How to Deal with Car Troubles on the Road

Not everything goes perfectly on the road. While we may set off for the idealized adventure of picturesque road tripping - from the sun on our backs to confidences around a campfire - sometimes the road gets bumpy in between. Such was our case on the beautiful morning we wound through the breakneck elevations of the Gila Mountains in southeast New Mexico. Our Truth or Consequences hot springs and camping high was quickly dashed as our car welcomed the new day with a terribly pessimistic grinding noise.

Nothing quite raises the haunches of worry like car troubles - especially when you are 2,200 miles away from home - but these are the chances we take when we road trip. This isn't my first bout of car troubles while on a car-reliant vacation, and I doubt it will be my last. But the important thing about facing the potential loss of time and money on the road is to 1. be prepared and to 2. stay calm. These two maxims have always helped me turn my travel frowns upside down.

1. Be prepared for car troubles

Duh, right? Hopefully we are all prepared for car troubles on the daily with a reliable car, an active subscription to AAA, and a savings buffer that can cover repair costs. But when you are miles away from home, it's also important to have the necessary supplies in your car to help you survive your location comfortably and the extra time to play the waiting game.

For example, the grinding noise in our car that morning intensified as we tried to take it over the Gila Mountains toward Silver City, where the promise of a "city-like atmosphere" would provide choices for auto repair. Up in the mountains, we found ourselves predictably without cell service on an isolated stretch of 75 hairpin miles. Luckily, we had all our camping gear, so spending a spontaneous night in the car while waiting for help wouldn't have been a big deal. However, we were running low on food and water. If you are heading off to extreme areas, always have enough supplies to support your party through a night or so of accidental isolation.

Don't forget that if you have to wait for repairs on your car, you will most likely have to find additional and last minute lodging in the area that can also run you a few extra and unplanned for bucks.

Which also leads me to the ever-so-important budget of time. I, for one, and hopelessly guilty of over scheduling my trips, which leads to the heartbreak of losing precious travel time and having to give up much anticipated activities. Even simple car repairs in remote regions can take up to three days, not including weekends.This is not good news for the busy traveler.

2. Stay calm

It's not always easy, right? Especially when faced with budget woes and time loss. And believe me, I am not always one to hold true to this little nugget of advice. I barely remember anything about the Gila's beauty because I was so focused on the grinding noise and all possible, terrible outcomes. Not fun. But I was lucky enough to have my boyfriend by my side who balanced out the yin of my over-the-top worries with the yang of his zen. He had to nicely keep reminding me that mechanics exist for a reason.

And never forget that unscheduled delays may be the most exciting things to happen to us on our trips. In Silver City, we had our lunch paid for us by a friendly patron who took sympathy on our car woes and then we ended up biking around the city on free rentals a friendly bicycle shop owner loaned out to us! When my car broke down in Arkansas, where we ended up stranded for three days, I ended up meeting wonderful friends, hanging at a motorcycle club, and experiencing Hot Springs, Arkansas, in a way I never intended. I still consider that "layover" as one of the most fortuitous moments of traveling I have ever had!

Truthfully, unless you are traveling in a beater who on its best day is on its last legs, car repairs should not be too surprising. Some repairs are just the predictable maintenance and responsibilities of car ownsership. When we finally got my car checked out in Silver City, the problem was a simple broken pulley that took no more than three hours to repair. Anderson was completely right to stay calm. Some cases may require more due alarm, but we shouldn't let a little bump in the road prevent us from being aware of our surroundings.

There is magic in traveling; some of the best experiences lurk in the unscheduled ether. Embrace travel interruptions and let the road guide you! Besides, there isn't much a car rental agency can't fix!

A Yurt in the Enchanted Forest

Yes, it's actually called the Enchanted Forest and I can vouch for its bewitchery.

For those of you keeping score, we are still in New Mexico. Actually, we decided to take a detour to northeastern New Mexico to visit the artist enclave of Taos, where we were lured by the promise of yurts and cross country skiing.

