Travels with Gunther and Kara

Today was supposed to be a rainy sort of day so we headed off after breakfast to our first stop of the day; the Molly Kitchen Gold Mine in nearby (well, 40 miles away nearby) Cripple Creek, Colorado. Our first souvenir for the day was our admission tickets; the tour was $18 apiece but well worth it in our opinion.

Our tour started with Mike our guide as we entered the elevator cage after donning hard hats for the descent. The elevator has two cages one over the other and each holds maybe 4 people tops. Once in; Mike triggered the right number of bells on the bell cord to indicate the destination of the trip (ours was the tenth level down from the surface)…more details on the bell system in a bit.

The mine opened in 1890something and was the third or fourth mine on the mountain and the first one in Colorado that was owned by a woman. She had to take her husband who was a mining lawyer along with her to the claim office to get the claim registered as women in those days were severely frowned upon in mining towns other than in the kitchens, laundries, and establishments that provided…well, let’s just call it entertainment since this is a family blog:-) There are a total of 11 levels in the mine but the bottom one wasn’t fully mined before the mine shut down in the early 1970′s due to the smelting plant closing. Underground gold mines don’t have the loose gold like you’ve probably seen on Gold Rush on Discovery Channel…it’s mixed into the minerals in the ore. Once mined; the muck (hey, that’s what the call it) is delivered to the smelter where through a process using mercury and some other toxic chemicals the gold is extracted. The smelter leaves a lot of mercury contaminated dirt, stone, and tailings behind and the environmental concerns were the reason the smelter was closed. No smelter means that the 7 or 8 mines on the mountain closed despite there being plenty of gold left in the veins. When the mine was closed a yield of half an once per ton of muck was the break even point and the mine was yielding 10 ounces per ton when it shut down so there was a lot of money left in the ground.

Our tour started at the bottom of the elevator shaft 1000 feet below the surface (which was at 10,020 according to my GPS). You can see the previous tour group in the back left getting ready to enter the cage which is the red phone booth sized thing behind the grate in the center of the picture. The other cage is below the floor in this shot; the upper cage is loaded first and then the lower; unloading is in the other order. After the shot we turned 180 degrees and headed away from the elevator for our circular (more or less) tour counterclockwise through the mine level with about a half mile total in length.

Our first stop was a recreation of the original mining technique. This is called triple jacking where the jack (chisel) is held against the wall by one man and the other two take turns pounding it with sledge hammers until the holes are about 2 feet deep. Holes were drilled with a center hole about halfway between the floor and ceiling; a series of 4 in a square around it, another square of 4 around that and then more evenly distributed around the perimeter. Final holes were along the floor and ceiling. Black powder was placed into the holes with the exception of the center and the fuse was lit. The innermost square went off first collapsing the inside of the smallest square towards the empty center hole, then the next square, then the third ring and finally the ceiling and floor charges. The result was about 10 tones of rock being blasted loose and falling into the tunnel where it was ready to be loaded. This mining technique remained in use through the closure of the mine with just a couple minor improvements. First was an air powered drill which could drill deeper holes (about 4 feet) and then an improved air drill which could dig to 6 feet or so. Each of these was combined with improvements in explosives…first to nitroglycerine for the 4 foot deep holes and then to ANFO (a mixture of ammonium nitrate or fertilizer and diesel fuel). The drills were essentially developed to be able to drill deeper holes as improvements in explosives technology enabled blasting 20 and then 35 tons of muck per blast.

Once the muck was loose; laborers called mockers loaded the ore into carts; a half ton per cart which were moved to the elevator to be raised. The carts were originally moved by donkeys which lived their entire lives from birth to death in the mine and were therefore blind. In the 1930s or so it was declared that using donkeys was inhumane so they were abolished and humans pushed the carts for a few years until the invention of the air powered cart. About this time the mockers were also replaced with this air powered miniature backhoe like thing that picked up the muck and dumped it into the cart. Here is a photo of the muck loader being operated by Mike our tour guide.

And here is a photo of the third type of drill; the improved air drill. The second one had a much more complicated mounting mechanism so it had to be disassembled and reassembled for each hole.

