Studded snow tires FTW!

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So I've been out camping and mountain biking in Moab, Utah since Saturday morning, and I've missed Jalopnik since then (like the desert misses the rain), especially the Murlopnik Weekend.

On Saturday night, I was riding with my roommate (we will call him "Allen" from now on) and two friends in my roommate's '93 Toyota 4Runner on our way to our campground just outside of Moab, Utah.

Right around 9 pm, we were going up a fairly gentle incline (gentle compared to Vail Pass or most of the other mountain roads we had already gone through), when the truck's ever-present rod knock became even louder.

Now, this vehicle was certainly not pampered by it's previous owner (which is probably why it developed rod knock), and it is 16 years old, but it's a Toyota, dammit: those things are supposed to be reliable! Plus, Allen has driven this thing over hill and dale (several trips over the Continental Divide), hither and yon (from Colorado to Kentucky and back), and it hadn't quit yet.

But quit it did. Maybe it was that slight incline: the final straw that broke that noble Japanese camel's back. Or maybe it was the four people, seven mountain bikes, and approximately 500 pounds of camping gear that we were asking the Scrum Wagon (Allen's affectionate name for the old 4Runner) to carry.

Either way, I awoke from my semi-asleep state to find that we had pulled over to the side of the road, with the temperature gauge pegged in the red. We added some coolant to the boiling and steaming tank and waited for the needle to dip down into the normal region again. After about twenty minutes we cranked it again, and saw a huge white cloud come billowing out of the tailpipe. Shit. Now the head gasket was gone, or something equally serious.

I wish that this story had an ending involving the heroic use of duct tape, JB Weld, and bicycle inner tubes, but the truth is that we simply limped into the nearest gas station (Thompson Springs, UT, which apparently consists of a few doublewides and a Shell station) and left the Scrum Wagon parked there for the rest of our trip. We did, however, perform some rather intense car-trunk Tetris in order to fit the Scrum Wagon's cargo into the other cars in our caravan. And we did drive a Buick sedan through some particularly wikkid sandy trails, managing to get stuck only once.

Well, the rest of the trip was full of the normal things that spring break camping trips in Moab consist of: drinking and burning things at night, freezing our asses off in insufficiently warm sleeping bags, gnarly mountain biking, and campfire theology discussions with our campground neighbor, a self-proclaimed "professional adventurer" and apparent pantheistic anarchist who seemed to have walked off the pages of an Edward Abbey book.

But the return trip is where things got interesting again. You see, we could've gotten most of the people and gear back home in the aforementioned Buick, but to get everything we would need another car, and to tow the Scrum Wagon over all those mountain passes we would need a big honkin' truck and a trailer. Luckily, Allen had a brother who was off work this week (we'll call him "Greg"). And Greg had an old Army buddy with a brand new Ford F-350 turbodiesel crewcab pickup. I don't actually remember this guy's name, so we'll call him "Roy" after our Fearless Leader and sometimes sex object.

Well, I'll be damned if Greg and Roy didn't drive seven hours, rent a car trailer, pick us up, and drive another seven hours through the worst that the Rocky Mountains could throw at us, drinking Mountain Dew and listening to talk radio the whole way, to bring us home. We arrived at 8 am yesterday, exhausted but alive. Apparently the ties of brotherhood and brotherhood-in-arms are stronger than I gave them credit, and big-ass diesel trucks are good for more than penis substitutes.

Threadjack over. Go about your business.

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the other #48 [www.lanemotormuseum.org]

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