A Circuitous Walkabout

Even More Pics! I know, right?

kevinhans — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:32:37 +0000

Bonneville Salt Flats

The Rubicon. Mike Hans at the wheel.

The Rubicon. Tim's D90.

The Granite Bowl, Rubicon Trail. I love this place!

The ledge here is greater than waist high.

K Hans spotting for M Hans

Spotting the D90 through.

Healthiest looking coyote I ever saw! Yosemite NP

Best nap spot ever!! Top of Yosemite Falls, Yosemite NP

Courtesy of Jeff Harmon and good camera equipment!

Half Dome, Yosemite NP

This guy was fearless! He ended up inside my truck one morning looking for some chow!

More Pics.

kevinhans — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 21:33:38 +0000

Home again!

kevinhans — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 18:04:33 +0000

Ok, its been a few days since I’ve been home. I’ve finally got the truck cleaned up some and most of the gear put away so I thought I’d spend a little time looking over the photos. That might sound pretty easy, but i noticed that I had almost 900 photos on my own camera, nevermind the hundreds ( probably thousands) that Jeff and Mike took as well!

Anyway, I feel bad for abandoning my post so if anyone out there is still looking at this blog hopefully now you can see some highlights from this trip! This won’t be the last!

Nebraska blows…

kevinhans — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 03:57:32 +0000

…that is to say, it’s windy. It’s also very flat and no matter what time of year I drive across it, it always smells bad!

I had an awesome time in CB though. I stayed an extra day just to enjoy the weather and stay out of the drivers seat. Spent some really good time with my bro….priceless really.

Today, the inevitable happened….time to saddle up and burn home. After one last visit to camp 4, mike and I hit he road to DIA to pick up his car from the economy parking lot. I havnt looked in to it yet myself, but according to Mike, DIA is shrouded with several conspiracy theories….remember the luggage debacle years ago? Dig deeper.

Anyway, we parted ways at the airport. It was a bummer in some ways for both of us, but life marches on ( and vacation can’t last forever…can it?). I managed to get as far as Omaha, about 800 miles from where I started this morning. Tomorrow I’m planning an early (6:30) start to try to pound out about 1k miles…it’ll be my most ambitious day yet!

Enjoy some pics!

Full Circle

kevinhans — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 01:17:01 +0000

Jeff made it out of Phoenix no problem on Sunday. Mike and I opted to stay at the Hampton Inn to get a good night sleep and make an early push to Sedona AZ to enjoy some time there. Sedona has significance for both Mike and I as we went on family vacation there as kids. This time however, we could see some different parts of it based on our knowledge of the area.

We started by driving in to Soldier’s Pass to see some sights and get off the beaten path. We even checked out some side roads that led to some challenging off road driving, but rewarded us with even better sights! We found a great backcountry campsite along Schnebly Road outside of town.

The following day (Tuesday) we headed back to Moab…..that’s right, twice in the same trip! I’ve discovered that it is truly one of my favorite places and is worth every moment you can spend there. Seriously, there is so much to do there and the terrain is so amazing…..there is always something new! At any rate, we got there after dark and camped near the beginning of “Hell’s Revenge” which we planned to do the following day.

Wednesday we slept in a bit as didn’t have much planned other than some offroading……that and there was a coat of ice on everything, making us not care so much for cooking an early breakfast. It warmed up pretty quick though, so we headed down the road. “Hell’s Revenge” is considered to be a difficult trail that takes you in a big loop above the town of Moab. We managed to get around it without too much difficulty, only adding a nickel sized scrape to the back bumper of the Tacoma. The sights were truly amazing, and it really inspires me to plan yet another trip to the area!

We got done around 1pm and drove downtown to get a couple of Americanos (this has become a common occurance everywhere I go). After walking around a bit and enjoying the beautiful weather, we decided to press on to Crested Butte for some decompress time (and to give the truck a well deserved rest!) We got in around 7pm, took some much needed showers, then hit the Secret Stash for pizza. This is a great time of year here in CB: the weather is awesome and mild, there are NO tourists!

Today we spent the day drinking Camp 4 Coffee Americanos and touring the area. We drove up to the Elkton townsite on unmaintained roads and had a challenging time, but we made it up to about 11k feet and saw some abandoned mining campsites and had some great views of “whoville” down below.

I’ll try to get some better pics and maybe video up shortly as I am working on an actual computer now!!

More pics!!

kevinhans — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 05:17:29 +0000

Tulare to Mojave to Phoenix, AZ

kevinhans — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 05:20:48 +0000

Hit the road on a mission: Bang out a bunch of miles to get to Mojave National Preserve as early as possible. Plans look great on paper, but rarely get fulfilled to the letter on the road…..Anyway, I had a bad feeling about heading into the Preserve without any maps or info. As such I spent a bunch of time online the night before to come up with my plan. The “Mojave Rd” is supposedly a great route to see the area if equiped with a four wheel drive vehicle. Sounds good to me! Problem is, if you can’t find the road in the first place you will have a hard time enjoying it.

