January 1998 Campfire Tales

by Larry Heck of

PASS PATROL

Please visit our Sponsor, CLICK on the Banner above

Baxter Pass - Part One

Another end to another long day of mapping and exploring. The sun had gone down  hours ago and I was still plotting intersections with my Magellan 4000XL GPS. The  digital dash clock flipped past 11pm just as I pulled onto the Baxter Pass Road. My plan was to find the ghost town of Dragon and get some photos of it and the road over the  pass. For that, I would need some sunshine. 

One advantage to having a vehicle large enough to sleep in is you don’t really need a  campsite. Any little hideout behind some rocks or nestled into some trees works just fine.

I pulled off the main road and followed a two-track to a small ravine between two hills. That would do just fine.  It only took a few minutes to move things around in the back of the Trooper and the  bed was made. Since it was a very warm August night, I opened the moon roof before climbing into the sleeping bag.

During the night, I was awakened by the nomads of the prairie. In other words... coyotes. Lots of them. I crawled out of the sleeping bag and stood up through the moon roof. The coyote pack consisted of many dozens and they were running past the truck on both sides. Using a flashlight, I scanned around the truck to see if I could see anything they were after but all I saw was coyotes. I lowered back down into the truck and started to get back into the sleeping bag when it occurred to me that a coyote could jump up on the truck and get inside through the moon roof. I then closed the moon roof and went back to sleep.

When I woke up the next morning and began driving away. I couldn’t help thinking about the coyote pack of the night before. That was a lot of coyotes. I thought about how many of them I spotted with the flashlight, then I remembered ... I don’t have a flashlight. I remembered closing the moon roof but when I looked up ... it was still open.

There is more than one explanation for what happened ... or better yet ...what didn’t happen. The most obvious was that a coyote pack was howling in the night and my mind  somehow created a dream to go with the howling. For that to be the case, we have to assume that my mind is capable to dreaming up such a wild event ... even while I’m asleep.

I don’t know. That seems kinda unlikely. There is a more believable explanation and is probably the actual truth. It is my guess that the Alien Brat found me sleeping out there and decided to have some fun with me so he abducted me and implanted those memories in my mind.

Don’t worry. I’ll get even. Just wait until the next time he needs a quart of unleaded for that spaceship of his just so he can get to some wild party on Venus. That is assuming he wasn’t lying when he said men are from Mars and women are from Venus.

Baxter Pass Part Two

A long time ago, which seems so far - far away, there existed a man who worked as a manager for a computer company. He traveled back and forth from Denver to Salt Lake City frequently and along the way he found something he did not know he had lost. He found the outback. From that day forward, he rarely took paved roads between the two locations and from those habits came the desperado known to many as Outlaw.

There are countless stories hidden in the dusty files of those early years. This is one of those stories.

It is referred to around the campfire as “Mud up Sissy’s Skirts!”

“I need to take Sissy to Utah next week, Honey,” I casually mentioned to my wife as she stacked dishes in the washer.

“I can’t trust you with Sissy. You’ll take her on some mountain trail and slip her off a cliff.”

“No I won’t,” I promised.

“You’ll take her down some bushy creek-bed and get her all scratched up.”

“I wouldn’t do that,” I whispered with a grin.

“Yes, you would. You can’t stand to pass up any old wagon trail without seeing where it goes.”

My wife is not a 4wheeler. She went with me once when I promised an easy trial. The next thing she knew, we were winching a Toyota out of a mud hole headlight-deep and crossing creeks so deep the water was splashing on the windshield.

She went with me another time when I told her I was going to a National Park. She didn’t know it had dirt roads. While we were on one of those gumbo dirt roads, it rained. The only way to keep from going over the cliff was to drive down the ditch on the other side. That time she wanted me to call a helicopter to get her out. She was so mad, she got out of the truck and walked. Another unsuspecting couple come up from behind and offered her a ride.   She said, “ I won’t ride with that idiot and I’m married to him. What makes you think I would want to ride with you!”

