be something more than that, e.g., answers to questions people asked me.  I tried to keep all but the trip’s happenings out of the above summary, and so this is the opportunity for me to record, for my own purposes, my thoughts about this trip that I want to remember. Since the below will really be only raw material for use in some other format at some future time, there will be no order to the below thoughts except as they come to mind as I write them. For this reason,  any numbers I assign may or may not signify their importance to me.

 

1.  Donner. Clearly, one of the purposes for this trip was to treat that magnificent companion of mine, Donner, to the same road trip that three of his predecessors had the opportunity to take, before it is too late.  Since Donner is restricted to his leash at home outside, I cannot tell you enough the joy I got from seeing this creature enjoy the freedom of the open space, probably for the first time in his life.  Watching him chase and retrieve the “toys” thrown for him in the wide-open spaces of empty campgrounds, running off-leash, and just basking in the splendor of Nature, things he never could have imagined in his wildest dreams in those Los Angeles back yards for his first four years tethered by a chain, at times brought tears to my eyes.  If I ever take another journey like this, it will be to repeat those same feelings I had, and to give him that experience again and again and again.

 

2. “Absolutely fantastic.” In this final posting, above, and on my blog itself, I struggled to find the right adjectives to describe the roads, the campsites, the sunrises and sunsets, the views, the flora and fauna, and the experiences themselves, and I did see a lot of them: magnificent, wonderful, fantastic, beautiful, splendid, sumptuous, grand, impressive, imposing, superb, spectacular, resplendent, opulent, luxurious, rich, fine, gorgeous, glorious, dazzling, elegant,  majestic, lush, and even delicious were just a few of those I used, often prefixed with an adverb, (e.g. absolutely. I don’t know why I felt I had to do that, but I did.  What I should have done, other than omit those words, was to invent just one word of my own and apply that word equally to just about everything I saw and experienced. In Denali, for instance, it made no difference whether I was seeing Denali herself in all her splendor or some lesser mountain or even a ubiquitous plant, everything, without regard to its size, shape, color or species, was of equal beauty simply because it was there and I was alive and there to experience it. Even those things I experienced that most people would label ugly or boring, e.g. the long drive over the prairies, had inherent beauty in themselves, in the case of the prairie, because of the hard labor that those who work those lands exert and the purpose of that work. And as for the negative words I used to describe things like the weather or the roads, those words were just the staring points for something positive, and all of them eventually morphed into something positive, most often in terms of the value they added to something or my own reaction to dealing with them.

 

3. Nightmares or challenges? During the 117 days, as readers of my blog know well, there were many challenges thrown my way, many with the Defender.  Not once did I consider those challenges nightmares or even crises. If I sometimes referred to them as problems, it was only because I was reviving old labelling habits. Indeed, they were challenges, and only challenges, and that’s how I treated them.  This was not my way of trying to white-wash what I was experiencing or paint a rosy picture, trying to cover up the real seriousness of the incident. On the contrary, this is the way I think about these things because it is a lot easier for me to deal with an unwanted or unexpected incident when I think of it in detached terms.  Had I viewed the ALCAN saga as a nightmare, for instance, instead of as a challenge, its outcome would not have been the same. Of course, if at any time, Donner’s or my safety was violated, I might have looked differently upon the incident, but to the extent that I labelled the incident as simply challenges, I diverted the outcome away from those that affected our safety and wellbeing.  The big question is, why weren’t some of the incidents we experienced nightmares when for many people they would have been?  The only answer I can think of is that I was prepared for each one of them logistically, mentally and financially.