Once the miners were in a vein (an area where there were the gold bearing minerals instead of just rock they mined to follow the vein. They much preferred to mine upwards so that gravity gave you an assist. The miners stood on boards or logs to drill and once the blast went off the muck fell to the bottom of the shaft where the carts were waiting. Here is a photo of one of the Mine Up areas; this one went up about 100 feet or so before being abandoned.

The walls and ceilings of the mine shafts are covered with magnesium sulfate which was carried in by water seeping into the mine and dissolving the minerals. You might know this chemical as Epsom Salts but it wasn’t available in enough quantity to make retrieval of it worth while.

Here is a second vertical shaft; this one goes up almost 800 feet before the vein petered out. The ladders were on the right side and the blasts were concentrated on the left side to fall down to the bottom for removal.

The miner’s restroom, rarely used as it was far from the business end of the mind so buckets were the preferred alterantive.

This gadget was invented to assist with the dreaded Mining Down; in which gravity was not your friend. It lifted 500 pounds at a time and has an ingenious arrangement that tips the bucket at the top to dump the contents into a cart. It was moved from a neighboring mine and was used to dig and remove muck from a 10 foot wide vertical tunnel that went down over 3000 feet before it was abandoned. I can’t even imagine how many trips up and down it made to move that much rock…500 pounds at a time. Manual labor for mucking made a comeback in Mining Down as there wasn’t room for any of the automated loading methods.

This chart shows the system of bells which was used to call for the elevator which was operated from the surface. It was invented by a guy whose brother was killed in an elevator accident. Each mine originally used a different bell code…which meant that an experienced miner who moved from one mine to another could get confused by the different system and hence get himself killed. This system slowly made progress until all of the mines on this mountain used it; it was then picked up by the state and mandated for use at all mines for standardization.

This is where the miners sat to eat their meals…yes, it’s the very first Hard Rock Cafe!

With that, we were back at the elevator where we made our way back to the surface. We grabbed this shot of downtown Cripple Creek, Colorado from right outside the mine…we had lunch down at Maggies Cafe in the Casino (one of many in town, seemed to be the chief income producing business these days) in the midst of a snow and sleet squall. Neil didn’t think much of that cold and icy stuff; especially after he jogged back to the car to keep Connie dry. It was only 75 yards or so and was downhill but the altitude of 9500 feet made it seem like he had run miles.

After lunch we headed home and spotted this heard of elk on the side of the road. Don’t know if they were a commercially farmed herd or not.

We were headed for our second hike at the Red Rock Canyon Open Space maintained by the city…but a couple things resulted in canceling of that part of our day. First; it was raining and we thought that wandering around on wet clay was not too smart. Second, we got the dreaded “Check Engine Light” coming on in the car so we headed over to the Mazda dealer to get it looked it; turns out we need a couple of sensors replaced so we’re dropping it off in the morning before heading off to our final fun thing for here in Colorado…a visit to the Wolf Sanctuary. Hopefully the weather will cooperate.

Cyas.

Today we headed off to 0830 Mass then stopped by Denny’s on the way home for brunch. After that we waited a bit until Connie’s tummy issues had settled down a bit then headed off about 10 miles south to our destination for the day…hikes at Cheyenne Mountain State Park.

This state park is located on the flanks of Cheyenne Mountain which is probably more famous as the home of NORAD, the North American Air Defense Command. Every body has probably seen the pictures of the tunnel into the mountain with the nuclear blast proof doors where incoming attacks are monitored and if necessary responded to. We couldn’t see the opening to the tunnels from where we were even though we were on the south side which is where the opening would be located (makes targeting by ICBMs harder). Here’s a picture of Cheyenne Mountain (at least the top of it)…you can barely make out the antenna farm located a bit to the right of the highest point of the peak. A large portion of the mountain has been hollowed out and the United States command center built into the hollow section. It’s got huge nuclear blast proof doors and enough power, air, and water to last for several months on it’s own and sufficient communications links to manage all of the US military forces in the event of a crisis.

Anyway; we paid our entrance fee and parked at the picnic area then heeded off on a hike that combined the Coyote Run and Zook Loop trails for a total of about 2.5 miles of hiking. There was a couple of hundred feet elevation change through the hike which in our non acclimated state was enough. Unfortunately the wildlife really didn’t cooperate much. We spotted a couple of deer hoof prints but they weren’t distinct enough to bother taking a picture of. Neil did grab a picture of Connie on the trail

and we saw this cool grasshopper alongside the trail at one point.