Oops! I almost forgot and stuck two other stories inside this one about Sissy. As for Sissy, she was a 1986 full-size Bronco XLT with all the trimmings including plush carpet and fancy paint. The only time her hubs got locked was to get over the speed bumps at K-Mart in an ice storm and she had never had mud up her skirts ... fender skirts that is.  That’s why I named her Sissy. Some people say trucks don’t have personalities, but I’m not so sure. Sissy was just like my wife. She didn’t like to get dirty.

The trip started out innocent enough. I took a few sales calls along I-70 and finally pulled out of Grand Junction about 3pm. My next appointment was not until the next day in Salt Lake City. I could either stay on the pavement and be there in time for supper, or I could just skip supper and do some poking around along the way. Remembering my promise, I decided to stick to roads on my official state map of Colorado. “Cain’t get no scratches on you, Sissy, or I’ll be spending a lot of time with you in the garage.”

Going north out of Mack, Colorado is a county road over Baxter Pass that eventually winds up in Vernal, Utah. According to my portable, condensed, on-board library, that dirt road used to be a railroad years ago and there were ghost towns along the way. Sounded safe with some fun thrown in the middle.

The first few miles were just plain old flatlands, but then the road entered a canyon and the sides began closing in. The farther I got into the canyon, the more I noticed the mud.  That mud soon got downright nasty. One look in the rear view mirror told me what I didn’t want to know. I was not making ruts. There’s only one kind of mud that can be that slippery and not leave ruts. “Gumbo!”

The worse kind of mud in all the west and it was in its most annoying form. At that stage, the top half inch or so is as sticky as fly paper, but a whole lot thicker. Under that layer is a surface as hard as concrete. When you put the two together, it’s nothing less than bad news. It’s kind of like driving on a rolling, weaving country highway in freezing rain. Any hump, bump, or slant in the road can send the vehicle off in a direction no one would ever want to go.

If you get out to look at the tires, you may notice it’s a little farther to the ground than it used to be. That’s because the mud builds up on the tires and can be several inches thick and the only way to get it off is through normal wear.

By the time we reached our first ghost town, Sissy was ready to go home. Kind of reminded me of the time my wife got gumbo on her shoes. She just kicked her feet trying unsuccessfully to get it off while repeating, “Yuk! Yuk! Yuk!”

A short distance past the first ghost town, the climb over Baxter Pass began.  The road was very narrow and much of it followed the original railroad grade. The switchbacks were always a problem when narrow gauge trains used the track. There were deep ruts in the road made in times when the surface was very soft, probably during spring thaw.

Sissy slipped back and forth as we began the long climb up the road.   Suddenly, her back end dropped into a rut and her front end whirled around on the slippery surface until she was sideways across the road with her bumper hanging over the edge of a cliff and pointed at clear blue sky. I could have sworn I heard Sissy scream, “Eee-ee-eekk!”

“Naw! Must have been the fan belt.” But hanging over the edge like that was enough to light up my headlights!”

Fortunately, I drive slow in gumbo. That way, if the vehicle is suddenly thrown off course, we don’t go so far. In this case, if I had been zipping through the mud, Sissy would have had her first flying lesson. I just backed up and tried another approach.

Near the top of the pass, the road was narrower, but was also rocky instead of gumbo. Even on the rocks, Sissy was slipping and sliding until the gumbo wore off.

By the time I found the ghost town of Dragon, I was on solid surface again. There are still a few buildings standing at Dragon but the brush around them is so grown up, it’s easy to drive by and never notice it.

Dragon was an important mining community at one time. The Uintah Basin is the only known location in the world where Gilsonite is found. At Dragon, the vein was visible on the surface of the ground and its shape resembled a black dragon ... or at least it did to the fella who named it.

As night fell, so did the outside temperature ... and the inside temperature.  Sissy was getting even. She had turned her heater off. It was blowing cold air. No matter what I did, I could not get warm air to come out of the heater and the vehicle temperature gauge was laying all the way over on cold.

I remembered a time when I got my wife all dirty. She would not smile again until she got a shower, washed her hair, and had a hot meal. I figured it was worth a try.  I stopped in Vernal and filled Sissy’s tank with premium gas. Then I took her to a car wash and gave her a thorough bath. Sure enough, that helped, but like my wife she wasn’t completely forgiving. The temperature out of the heater was just barely warm. She would not let me forget what I did to her for the next three days and all the way back to Denver.