 

4. How was my vacation? Some people innocently referred to this journey as a vacation.  It was not a vacation. I do not take vacations because of my personal situation. Nor was it meant to be an adventure as I have had my fill of adventures over my lifetime and do not need any more. Now was it or meant to be fun, even those parts of the trip watching Donner enjoy himself. I gave up looking for fun in life long ago for reasons those who know me well know. Well, what was it then?  Why do I take these 14,000-mile road camping trips across the continent, trips that are surely unprecedented? I already talked about one reason above (see Donner). At one time, I wrote down why I thought I make these trips and stopped writing reasons after, I think, reason 39. ( I will try to find and reconstruct that, its and publish it here in the future.) But if there is one reason that stands out in my mind right now more than any other, it is to get out of my comfort zone. I say this not just to take a vacation from that comfort zone for a few months, but to change the way I deal with it when I get back home. One of these days, I might appreciate getting out of my comfort zone so much that I just night not return to it, for very long anyway.  Perhaps that’s what I am really hoping for. That almost happened on this trip, maybe still will.

 

5. What will I remember most about this trip?  Probably the whole trip, but if not, I will not know the answer to this until way in the future when I can look back at what I remember. In the meantime, what I hope to remember, not necessarily in this order, are: (a) The absolute joy I felt at Donner’s experiencing real freedom for the first time in his life; (2) Summer; (3) my fantastic constant travel partner of 12 days, Stefanie; (4) the fantastic people I met along the way, especially those who were quick to help was when we needed help or advice, starting with Denis in Quebec and ending with the captain and chief steward on Delta’s flight 1469; the Dalton and Denali experiences; (5) the several new roads traveled and campsites visited; (6) the living proof I experienced that there really is a solution to every problem worth solving;  (7) the living proof I experienced that the old Boy Scout motto, Be Prepared, really does have substance; (8) how the Defender did what it was supposed to do, despite its troubles along the way; (9) the living proof I experienced that having a Plan really does pay off; (10) the focused, determined way I handled all the challenges that were tossed my way; and (11) the many absolutely beautiful nights we spent in total solitude in some camp sites.

 

6. Regrets?  Looking back over the 117 days, I have only one regret, or would do only one thing differently in the future : I  should have taken a three-day ferry from Alaska to Prince Rupert and then after a day off a one-day ferry to Port Hardy on Vancouver Island instead of the five-day ferry to Seattle, not for my sake but for Donner’s. It was a big mistake keeping him cooped up in the Defender on the ferry’s loud car deck for five solid days. But I was going on Leben’s and Erde’s experience in 2001, so what did I know? Next time.

 

7. Was there anything on this trip that I was unprepared for? Nope. Even the layovers. Before the trip started, I moved all my appointments back to the end of November and moved more cash into my bank account specifically in case something went wrong with the Defender.

 

8. How did the 59 days of unexpected layovers adversely affect my attitude toward the trip?  They did not. They were as much as part of the experiences that could happen on these trips as the weather, the people along the way, the roads, the camps, etc.  When someone drives his or her own vehicle 14000 miles on one trip, if they do not expect these things to happen, they are deluding themselves.  You do not want these things to happen, but stuff happens wherever you are.  More than half the miles on the Defender were put in on these loag road trips, albeith over only three percent of the time I had the vehicle, so I should expect that more than half the sudden failures would occur on the road. Moreover, I decided long ago that I would not replace parts on an expected useful life basis but on an as needed or likely-failure basis and take my chances.  I probably saved a bundle by doing that, but lost some of that during these layovers.

 

9. What was the most profound experience on this trip?  My weeks in Whitehorse, for reasons I still need to think about, but probably because it made me realize that I need to juggle some priorities when I return home.

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10. Do I regret my and Stefanie’s decision to turn around just miles short of my goal of the site of Sonntag’s and Kessie’s ashes north of Atigun pass on the Dalton Highway? See answers to #6 and #10.

 

11. Did I accomplish everything I set out to do on this trip? I had one only goal for this trip, to return home safely with Donner. We made it home safely. Mission accomplished.

 

12. Will I ever take the Defender on a long road trip again?  Ask me that question when I get it back.

 

13. Given what happened on this trip, will I ever take a long road camping trip again, without or without the Defender? Of course.  Now that I know there is a solution for every problem and that I know how to prepare for these things and that there will be people around to help when needed, why wouldn’t I?