We managed to miss the rain; a couple of thunderstorms passed us by during the hike and at one point we looked east across the valley and Neil got this nice panorama photo of a couple of the storms that passed us by dumping rain down on Colorado Springs.

You can see the rain coming down in a couple of places; it actually looked a lot better in person but I  guess this photo is the best I can do.

We passed a couple of other hikers but it was pretty quiet on the trail. After that we headed home and rested a bit…by dinner time Connie’s tummy issues had subsided a bit so Neil made some spaghetti with onions, cheese, olive oil, and some leftover bison short ribs from our dinner at Ted’s the other night. Add a couple glasses of wine and it was (again) quite tasty.

Tomorrow we’re going to visit the gold mine; it entails traveling about 1500 feet or so underground to see the actual gold mining operations; we’re looking forward to it. We might go to Red Rock Canyon as well but it’s supposed to rain so that might get canceled if it does.

Cyas.

I can report that as I write this the temp is in the 60s and it’s a pretty nice evening here at the Air Force Academy. About 12 miles away as the crow flies it’s snowing on top of Pikes Peak and the temp is in the 20s and snowing. Glad we’re not up there this evening.

Today we got a sort of late start; Connie had a bad night sleeping and has been having some on and off (mostly on) tummy issues. We’re pretty sure it’s just due to the altitude; she hasn’t got full blown altitude sickness but is having some of the symptoms which start with headaches and on and off nausea. We’re continuing to do what we want to do; but between that and the thin air it’s just slower than usual.

We did get stuck by the bank robbery on the base as we left this morning. Just as we got to the gate they closed them and weren’t letting anybody out. Talked to the guard and apparently an alarm had gone off at the bank on base so they were restricting leaving until they found out what kind of car the robbers were driving. We had a good laugh with the car next to us since we were clearly too old to be robbers and they had 4 kids in the car…besides, everybody knows that robbers have masks and guns…the gate guards didn’t find this amusing at all. After about 15 minutes they opened the gates and let us go…we never did find out what happened but there was nothing on the news and no additional armed security when we got back 3 hours later…so we decided it must have been just a false alarm. Darn, we always wanted to be in the middle of a bank robbery, guess we can’t check that one off the bucket list.

By about 1100 or so she was feeling better so we headed off to our scheduled thing for the day which was a visit to the Wild, WIld, Wild West Festival in Pueblo, Colorado about 45 miles form here. Pueblo is about 2000 feet lower in elevation so we pretty quickly could tell the difference in breathing as we headed south. By the time we got there it was noonish and getting up into the 70s so we wandered around the festival awhile. It turned out to be very little in the Wild, WIld, Wild West mode and mostly just another street festival. Connie was all up for quarter horse demonstrations and cowboys and shootouts and the like and what you got was funnel cake, turkey legs, snow cones, and lots of cheap but overpriced trinkets. Bummer.

We parked in a 2 hour free parking space a couple blocks from the festival, wandered around for an hour or so, had lunch and decided that we had enough street festival. It was getting pretty warm by that time (1300 or so) and Connie was running out of gas so we left, hopped in the car and came home.

We were really tired (not much sleep last night for Connie and Neil was worn out from just living today…so we had a nice siesta in the afternoon. After that we got up, had a wine cooler, and made a nice dish out of left over rotisserie chicken from the Commissary, some leftover sauce made from Mushroom and Roasted Garlic Campbells soup and a little wine, and some noodles. Added some cheesy garlic bread using the last of some rolls we got the other day (as you can tell, it was pretty much a leftover kind of dinner) and it tasted pretty good. We’re having bread pudding with strawberries on top for dessert a little later.

Sorry no pictures today; there wasn’t anything worth it. We did see some nice young ladies dressed up in old west saloon girl costumes (saloon girl was a nicer term for available woman back in the day) wandering around trying to drum up business for the photo studio…but then they opened their mouths and all had down home Virginia accents with a real Southern Bell attitude…which sort of clashed with the saloon girl outfits. We were too hot by that time to bother with pictures though.