Just a little beyond Taos, located 10,000 feet into the Carson National Forest, is the Enchanted Forest Cross Country Ski Area, replete with 30k of skiing trails that wind through towering and lichen filled pines to stunning views.

Inside the winding trails are two yurts that are available to rent throughout the year, the only catch being that you have to ski yourself and your belongings there. That's cool - if you are a good skier, which I am not. Actually, I had only been x-country skiing once before and downhill skiing never before this.

But it was an impossibly beautiful day and the allure of a yurt hidden in the woods was too good to pass up, so we loaded up our pulk sled (a sled that hooks around your waist and you town behind you) and headed up the slopes.

It was the beginning of a freeze/thaw cycle, so the trails were a bit icy, but since we were there at close to the end of the season, we had the whole course to ourselves - so we could fall down without feeling embarrassed.

After a good mile of uphill skiing, we finally found our little yurt, quickly unpacked and then headed further up the trails to the spectacular birch trees that lead to one of the most breathtaking views of the trip. If only we had been skiing (and falling!) with our nice camera, we might have been able to share the love a bit better!

Eventually we had to stop skiing for the day as the temperatures dropped because the trails became too icy to navigate safely and dusk fell on our little hideaway. In fact, we ended up having the whole forest to ourselves! Since the Enchanted Forest trails close at 4:30pm, we enjoyed the haunting calls of owls and a very cold night with a little bit of whiskey, campfires, and a lot of solitude.

Enchantment, indeed. 

The next day we skied out and began the drive towards more desert regions.

REVIEW:

My review of the Enchanted Forest Cross Country Ski Area is a 6.5/10. However, this has nothing to do with the quality of the trails, the pristine beauty of the forest, or the awesomeness of the location. 

For a small building that is serviced easily by snow mobile and is only one of two rentals on site, the yurt was actually a tad under-stocked and uncared for. The under-stocking wasn't too much of a problem since we had all our camping gear in the car, but we were in no way informed of this by the two people who were running HQ that day, so we had to waste time skiing back down to get more stuff even though the website tells a different story of its amenities. 

I was disappointed to find that the mantles on the propane lanterns were all broken with no replacements even at the store (we had to use our own or be stuck in darkness), the wood stove was a bitch to use with no instructions (and we are wood stove users at home), and that the two port-o-potties (that we were asked nicely to use instead of the nature potty) were filled above the brim with poo. For the price ($85/night), I would have expected a bit more upkeep - and a bit more information from the people in the shop, one especially who giggled when we tried to explain we were beginner skiers instead of offering us advice, tried to charge us for an additional day of skiing even though it is included in the rental price, and who didn't offer us the free for use pulk sled until our second time back down though she watched us shakily ski off with overstuffed backpacks the first time. 

But aside from that very unhelpful person, the excitement of sleeping in a yurt under the stars surrounded by the melody of owls and the thrill of skiing in tee shirts is enough to make me go back for more. Plus, I'm a better skier now.

Exploring the Jemez Mountains of New Mexico

Still shaking sand all the way out of Colorado, we were pretty excited to finally get to New Mexico and find some (hopefully) warmer weather. Our first stop was Santa Fe, where we checked into our base camp, the Santa Fe International Hostel. The hostel is a really friendly place where you can stay in same-sex dorms or rent private rooms with up to five beds inside! We chose the private room route so we didn't have to split up for a very reasonable price.

We had two main goals in Santa Fe: eat chile relleños everyday and check out the Jemez Mountain region. You might remember the story about how Nessa and I nearly got stranded in the woods here at night while looking for hot springs a few Septembers ago. Despite the brush with disaster, I just had to give it another chance! (Spoiler alert: We found them this time!)

On a sunny and moderately warm day in January, we headed off into the mountains to first check out Bandelier National Monument, an Ancestral Pueblo archeological site protecting the impressive canyon homes of the native peoples of the land. If you are thinking "cliff dwellings", than you are on the right page.

Once we took the windy, pine and snow speckled road into the Cañon De Los Frijoles, we grabbed a guide book for a buck and hit the trails along the canyon walls towards the noteworthy Alcove House. The trail, albeit leisurely, is an awesome way to explore the dwellings, sometimes reaching three stories high and accessible by ladders. There are also a lot of friendly rangers walking about to make sure you didn't pass by any petroglyphs without noticing.