 

14. Will I ever return to Alaska and the Yukon?  In due time, yes.

 

15. Will I ever see my Dalton and Denali travel partner Stefanie again?  Is the Pope catholic?

 

16. Is the Pope catholic?  Of course he is.

 

17. When the Defender is up and running, if I decide to sell it, what will I be asking for it? If you have to ask, you cannot afford it, but who said I am going to sell it anyway? That vehicle has served me well for 23 years and it is part of my personality. I would not feel safe or equipped in any other vehicle to do the things I do with it. If they still made them I might consider getting a 110 (mine is a 90), but they stopped making them in 2015 (and stopped importing them for the US market in 1997).

 

 18. How many coveted OTR patches did I give away on the trip? All but two of the 200 I ordered, but I gave those two away to my genuine-cowboy row-mate Chris on the plane ride home and to a new neighbor Haley, who doted over Donner the first day we got home. I even forgot to save one for myself.

 

19. Did this trip with all its challenges change me in any way?  Probably, although I will defer to others to tell you how. But it was much more than just the challenges that will have contributed to those changes.  The intensity of the whole experience, heightened further by the meditative effect of eight or more hours of thinking on the road each day, probably ignited some catalyst within me that rewired some neural paths deep inside my brain in ways that I cannot predict or control.  I can only hope they are for the better.

 

December 6, 2016......

For most of my road trips, I usually drafted my final blog posting at night during the course of the long drive home across the lower 48, once bivouacking for two days at the splendid Savage River Lodge in western Maryland to finish it.  I did this knowing full well that as soon as I walked in the door of my home, I would be swamped by the formidable task of unpacking almost 800 pounds of gear and supplies, tackling the several feet of mail waiting for me, and being pulled headlong into to the vortex of daily routine of life back home.  And that is exactly what happened this year, which is why I still have not yet drafted that final blog entry. But I started working on it today and hope to have it finished soon, so please bear with me. And although I refer to it as the final posting, it really will not be.  The real final one will be posted only when the Defender is back home and back on the road again, which it will be. In the meantime, Donner quickly settled back into the life he thought he was going to have forever after I rescued him last year, only to have it interrupted by 117 days of what probably were the most bizarre days of his life. They certainly were mine.

ED

Day 117, Saturday December 3rd, Home at Last

This long journey has ended. Unloading out back of my condo.

About to get home.  I am still wearing the safety vest they had me put on to retrieve Donner on the tarmac.

Day 117, Saturday, December 3, Airport, One last obstacle, courtesy of Delta Airlines


Day 117, Saturday, December 3, Airport, One last obstacle, courtesy of Delta Airlines

Just when I thought that I had encountered the last pesky obstacle tossed my way, another one appeared.

As readers of this blog know, once I made my decision to fly home, I immediately contacted Delta Airlines, the only carrier flying non-stop from Salt Lake City to Washington, to inquire about the details of transporting Donner to DC.  The Delta rep on the phone, whom I have since affectionately referred to as the "schoolmarm", sternly warned me that Donner's kennel must have metal and not plastic clips and be large enough for him to lie down comfortably, turn around and stand up without his ears touching the roof, but she did not tell me it could only have one door. When I expressed concern that I might have to show up with a (30") kennel where the tips of his ears slightly touched the roof, she warned me that he would be rejected and advised me to look harder to find an appropriately sized kennel. As I reported earlier on this blog, the next day I decided to buy the only 30" kennel I could find in the area --- with two doors ---- anyway instead of the 36" one and take my chances of a more reasonable agent at the cargo check-in.  (If I had known about the one-door requirement, I would have found one.) If the kennel was rejected by Delta Cargo, my fallback was to get back in the rental car and drive home, which I had already worked out with the cooperative and competent Enterprise Car rental agent (Evan) in Richfield, Utah.