Cyas.

We’ve had an interesting and very busy couple of days…so this post is a bit photo intensive. Sorry about that.

Thursday we headed off for our first fun day; we had two stops scheduled for our visiting pleasure. First up was the Garden of the Gods State Park here in Colorado Springs. Our plan was to drive through the parts of the park we were not going to hike through and then take a 3.5 mile hike around the central and most scenic parts of the park.

Our first stop was Balanced Rock. This 700 ton boulder is about 20 feet tall and 30 wide and is balanced on a little segment about 6 or 8 feet around. It’s right next to the one way road through the park so it was a pretty easy visit.  

After that we made our way around to the south parking area and set off on the Chambers/Ute/Bretag/Palmer trail which is  a nice loop that covers most of the best areas in the park. Right at the north end of the parking lot we spotted Cathedral Rock. Our original impression of this rock was that it was just a pinnacle as you can see from this first photo which was taken from the south side.

Little did we know that in actuality it’s a long skinny dorsal fin shaped rock about 500 or so feet high. As we got further around the east and then north east sides of it Neil took the following two pictures…it’s nice how almost every direction gives you a different viewpoint.

Shortly after that we happened across a Black Billed Magpie. This is really a beautiful bird with the black and white accents…Neil was able to get 2 good pictures from slightly different viewpoints.The wings are black and white and flash in flight along with the greenish iridescent tail.

Shortly after this we crossed the main entrance road into the park and took this shot of the classic and famous view of South Gateway Rock on the left, Signature Rock in the middle, and North Gateway Rock on the right. This view is looking to the west and that’s Pikes Peak about 15 miles away between the two gateways.

We turned to the west around North Gateway Rock  and passed White Rock; this is the north side of North Gateway Rock shortly after we turned again to the south to continue our hike.

After going up and down a couple of canyons we exited the trail and entered the Central Gardens area of the park from the west side where we went past Cathedral Spires.

Doesn’t look much like spires from this angle but from the side you can see the separated towers that give it it’s name.

Doesn’t look like the same rock formation, does it. It’s about 200 feet or so high and the profile in the second picture was taken from immediately to the left of the rock in the first picture. Here is another neat formation we saw in the Central Gardens although hit doesn’t appear to have a name of it’s own.

While in the center area we spotted this Western Scrub Jay.

With that our hike was about done so we exited the east side of the Central Gardens area, rejoined the Chambers/Ute section of our original trail and made our way back to the parking lot.

Our next stop was the Manitou Cliff Dwellings which were inhabited by the Ute Indians for about 1000 years…they lived in the caves in the cliff and farmed on the top of the mesa above. Due to a drought about 1300 or so they abandoned the area and moved further south between Pueblo and the Four Corners area. Here are a couple of shots of the dwellings.

Connie noticed that we had forgotten to take a picture of the Kissing Camels at Garden of the Gods earlier so we stopped by there on the way back to the Fam Camp. We really needed to wait until later so that the Camels (which actually are on top of South Gateway Rock) would be backlit and hence easier to see.

You can see the hump and head of the left hand camel and pretty much just the head of the right hand one; the large bump to the right of the second head sort of forms his hump but it’s harder to see than the left one.

With that we headed home as we were pretty tired. We stopped by the Trinity Brewing Company and had a couple of beers and then pretty much just snacked for dinner.

Friday we got up early as we had another pretty long day. 

Our first stop was Helen Hunt Falls. There are two falls at this location; the first (and what turned out to be the better of the two) is right at the trailhead parking area.

This falls is about 40 or so feet high; the picture above is an HDR compilation Neil took from down in the stream bed. After that we headed up about a 1/3 mile hike which would normally be pretty easy even with the 200 foot vertical rise over the distance. However, since the hikestarted at 7600 feet…it was pretty tough going until we got to the top. Neil grabbed this shot of the valley part way up

and then we got up to the upper falls which pretty much turned out to be a bust. This is the best picture Neil got; the falls here are only 4 or 5 feet high. Still worth the hike though.

On the way down he grabbed a couple more shots of the stream; this first one was just below the upper falls after the water ran down a 45 degree rock slope and then hit a rock that was poking out of the slope. Neil really thought this was a really neat shot.

and finally this is the stream just above the lower falls.