 

The pinkish canyon walls of the Frijole Canyon are made of a volcanic ash called tuff that was deposited from the eruption of the adjacent Valles Caldera over one million years ago. The Ancestral Pueblo people were able to carve homes into the soft tuff and use the harder pieces as bricks. 

See the turkey?

At the end of the trail is the Alcove House, which you can reach by climbing 140 feet into the air on a few narrow ladders. The ladders are very sturdy and I wouldn't hurry to say that the climb was all that scary, but then again, I definitely didn't look down - a steady hand over hand was the perfect method for me.

The whole Jemez Mountain region was formed from volcanic activity triggered by an intracontinental rift (not associated with any fault lines) which also affords the area its many hot and warm springs. And I wasn't just about to give up on those elusive Spence Hot Springs!

Finding the Spence Hot Springs this time was a breeze and not at all as challenging as it should have been for me and Nessa last time! And yes, there is even a sign to the springs on the path and a bridge!

Now I wish I could rave about what a thermal paradise the pools are, but fresh from a few days at the paradisaical Orient Land Trust Hot Springs, these heavily used yet poorly respected pools didn't have the same spark that the might have had if I had found them during an adventure with Nessa.

The best thing about the pools is the spectacular view and the fact that the warm spring is fed from the mouth of a small cave - just the right size to squeeze into and maximize the warmth. Otherwise, the layers of soggy trash that surrounds the whole area kind of kills the vibe. Considering how easy it is to reach from the main road, that is not totally surprising, but still a bummer for someone trying to enjoy nature. Although I certainly was able to get a little relaxing in!

We looped around south of the mountains and back into Santa Fe in time for chile relleños and a little bit of dancing before resting up for more New Mexican adventures.

On Arches and the World's Oldest Living Organism

Catch up on the adventure here (Oklahoma to New Mexico) and here (Adventure in the Jemez Mountains).

I could go on and on about my indefatigable love for prominent monolith Shiprock - my beloved winged rock, my pointy volcanic neck - and its cultural, mythological, and geologic significance, but I've done that before. All you need to know is that I am in love with Shiprock, perpetually drawn to its starry beacon of radiating dikes. Even the name falling from my lips makes me wistful: Shiprock.

And, true to its name, it does indeed look like a mammoth sail set on the vast desert sea. Because it is protected as a spiritual and cultural epicenter for the Navajo, access is limited to the closest public roads which greatly hinders its geological magnetism. Even though I am pulled cross country to catch a glimpse of it time and time again, I am left to circumnavigate it endlessly without ever getting any closer.

After staring longingly at Shiprock for a while, we headed for Four Corners so Nessa could get her traveling chops and so I could get called a showoff for doing a handstand on four states at once. Yea, like I was really the first to do that!

Hooray for being in four states at once! Before long we found ourselves headed north to Moab and Arches National Park like dutiful tourists, checking off all the traditional sights and sounds of a southwestern road trip. Then a really cool thing happened: We are driving up US-191 with the windows down and the satellite radio blasting, being warmed by the late afternoon sun and trying to find Drake on every channel, when we found ourselves five miles out of Blanding, Utah. Suddenly, the air wasn't quite so warm anymore and we watched with alarm as the thermometer rapidly dropped fifteen degrees. Before we could even hypothesize what was happening, we happened upon an apocalyptic scene: gray clouds blotted out the sun and all around us, the telltale signs of a massive hail storm. Remember, this is on a sunny day in mid September just shy of Moab, but what do we see? Ice, everywhere, covering the road, fields, and yards in a thick blanket of wintery white. And just as soon as we entered it, it was gone - back to the sunbaked Utah highway and its endless blue sky. A bit of unearthliness in an already unearthly world.