Having burned up a bunch of time (and gas) looking for Mojave Road, we opted to get in to the Preserve via the normal entrance and go check out some geologic features. I forgot to mention that we were going off of a photo of a map to find these landmarks……..I’m sure you can guess where this is going. After much debate among the three of us, we decided there wasn’t much use in looking for things we had no info about. We hung our heads and made our way to one of the more amazing campsites I’ve stayed at so far.

It wasn’t much to look at in the daylight, as a forest fire had reduced all of the trees in the area to blackened snags. But at night, it became an eerie landscape and with the nearly full moon and the fact that it was halloween added to the ambiance! We took a lot of cool pictures…..

We busted over to Phoenix today via Lake Havasu. It was mostly just a big commute over the desert…..While it is a great experience to be here and see the countryside, I wouldn’t want to live here!

Top of Yosemite Falls

Toyota at Bonneville Salt Flats

Back on track

kevinhans — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 04:26:58 +0000

We had lots of fun visiting Tim in the Sacramento area. We did part of the notorious Rubicon trail on Tuesday. It was super windy and blowing flurries a bit, but we had great fun driving tim’s jeep cj, land rover defender 90 and maureen’s toyota fj cruiser beyond the granite bowl. Thank you guys for being awesome hosts!

Wednesday was spent driving to Yosemite NP. The landscape there is truly worth the hype, it really is amazing! It is also worthy to note that the animals there are extremly tame. So much so that we were nearly able to pet a coyote, had a squirrel get in my truck, and had a bear get within 10 feet of Mike and I in camp! They aren’t kidding about “don’t feed the animals” here! On Thursday we hiked to the top of Yosemite Falls which is the tallest waterfall in the US, and the 5th tallest in the world! The hike was only 3.8 miles up, but gained around 2400′ and took all day…brutal! Outrageous views of the park were the reward, as was a dinner at the ahwanee hotel afterward!

Friday we got up pretty late feeling the damage of our rough hike the day before. Our squirrel pal (below) came back to see what we might leave behind as we packed to go. Our route took us to Sequoia NP. Our main goal there was to see Gen. Sherman. At 2100 years old it is the largest tree in volume, in the world. It is difficult to explain how big it was and I’m sure that pictures don’t do it justice. At any rate, this park is beautiful and I hope to come back and spend more time here. We made it as far as Tulare, Ca today and we’re trying to come up with a plan to not only see and do as much as possible, but make sure Jeff catches his flight on Sunday.

Salt Lake City to Sacramento, CA

kevinhans — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 06:43:35 +0000

Quick pitstop at the bonneville salt flats before heading to Sacramento. The freighted up Toyota could only muster a gps confirmed 102 mph.

More again soon

The desert is an odd space

kevinhans — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 03:55:07 +0000

Well we made it through the white rim trail. 80 miles of rough an broken road. While it wasn’t very difficult from a tehcnical standpoint, it is very challenging to bounce over rough ground at 6-10 mph for 10 hours! Aside from that, the scenery was beyond compare, and there were many spots that required undivided attention so as not to put a tire out over a several hundred foot drop!

We saw some amazing sights and got really far away from the crowds (the whole reason for his trip.) In fact, there were many times when we stopped that it was so quite that I could hear absolutly nothing (aside from the slight ringing in my ears that is always present.) It truly was the most quite place I’d ever been. From what I understand, many people don’t like that sensation, to me it was awesome! Unfortunatly I didn’t get too many pictures on the iPhone of this part of the trip ( driving kept me plenty busy), but I did get a couple of our campsite.

We made it to salt lake city today, a day ahead of schedule. Leaving canyonlands we realized we didn’t really have a plan for the upcoming day. I looked over some maps and concluded that we should camp in the Manti-La Sal National Forest. As we headed up that way, the wind started to blow really hard and the temps
Dropped quickly from the mid 60s down into the low 30s as we climbed in elevation. We drove up and up and the driving rain turned to driving snow and the roads were covered. Everything was going great until about 9500 feet when all of a sudden the back of the truck swung out to the left about 60 degrees or so. I’m glad fir the many years of rally driving training that I have as I quickly countersteered and let off the gas and everything was fine ( I promptly put it in 4 wheel drive from that point). At any rate, no matter how comfortable with sliding around you are, it is pretty scary when you don’t expect it on a narrow mountain road, at high elevation, several thousand miles from home!

As such, we decided to camp at a hotel in SLC and check out the town tomorrow while we wait for my brother mike and our friend jeff to arrive.