With that we were off to our second destination of the day…Pikes Peak. There is a 19 mile long road that goes all the way up to the summit at 14,110 feet. Costs 12 bucks a person toll to go up but the views were definitely worth it. Following the recommendation of the toll road folks we drove all the way up and stopped for photos on the way down as that’s a lot easier on the car than stopping and then having to start again going uphill. The first 9 miles or so were pretty easy climbing through Pikes Forest…the next 4 were getting steeper, less shoulders, almost no guard rails except at the switchback turns and climbing through the tree line and the last 6 were essentially through arctic tundra. Again, not much space on the side of the road if one lost control and it was a long way down. Finally arriving at the summit; the first thing we did was put on some warm clothes as it was 29 degrees up there instead of the 80 it was down in Colorado Springs. Here are some shots from the top.

as well as a 180 degree panorama view looking to the east/northeast.

Here’s the obligatory We Made It!! photo of us at the top.

The wind was blowing about 20 knots so the wind chill temp was around 19 or 20…needless to say we didn’t hang out too long outside. We did head into the gift shop and Connie got a T-Shirt that says “Pike’s Peak, 14,110 Feet. Got Oxygen?”

We thought the air was thin down in Colorado Springs but it was really, really tough to breathe up on the summit. We walked maybe 300 or 400 yards tidal around the top taking photos and buying stuff and pretty much stopped and gasped every 50 feet or so. Right before we left, Neil grabbed this shot of the Pikes Peak Reservoir; this is the main water supply for Colorado Springs. The reservoir is over a mile below the summit in height and about 7 or 8 miles away horizontally.

With that; we got back in the car and headed down…slowly and in low gear so as not to overheat the brakes and recreate the old Harry Chapin song “Thirty Thousand Pounds of Bananas” which is about a truck headed into Scranton PA that has a brake failure and the resultant trials and tribulations of the driver (true story by the way behind the song). The purpose of this picture will become clear in a bit.

Here is a shot of some of the switchbacks up in the above the timber line tundra area.

These are actually not some of the steeper ones; Neil was afraid to stop and get a picture of them since there were no pullouts. The grade ranges from 4% up to about 15 or 18% for several short ramps. I can’t believe that they actually run a marathon foot race up this mountain with the finish at the top. The race starts down in Manitou and climbs over 7000 feet during the course of the race. Nuts I say.

On the way down; we stopped at the visitor center on the shore of the reservoir from a couple photos back; at the top of the reservoir you can see the white line that is the dam holding the reservoir back; the visitor center is just on the left side of the dam. Here is a shot from the visitor center lot looking back up towards Pike Peak.

This shot is looking almost due west. The dam is immediately out of the frame to the left and the road is behind where Neil took the photo from. The highway to the summit turns and parallels this reservoir for a bit then winds around the back side of the rightmost snow capped peak you can see here then onto Pikes Peak itself which is the left hand snow capped peak. The road comes up from the back right side of Pikes Peak and the summit house is just to the right of the highest point you can see.

We headed home then went out to Ted’s Montana Grill for dinner…then it was back home and since there is nothing worth watching on TV tonight we’ll go to bed early. I think we’re getting acclimated to the thin air. Tomorrow we’re heading south about 50 miles to Pueblo, Colorado for the Western Cowboy Festival. I can’t remember what we’re doing Sunday, Monday and Tuesday but we have more fun stuff scheduled for all 3 days. Wednesday is get ready to travel day and we head out for Great Falls, MT on Thursday.

Cyas.

Today was planned to be a work day…which turned out to be a good thing since Connie didn’t feel good most of the day with tummy issues and it rained on and off from about 1000 on, sometimes pretty heavy. Connie’s plan was to stay home and do some work…and catch up on everything she needs to do for the next week or so and then we have the rest of our time here in Colorado to do fun stuff.

Neil took the Mazda over and got the oil changed and a minor repair on the front bumper…it got sideswiped in a parking lot somewhere and one of the clips holding the bumper on was broken so it needed a little hillbilly engineering to help hold it in place. It wasn’t in any danger of falling off but was loose and rattled in the wind at highway speeds.