We didn't have grand plans for the evening. Our only goals were to find easy camp before sunset, take a hopefully beautiful stroll in the shadow of Mt. Peale, eat barbecue food and drink beer. We got lucky on all three accounts with an added light show in the form of encroaching thunderstorms up the Spanish Valley while wasting away another Utah weekday night with wine and conversation. Typical road trip scenario

The next day we visited Arches National Park for the first time. Iconic for its incredible sandstone formations, particularly its astonishing natural arches as seen on calendars, desktops, and in stock photo archives everywhere, Arches is somehow so overexposed that it's hard to grasp the enormity of the intricate geological processes that bring these arcing sculptures to life. Here we stand, in the limelight of this sandstone's heyday, when millions of years of erosion have unlocked thousands of free standing arches for a brief eon of existence before they erode away like so much stone before them.

Even as a degree-holding geologist I have a hard time truly processing the cornucopia of factors that allow the arches to stand today. First you need to put a hefty deposit of porous sandstone on top of a denser, clayey layer that is already on top of a thick, salty layer, preferably left behind by an ancient ocean. Then you need the sediment on top of the salt to be just heavy enough that the salt liquefies, buckles, and causes uplift. You need this uplift to crack the uppermost sandstone layer; in this case that layer is the Entrada sandstone formation and the medium for most of the park's arches.

Once the Entrada sandstone cracks, you must wait a million years or more for just the right amount of rain to fall, eroding the cracks into deep yet narrow valleys. You need just the right amount of water to gather at the crux between the Entrada formation and the denser layer beneath. These puddles have to create cavities by dissolving the sandstone into loose particles and allowing it to be washed or blown away. One fine day, these cavities will become the famous gaps in the arches. But don't wait too long, because left to nature's erosional ways, the precariously crafted aches will eventually be washed of their cement and turned to dust too.

So you are here, on just the right day in not only your whole life, but in all of geologic history, to see these delicate arches stand - fragility and temporality encased in the feigned permanence of stone. Because without a doubt the arches will be gone one day, and perhaps that day might will tomorrow. Mother Nature can be a bitch like that. But I suppose she's an even more impressive as an artist, for who knows what other epic earth sculptures she has locked away and waiting for another million years or so to release.

After the mindfuck that is Arches, we hit the highway west for a less surreal landscape - at first glance. Fishlake National Forest may not carry the same shock and awe power that Arches does, but a glimpse underneath the soil tells a different story. What might be mistaken for just another forest thick with quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides) is actually an organism oft touted as the oldest, largest, and heaviest on the planet. Can you guess what colossus lives in this Southeast Utah forest? Why, it's Pando, of course, and he is the forest! Pando is actually 160 acres of clonal quaking aspen, believed to be at least 80,000 years old and weighing upwards of 13 million pounds.

You might be wondering how one tree can be multiple organisms weighing millions of pounds, but all you have to know is that Pando isn't just one tree, he is all of the trees. He thrives from a singularly dense system of roots from which he sends up suckers that turn into saplings with the same biological and molecular make up as the trees from whose roots they sprang. Multiply this process by 80,000 years, maybe more, and you have a forest full of genetic clones all a part of the same root body: Pando, which translates from Latin into "I spread".

Scientists believe that Pando is the vestigial remains of an ecosystem from a much warmer climate and that due to unfavorable present day conditions, Pando hasn't flowered for 10,000 years. And whether this data translates into chilly September nights, I don't know, but Nessa and I surely found it difficult to do most things that brisk evening, including build a fire, which we failed miserably at. Damned damp Pando wood!! Though I suppose that's what you get when you road trip in September at 8,800 feet above sea level. So we woke up a little cranky the next morning, arguing over who was pushing who into which puddle of freezing water pooling into the tent while sleeping, but like the intrepid travelers that we are, eagerly hit the road to lower elevations.

Next stop, Dreamland & The Extraterrestrial Highway, Nevada.

Actually, that isn't to be continued because I already posted my ode to that paranormal highway. So read it next and then stay tuned for a little ditty I like to call "Morning Over Mono".