Because of the risks involved, I do not undertake critical steps on these trips unless I prepare for them. In some cases, that preparation includes a dry run. And so it came to be that on Friday, I left Salina early enough to arrive in Salt Lake City in time to go through a dry run at Delta Cargo with Donner instead of just showing up on Saturday only to learn that for one schoolmarmish reason or another he would not be able to fly.  Well, as it turned out, the cargo manager was not so concerned about the 30" kennel but that the kennel had two doors, something the schoolmarm never told me about. Sorry, he told me, no two-door kennels allowed. (Why Pet Lodge, the manufacture of the kennel, says that their kennels are IATA approved, or why the schoolmarm never told me that, or why they could not just stay-tie that second door securely as they do with the main door, I do not know.) When I expressed exasperation to the manager that the Delta rep on the phone never told me about that and that I was in no position to go find a suitable kennel at the late hour, he told me not to worry, Delta has a supply of kennels that they could sell me, $170 for a 30" one and $270 for a 36" one, also something the schoolmarm never told me.  I told the manager that I preferred the 30" one because of the bulky size of the 36" inch kennel and he said he would set up one of each and we could decide on the appropriate one in the morning.  I asked him to please make notes for the morning manager about our decision, had he promised he would. After I left Delta, since the 30" Pet Lodge kennel with two doors was now useless to me, I drove to a local the Human Society and donated that kennel to them.

I showed up at Delta Cargo at promptly as soon as they opened at 6:45 to make sure no further obstacles were waiting for me there. It's a good thing I did. When I asked Crystal, the morning manager, if the afternoon manger had left notes for her, she said he had not. When she asked me where my dog's kennel was, in told her there were two that the afternoon manager has set up waiting for me to choose from. She looked puzzled and then disappeared for a few minutes. When she returned, she told me they not only had no such kennels for me, but had no kennels that size at all. When I asked her what I should do, she told me that that was my problem to solve and that my dog would not fly on the flight without a kennel.

I will not recite the details of what transpired over the next several minutes, but, in summary, I politely told Crystal that it was not my problem but hers to solve and that I and my dog would be on the 9:45 flight. But I also told her that the afternoon manager would not have told me that they had a 30" and 36" inch kennel if they did not. She answered that someone probably showed up after I left and bought them.  Dismissing her response as improbable, I "urged" her to keep looking for the kennels as I was confident they were somewhere in the cargo warehouse.

After several minutes, Crystal returned and told me that they found the two kennels, but the 30" one was broken in half.  Not wanting Donner to fly in such a large kennel, I asked if the 30" kennel could be repaired and she said no.  Reluctantly, especially since at this point my options and time were running out, I agreed to buy the 36" kennel but only at the price of the 30" kennel since that is what I wanted and had been promised, and she agreed.  I then proceeded to the loading dock, helped get Donner into his mobile mansion, and said my goodbyes to him, confident that I had just solved my last challenge of this journey.

After dropping off the Enterprise rental car, checking in with the affable Terry for my flight, and sailing thru TSA's pre-check without much difficulty (sadly, they did confiscate my solitary can of Starbucks Double-shot Mexican Mocha coffee that I absent-mindedly left in my backpack), I made a dash for the boarding gate. While waiting for boarding, I spotted the captain and introduced myself, telling him that I had a dog in the cargo hold so to please to make sure he keep he temperature up, although was certified for temperatures as low as 11 degrees, hoping he would keep them higher than that. He assured me that they would keep the cargo hold at 66.  When I returned to my seat in the waiting area, while chatting with the woman next to me about my conversation with the captain, I jokingly told her that I expressed hope to the captain that he would not have to announce during the flight for the owner of the German shepherd dog to go to the cargo hold as he had escaped for his kennel, just as the purser of the Alaskan ferry had done twice on this trip.

After boarding the flight, settling into my seat, and striking up a conversation with the most interesting person I have even sat next to on a flight, a genuine cowboy from Montana named Chris Christensen, just as the doors of the Boeing 737 were closed and the flight ready to depart, the captain came on the loud speaker and announced, "Ladies and gentlemen, it seems we have a slight problem we must tend to which will delay us for about 10 minutes. Would the owner of the German shepherd dog in the cargo hold please identify himself and come forward?"  I cannot now recall what was going through my mind at that point, but I immediately unbuckled my seat belt and rushed to the cockpit. There, the chief steward and captain explained to me to me that Donner's kennel would not fit through the cargo hold door so that would have to remove him from the kennel and try to fit it sideways through the door, but they did not know if it would fit that way either.  I turned to the chief steward and told him that I needed to take this flight and that I hoped that he believed the same thing I did, that there was a solution for every problem.  He told me he did and assured me that if the kennel did not fit, with the captain's approval, he would permit my dog to ride in the cabin with me. The captain agreed.