I told my wife she needed to take Sissy to the garage and have her thermostat checked out. Instead, she took her to the grocery store and to the mall. Sissy’s temperature gauge went back to normal and never faltered again. I didn’t understand and my mechanic thought I had been sleeping too close to Uranium mines. The only one who understood was my wife. “Sissy don’t wanna play your silly games ... getting all that mud up her skirts.”

Keep on smilin!

Happy Trails.

Another one bites the dust.

For several years there has been a sort of truce on the San Rafael Swell in Utah. It was designated as Wilderness Study, but the roads were open. The Wilderness was getting beaten every time it hit the senate so we had nothing to complain about. Then along came a new program in the BLM called “Management plans”. With these things, the BLM can just decide to lock the public out of any public land the local manager decides should be closed.

That’s exactly what happened and Saddlehorse Canyon as well as dozens of other roads were boarded shut. Saddlehorse Canyon is the one we use when hiking to the Outlaw Cabins. From that location, we can hike to the cabins and back in a short day. The closest other entrance is a very long hard hike to attempt in a day.

Due to some letter writing campaigns and complaints, the BLM has opened their management plan up for public input. You have until February 1 to write to the BLM and tell them that closing existing roads, especially Saddlehorse Canyon, in the San Rafael is totally unacceptable and the roads should be reopened immediately. You don’t need to do anything fancy. A handwritten note will do. Once these roads are closed, it would take a super human backpacker several days to reach many of the areas included in this closure. There is no water available so enough water will have to be carried to last a week. In other words, if you don’t have a bunch of pack mules, you can never go there again. Write to:

BLM, Price Field Office
125 South 600 West
Price, UT. 84501

Wacky news update

This special news bulletin hot off the super encrypted encoded decoder carrier pigeon express. According to our roving unnamed reporter, a high ranking inside source at the Department of Interior (the guy who opens limo doors) has confirmed that Ranger Rick is actually a descendent of Roscoe. Roscoe is best known for his continuing pursuit of Outlaw’s distant cousins most commonly referred to as the Dukes of Hazard.

Another inside source (the guy who shines shoes in the men’s room) claims that Cancer Man (mistakenly reported as killed in a recent episode of X-files) recently met with Ranger Rick in stall three. They were heard shouting at each other concerning the failed Vironazi attack on Pass Patrol last summer. Shots were fired and both men vanished when a brilliant burst of light blinded everyone in the room.

Although it is difficult to dispute such a reliable source, we already know Ranger Rick was actually working for the IRS last summer and that’s why they were in so much trouble. How could he have been in two places at once?

My oh my! We are sooooo confused!

Pass Patrol Books & Videos | Pass Patrol Campfire Tales

Colorado Trail Guidebooks, Trail Maps, and Trail Videos

Utah Trail Guidebooks, Trail Maps, and Trail Videos

4X4NOW Feature Page
4X4NOW Trail Reports | Moab 4WD Trails
4X4NOW "How-To"  | 4X4NOW Buildups
4X4BOOKS | MAPNOW

get Garmin at GPSNOW - Order by 5pm and have it Tomorrow!
Choosing | for Laptop/Pocket PC | Basic | Handheld Mapping | 2-way Radio | Automotive | Motorcycle | RV/Truck/Bus | Land & Water
Accessories
eTrex H | Legend | Vista | Venture HC | Summit HC | Legend HCx | Vista HCx
GPS 18 DLX | 60
Mobile 10 | Mobile 10 for smartphones
GPSMAP 60 | 60Cx | 60CSx | 76S | 76Cx | 76CSx | 276C | 376C | 378 | 478
MapSource City Navigator North America | US Topo | BlueChart
nüvi 200 | 270 | 350 | 360 | 370 | 650 | 660 | 670 | 680
Quest | Quest 2
Rino 110 | 120 | 130 | 520 | 530 | 520HCx | 530HCx
StreetPilot 2820 | 7200/7500 | c330 | c340 | c530 | c550 | c580
Astro GPS dog tracking system
zūmo 450 / 550
© 4X4NOW