After he got back from the Mazda place Connie was feeling a little better so he cut up an avocado for lunch for her and got some lunchmeat and cheese for himself. After that he went on a quick run…and thinks he’s starting to acclimate to the altitude a little since it didn’t hurt quite so much today…then had a shower and listened to the Security Now podcast from twit.tv. Following that they ran out to the commissary to pick up a few groceries we needed and mail a package for Connie’s work to Chicago.

Getting back home we watched a little news and are going to have some rotisserie chicken with cheese tortellini for dinner and then settle in for some of Connie’s favorite shows on TV. We also picked up a couple of packages (new power supplies for Neil’s Macbook Pro and Connie’s work laptop) that we ordered on Monday.

Tomorrow we’re off to see the Garden of the Gods state park and the Manitou Indian Cliff Dwellings and then have a date at the Trinity Brewing Company for dinner. Friday we’re going to on a hike to see Helen Hunt Falls and then take a drive up to the top of Pikes Peak and back. I’m sure we’ll have some great photos from those adventures…and then we have additional adventures scheduled for Sat through Tuesday. Wednesday we will get ready to travel and Connie has to go and get her new crown installed. Tuesday is Neil’s birthday and we’re planning on going to Tomo Sushi for dinner…it was recommended by Dr. Koo the dentist we saw here as having the best sushi in town.

While it rained most of the day it was pretty nice early this morning…here are a couple of photos of the 14,114 tall Pikes Peak. It’s the snow capped peak in the center background of these pictures; Colorado Springs is located in the valley to the immediate east of the Front Range which is the part of the Rocky Mountains that passes west of Colorado Springs and Denver. Both photos were taken from the side of the road through the Air Force Academy to our campground but he zoomed in a little bit for the second. They were taken with his iPhone…hopefully we’ll get some more detailed ones later in the week as we have our fun.

Pretty impressive, huh? These shots are looking southwest from the road toward the peak. The road to the peak that we’ll be taking Friday leaves the freeway a little north of Colorado Springs then goes west and basically comes up the back right side of the peak as you see it from this viewpoint. I’m sure glad we aren’t doing any serious hiking at that altitude…we are having a hard time catching our breath here in town at a mere 6,100 feet and the summit is 8,000 feet higher than we sit here. Nonetheless; we’re looking forward to it.

Cyas.

I really don’t have much to report since our arrival Sunday and my post yesterday morning with our site picture…but I’ll go ahead and catch you up anyway.

The first thing I can report is that there isn’t’ any oxygen in the air in Colorado Springs. I knew we were getting pretty high in elevation but thought we were somewhere in the 4000+ foot range still lower in elevation than Denver. In actuality, Colorado Springs is at 6035 feet and the air here is really, really thin…especially when you’re not acclimatized yet. Yesterday Neil went on a bike ride…11 miles or so but discovered that a 300 yard long climb that went up 30 or 40 feet total was really steep in the thin air and caused much heavy breathing on the way up. Today running…he was even worse…by the time he got to the front of the campground he thought he had run 10 miles. Nonetheless…he continued and did about 3 miles but boy did it hurt.

After our early bedtime Sunday night; we got up yesterday and Connie worked in the morning while Neil caught up on some bills, paperwork and other administrivia. After that we did a serious cleaning on the house; Neil vacuumed the floor and carpets while Connie cleaned and then she Swiffered the floors. We had a steak and some fried ‘taters for dinner, a beer with it, and a coconut chocolate ice cream bar for dessert and went to bed.

Today we woke up and were starting to feel refreshed a little bit; although the thin air does make things take longer to do…hopefully that will pass in a couple of days.

Monday Connie went for her dental cleaning and discovered she needed a new crown…she has a cavity under one of her existing crowns…so she went back today and got the prep done while Neil had his dental cleaning. We also got her recliner repaired (the Lazyboy dealer in Sarasota forwarded the parts here), ran a couple of errands (including buying a couple of 5 gallon containers for spare diesel fuel in the back of BAT)

Tonight’s dinner was sautéed chicken with a sauce made from fresh mushrooms, onions, a can of Roasted Garlic Cream of Mushroom soup from Campbells and a little wine…the sauce was really good but unfortunately not as good as the one Neil made a week ago out of fresh roasted garlic. Now it’s a little TV for the evening…we got our DirectTV access shifted over to the West Coast channels for network broadcasts…and we’ll have some fresh baked cookies for dessert and then off to bed.