Adventure in the Jemez Mountains

(Find out how the adventure started here: From Oklahoma to New Mexico)

The abridged version of the story is that while we were searching for hot springs in the engorged ravines of the Jemez Mountains of New Mexico we met a similarly young and local couple doing the same. They led us to the dubious location of a spring across the San Antonio Creek alarmingly full of rushing chocolate water, which made sense considering the whole area was under an aggressive flash flood watch. But we crossed the river anyway under the guise of this dude we just met, whose confidence infected us to abandon all common sense and traverse into an extremely unknown environment. We traipsed the ever-so-steep ridge in search for this "right over yonder" spot whose location remained elusive until we foreseeably got separated from our little band of strangers. Nessa and I hastily vacated the area with the sudden awareness that we might be lost if we weren't exactly where we thought we were (which is where we ended up being, thankfully). We two re-ford the river where once went four and meanwhile thought anxiously of our separated compatriots as the sun set, the river raged, and their car remained in the otherwise empty lot like a lonely sentinel of their return. 

While we sat at the water's edge drinking whiskey and waiting for these people to emerge safely and swiftly, wondering if this situation might entail an emergency 911 call in the near future, something unexpected happened. As we waited, fretting, they returned to their car and unbeknownst to us, got in and simply drove away, leaving us (presumably) in the untamed wilds on the other side of a flooding river at nightfall. 

Are you as confused as us right now? Like, we could have been in serious danger right then and not one soul in the entire universe aside from them knew where we were and still they left without a second thought!

How rude! After a bit of standing around trying to recover from our wounded, why-didn't-they-like-us-enough-to-not-leave-us-stranded-in-the-woods-to-die? pride, we were able to locate them a little further up the road and ask them that burning question: what the dang hell?! Turns out they had found the hot spring after all, had a little tête-à-tête and then skedaddled without a second thought of us stranded in the darkened wilderness in our tank tops and flip flops. Cue the dumfounded looks: answer deemed unacceptable, goodbye forever.

(We were in the woods behind here, btw. Image provided by Google Street View.)

That, my friends is the abridged version. Unabridged, this story features a little more clothing being lost and a lot more time spent picking through an abandoned meth lab, but that is best kept for another time - maybe another lifetime when I can reckon bad decisions with adventure.

So, a little deflated, but happy to be alive and similarly amused by the side of the road interlude with our new friends enemies, we headed into the night towards our campground. But first: Los Ojos Saloon, where we nursed our wounds with Shiner Bock and let ambiance heal us. This was a biggy for me; I had been wanting to booze at Los Ojos since I first drove past it one frozen night before Christmas 2008. I developed an instant crush on the mysterious joint that lit up the canyon with warm red holiday light, pulsing nourishing comfort with the promise of beer, food, and good company. As we had careened down that same icy mountain road through a valley void of civilization so many nights ago, the tympany of the saloon standing like a neon menhir in this unlikely place stood out to me long after we left it in the dark.

(Image courtesy of Google Street View.)

And, like I knew I would one day, I found myself once again 2,000 miles away from home parked outside of Los Ojos Saloon with an unquenchable hankering for beer and New Mexican food. Even better, there was live music inside and the band, sporting a New Mexican flag inside a Grateful Dead head, insisted on playing Emmylou Harris and Graham Parsons covers. Tears of wounded pride although tinged with delight mixed well with my Shiner Bock that night.

We pitched our tent at nearby Vista Linda campground where Nessa and I made the determined decision to write more, if only to chronicle this ill adventure. Soon after, Nessa joined the Day Drunk blogosphere with me and here we are today! So I guess you could say Day Drunk duo-style was really born that dangerous night in the Santa Fe National Forest with me and Nessa thoughtfully crafting journal entries by the light of our headlamps. And one year and a couple weeks later - BOOM here it is, the story of our Jemez adventure, officially chronicled in perpetuity on the internet (even if I did leave out a few parts).

We woke up the next morning and like a balm on our wounds found ourselves at a stunning cactus freckled campground whose vista was indeed linda. From there it was a short day trip northwest to Shiprock, my geologic mecca and gateway to the four corners.

Another story about Shiprock?! I can hear you saying with fervor, I can't wait, tell me now! But patience, my sweetlings, for that is a post for another day.

TBC.