After the cabin door was reopened, I was escorted down the ladder to the tarmac and for the next ten minutes poor Donner went through what had to be the most traumatic experience of this trip, if not his life. After freeing Donner from his kennel, it took several cargo workers to flip the kennel on its side and squeeze it though the cargo hold door and then flip it upright inside the hold. After it was in place inside, let me just say that it was not an easy chore to get a scared 101-pound dog onto the four-foot high conveyer belt, guide him along the narrow 15-foot conveyor up to and into the hold, and then secure him in his kennel, but we did it, and the flight got underway soon after that without further Donner incidents.

Three and a half hours later, after the plane landed in DC, I had to return to the tarmac and reverse the task of getting Donner and his kennel back onto the tarmac.  The Delta staff who assisted in the process, especially the likeable Julia Oggiono, could not have been more cooperative and understanding, and after some difficulty, including Donner's frantically running free in the cargo hold looking for me, he was eventually on the tarmac and put back into this kennel for delivery to the baggage claim area.  After I claimed Donner, Julia apologized and handed me a credit for $50 for the "inconvenience" both he and I had suffered.  Minutes later, Donner and I were met by my "home-base commander", Mike Boyd, at the pickup area, and driven home safely without further incident. The final obstacle in the way of our returning home safely was over.

This entire upsetting incident could have been easily avoided by, at a minimum, the schoolmarm telling me that two-door kennels, even IATA-certified ones, were not permitted by Delta. I would clearly have respected that and driven out of my way to find a conforming kennel. As the result, I not only was out the $170 I paid for the two-door kennel, but Donner was subjected to a trauma the likes of which he had never experienced before, and I was subjected to still another stress-accompanied incident on this obstacle-laden journey.   Fortunately, thanks to the flight's captain and chief steward, and Delta's ground crews at both airports, not to mention my determination, the incident ended well, and Donner arrived home with me and safely, and another challenge tossed our way on this extraordinary journey was resolved.

I will try to post my final blog entry on Monday.

Photos include:
The announcement of the delay on the flight's web-site page.
Donner and I arriving in our driveway and then getting ready to finally get home after ab absence of 117 days and nights. (Note that I was so distracted by the tarmac incident that I forgot to return the safety vest they gave me to step on the tarmac.)





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Day 117, Staurday, December 3,

I apologize for the delay in posting this.  Let me just post this brief entry now  to say that Donner and I made it home safely tonight, but not without one final obstacle that was thrown into our path by some employees at Delta airlines, despite all my careful preparations and precautions.  Thanks to the captain of the plane and the chief steward, that obstacle was swiftly and professionally removed, but only after Donner (and I, as his surrogate) went through the most harrowing incident of our entire trip, just when we thought that we had seen everything.  I don't have time to write about it now, but I will tomorrow.  I will also send my final posting of this blog some time after that. Suffice  it is to say now that we are both home safe and sound.  The Defender, however, is still sitting in Salina Utah waiting to be transported back to Washington next week, and it will be transported back, even if I have to go back to Salina to haul it back myself..  Those who know me know that I never give up on matters that are important to me, and this one is important to me.

ED and Donner, from DC

The final map

The final map for OTR-8, 117 days, 16,700 miles: 13,000 by Defender, 1,500 miles by ferry 2,200 by air


Original trip legs postponed shown in RED
Actual trip in BLACK; Ferry in Blue; Air portion in Yellow.

 
 






Day 116, 6:50'p.m., LaQuinta, SLC, room 125

"This sure beats sleeping on the cold, hard floor of those tents." Donner



Ed and Donner, from on the road