Tomorrow is going to be a rainy day…so Neil is going to go get the oil changed in the Mazda while Connie does a bit of work and then after that we’re looking forward to some fun stuff…Connie’s working out the schedule this evening.

Pikes Peak is really pretty cool looking…Neil will try to grab a picture tomorrow when he heads out to get the oil changed in the Mazda so you’ll have a little taste of the good views to come during our visit out west.

Cyas.

We got up early Saturday morning, went over and nagged the guys to finish up the final fix on the rig before we left (they moved our internal cell phone booster antenna under warranty and had to patch the hole in the inside ceiling. It’s not a material you can patch so they just installed an addition smoke detector over the hole and it looks like it was always there. After that was fixed we hitched up and were on the road by about 0830. We had a 277 mile trip today of which 276 were on I-70…we had a half mile from Camp Horizons to the freeway and another half mile once we got off at exit 19, US-24 in Goodland, KS. We got a nice pull through site 62 at the Goodland KOA for 30 bucks; there’s a nice guy with a german accent that runs the place. We crossed into the Mountain Time Zone shortly before getting to Goodland (in fact, we’re so close to the time zone boundary that our phones still think it’s Central Time) and were parked, front jacks down, and electric/water hooked up by 3PM. Neil went on a bike ride…Goodland is a nice little town…and we’re going to Mass this evening followed by dinner at the local Chinese joint since we’ve been wanting some Chinese food for a couple of weeks. The China Garden here in Goodland (there must be 10,000 Chinese restaurants named China Garden) has a lot of 4 and 5 star reviews on Yelp and Google…hopefully it’s pretty good. Here is a shot of our campsite…this is really a quite nice little park, about 90 spaces or so and there were at least 4 or 5 RVs parked for the night.

Neil talked to our friend Linda Payne…she and Howard are in Colorado Springs already and confirmed the location for our rig weighing tomorrow. We’ve got another 180 odd miles to go and can’t get into the campground until 1730 tomorrow afternoon since Prince Harry is at the Air Force Academy in the afternoon. We’ll plan on getting rolling about 1000 or so which with a nice stop for lunch will put us at the weighing location about 1400. Figure an hour for the weighing and we’ll find a Walmart or Camping World to park in for a couple hours and go find a beer or something while we wait.

Sunday turned out to be (a) a lot more exciting than we thought and (b) quite a tiring day even though it was only a 180 mile travel day. Since we only had 180 miles to go and couldn’t get into the Air Force Academy to park until 1730…we ate breakfast, Neil went on a run and we headed out at 1000. After a quick stop for lunch we continued on to Limon, CO about 60 miles from our destination and left I-70…which is when the fun started. As we exited Limon and turned onto US-24 for the final 60 miles of our day we passed a sign that said No Services next 56 miles…so we sort of knew the road would be relatively deserted. We quickly conferred via our walkie talkies and decided that since BAT’s trip computer said we still had 100 miles of fuel remaining not to turn around and go on a diesel hunt in Limon (we had not seen any stations on the way through town and while there were surely some there we would have had to look…which given our 45 mile cushion seemed like plenty). We continued down US-24 and the miles were counting down to the next turn…when at about 40 miles to go we passed what turned out to be US-24 on the right turning off but it was unmarked and looked more like the dozen or so side roads into ranches we had already passed. Right after that the GPS with no “Turn right now” message went into the dreaded “Recalculating” mode. It didn’t tell us to make a U turn but calculated a new route to Colorado Springs that was now 93 miles left instead of 46 miles…and BAT’s trip counter was down to about 70 miles of fuel remaining. We pulled over at the first place we could find a space about 9 miles down the road (the road had no shoulders and ditches on both sides) and essentially blocked a side road while we again conferred. We decided that the road we passed shortly before Recalculating was actually US-24 so we made a U turn and headed back. Nine miles back up the road we turned onto the unmarked road and the GPS immediately went back into 40 miles remaining to our destination…so we had found the correct road. The bad news was that now the difference between fuel remaining and destination only gave us a cushion of 13 miles since we had wasted 20 or so miles of fuel with our unscheduled sightseeing trip into the unpopulated sections of Colorado. By this time the road also started getting hilly since we had one section of low mountains to get over before descending into the valley where Colorado Springs is located…which means that BAT’s mileage decreased a bit which meant that our 13 mile cushion started decreasing. We started looking for fuel in all of the towns we were passing but most of them were towns in name only. After passing through 3 or 4 of these and with our cushion down to 9 miles we entered Calhan CO about 20 miles short of Colorado Springs which luckily had a truck stop so we were able to fuel up. Took 33 gallons so Neil remarked that we had a whole 4 gallons left and would have made it to Colorado Springs with almost 2 gallons or 19 miles to spare. It was a lot closer than we wanted to cut it so we immediately decided to always fill up at 100 miles remaining for the duration of our time out here in the west and also to stop at Home Depot today and grab a couple of 5 gallon cans we can fill with diesel and stow in the bed…that will give us an extra 95 miles of emergency fuel; we’ll just have to remember to put diesel stabilizer in them and use the fuel in the cans every couple months and refill them since diesel can grow mold if left sitting for long periods.

With that crisis averted we continued on into Colorado Springs to Pikes Peak Travel Land where our friends Howard and Linda of RV-Dreams are parked for the weekend. Linda came out and unlocked the gate for us and we got the rig weighed. As expected; all of our weights except the rear axle of BAT were fine and as we feared the rear axle is overloaded by about 700 pounds. We’ll have to do some shifting of some of our heavy stuff within the coach to correct the overload condition but it won’t be too hard. We can move our 120 pound safe from the front closet to sit next to the couch at the rear of the coach…this alone will correct over 240 pounds of the overload. We’ll move our 100 or so pounds of toolboxes from the basement to sit in the front passenger side of BAT on the floor since the front axle is way under the limit…between the two of those we’ll correct most of the overload. The remainder isn’t something we can fix so we’ll just live with it.

Howard and Linda also recommended lowering our trailer tire pressure from 125 to 100-110; we’ll still be well within the weight limits of the tires at the lower pressure, they’ll last longer, and the ride will improve since they will be less like balloons bouncing the trailer up and down. They recommended we increase the rear tire pressure on BAT from the factory recommended 60 to 70-75; this will make the rear tires the same pressure as the front tires are at factory recommendation so is well within the capacity of the tires. Doing this will make sure that the tire loads on BAT’s rear axle are well within specs so the only overload will be on the rear axle itself by a couple hundred pounds and we’ll just have to live with this or else buy a bigger t ruck and we’re not ready to do that at this point…although the possibility is still under review since we haven’t been in the mountains yet. We did hit a couple of 7 or 8 percent grades for a mile or so yesterday and had no issues with braking and controlling speed but will continue to evaluate this the rest of the travel season.

After our weighing was complete we headed out…it was only about 1530 by that time so we stopped at Walmart to kill time. Connie got her nails done while we waited…when that was finished we got back on the road and headed up Academy Boulevard the last 5 miles to the campsite. The road had been reopened by that time so we got to the Fam Camp and quickly checked into site 84. This wasn’t our original site but when we told the young lady at the counter we had a 39 foot rig she said that a 40 foot site would be a bit cramped so she changed us to the pull through site 84. Plenty of space, pull through instead of back in, and has a nice hole in exactly the right location through the trees so we can get satellite visibility for the TV. Here’s a picture of our site once we got setup (although Neil took this the next morning).

We quickly decided to just do the minimum setup and leave the house cleaning and outside setup until tomorrow since we were tired. So it was utilities only then we went in, baked a pizza for dinner, and watched a little TV. We did catch a really neat show on National Geographic Wild channel on Canyonlands National Park…which is one of the places we will be visiting later in the summer after we leave WA/OR/CA and start heading east through UT and CO…so we got a lot of good tips on things to see while we are there.

Today Neil is going off to get his recliner fixed and run a couple more errands while Connie gets some work done. She has a dental cleaning at 1330 and then we’re spending the rest of today and probably tomorrow cleaning, putting things back after our work last week, and rest up as we have been going pretty hard for the past two weeks or so and need to rest up a little before we start doing fun stuff.

Cyas.