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Little Big Horn

We drove up from Buffalo, WY, and got to the 7 Ranch Campground around 1 pm.   They weren’t kidding about not using a GPS to get there.  Google Maps directions wanted to take me the wrong way twice after I got off the freeway.  The first one was down a long paved road along the eastern side of the freeway that I had noticed had ended at the Little Bighorn River prior to where the campground road was.   We followed the signs to the park and about half way there along the road on the west side of the freeway it kept wanting me to make a right turn down a couple of dirt roads.  Geez, the campground folks were right.  If I had followed either of those routes provided, I would have been a really unhappy person as we cannot back up with the car in tow.

We headed over to the Little Big Horn national monument early this morning, not long after it opened at 8 am.   It’s kind of an eerie place, vast hills and ravines for as far as you can see.   This would have been a really awful place to fight a battle in June, although the tops of the ridges and hills should have been pretty good vantage points if you still had ammo.

All along the ridges and hills were small groups of two or three white grave stones with the inscription, 7th Calvary solder fell here.   A few places there were many in the groupings.   The pictures of the landscape don’t show how steep the ground was.

 

We drove down to Reno’s battlefield and realized that was a long way south of where Custer’s men were.   And about halfway between there was a marker for an Indian settlement.   Not sure how he could have fought his way to Custer with the mule train of ammo as he was under attack the whole time too.

The park appears to have private land right in the middle between the two largest battlegrounds.  Along that way we came upon a herd of horses.  As they appeared to be on the private land area, I was guessing they weren’t wild.  They appeared to be fenced in as there were fences along that stretch of roadway.   But all along that part of the road were piles of horse dung.  It seemed odd the horses would walk along that roadway, and how did they get past the fence?

Short Horse video.

There is a national cemetery there where I presume all the 7th Calvary men were buried, although there appeared to be many more than 270 graves, but nowhere near as large as other national cemeteries we have seen.  The one my Dad and Mom are buried in is huge in comparison.

 

 

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Buffalo and the Black Hills

We arrived in Buffalo Wy around 1 in the afternoon, checked in and drove over to our very shady campsite.   Trees are not normal in the high plains, so this is  a really great campsite as the whole campground was full of very large trees.  Now this might not of been a great place to be if the Gale from the prior night had come thru here.  But my neighbor said the night prior had been totally calm winds.

We had been to Buffalo 5 years ago but when I drove off to buy groceries it didn’t look at all familiar to me.  We are still recovering from our Covid 19 bout so we haven’t been doing much at all.

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Cheyenne, Casper and the High Plains.

We drove to Cheyenne from the Cummins dealer, and most of the stay there was a blur as both of us had caught Covid.   We tested positive on Thursday afternoon and it took me till Friday night to get a prescription filled for Paxlovid as my PCP had to write it, the urgent care didn’t do that.  Kathy was asymptomatic at first, but by Sunday morning she too needed to get that prescribed.

We stayed in Cheyenne a couple days longer than planned prior to getting sick and then drove to Casper, about a couple-hour drive, and have stayed here for another 4 nights.

Along the way we heard about the Jackalope on the story app we subscribed to last month (which we highly recommend while traveling!)  We got to see a statue of one along the freeway near Douglas, WY, and found this closeup on Wikipedia.

I finished my antivirals last night.  Thankfully this morning I no longer have an awful metallic taste in my mouth.  That stuff is awful.

We are camping here right on the North Platte River.  This place seems like a desert, but right along the riverfront is all green and treed.   Everywhere else it really looks like a high desert and it is.

 

 

 

 

 

One thing of note about Casper, last night we found what I believe is probably the best Mexican takeout place outside of San Diego.   I am probably going to head back there this afternoon and buy a bunch of burritos to freeze, they were that good.  It was like a Roberto’s clone.

 

The night before we were leaving, an all-out gale hit us around 10:15 pm and woke us from a dead sleep.   The Bus was rocking like we were on a boat in a storm.   It took a few seconds to figure out what was happening!  There was so much noise, I remembered I hadn’t put one of the window awnings up.  It sounded like it would be torn off soon, so I ran outside and tried to put it up.

The wind was so strong, the springs in the unit that roll it up were doing nothing.  It was just billowing up with the gusts of 50 mph.   Then just for a second, it died down enough for the winding-up springs to do something and I got it closed.   There was a lot of lightning while I was doing that and I suddenly realized standing outside probably wasn’t a very smart thing; so I ran back inside just as it started to rain hard.  I then decided to go into at least half turtle mode with the RV and brought in the windward slides.   The wind was so strong, it pushed on the slides as I was moving them and seemed to try to overspeed the motors; but we got them in, and that helped considerably with the roaring sounds and flapping of the slide toppers.

I sat down at the table to look at the weather info on my laptop.  While looking at that, I noticed water on the narrow table along the wall; so I got towels to wipe it up and tried to figure out where it was coming from.  Was the roof leaking or maybe I didn’t seal the top of the window enough after the paint job?  But I couldn’t find any water anywhere but on that narrow table.  Turns out the winds, now a steady 50 mph, was blowing the rain sideways right at the window and it was blowing in the two weep holes at the bottom of it.  That was a first!  I stuffed the towels we use to wipe up the table into the window track to block it as much as possible.

The lightning was like nothing I had ever seen.   It was constant, just everything in all directions, glowing in what looked like a white mist surrounding us.   And the thunder just kept going, it never seemed to stop, just a constant loud rumble for hours.

The weather radar showed a red cell right over us and it looked like it would fully pass us between 11 and midnight.   I stayed up till the wind was back down to about 20 mph sustained and put my head back on the pillow.

The following morning the river was a muddy brown but appeared to have not risen at all, and all the campground patio furniture was scattered all over, except ours, which was on the lee side of our Bus.  Only one of the chairs was knocked over, but nothing blew away like the other campsites’ furniture had.

We head for Buffalo, WY, this morning and hopefully will resume our “Vacation” Covid free.

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Denver Colorado Sideshow

Pulled into the Henderson Cummins dealer around noon on Sunday for its free hookups to wait till 7 am the next morning to see if we could get a diagnostic on the check engine light we had a few times while traveling around the Rocky Mountains.  When I went back into the monitor to download the info to an email, I noticed the error codes stopped on July 10th, 8 days prior to now.   We will see what transpires with the service person this morning.  The service guy convinced me the problems were just from the altitude, so we headed out to St. Vain State Park that Monday afternoon after making a reservation for one night.   We left the next morning to head for Estes Park, and the CEL light came on while still on the flat ground (although 5,000+ elevation)  We drove to Estes Park with it coming on and off fairly often.  [Very nerve wracking drive in the mountains!]

After a week touring RMNP and Estes Park, CO, we headed back to Cummins.  Only one CEL light happened and that was during the initial engine start. We arrived that Tuesday afternoon (July 26th)  and they were going to take it in 7 am the next morning.

On Wednesday they ran diagnostics all day, checking the fuel system all the way to having the injectors fill a beaker to make sure the flow was correct.  It was double the minimum, so that wasn’t the problem.

Late that afternoon two techs did a road test with their computer hooked up and surprisingly were able to reproduce the issues.  (That never happens!)  That evening they sent all the data to Cummins Engineering and the next morning (Thursday)  were told to install a test ECM.  They did that and after lunch asked me to take it on a long test drive.  (so I didn’t need to pay them $200 an hour for that)  We drove it about 3 hours and not one CEL appeared.

One of the nights while there, I went out to pick up Mexican takeout and saw this Skoolie on the way there that had a mini split mounted up high in the rear.  I had not seen that before but seemed like an ok spot to mount the condenser.

 

The next morning (Friday) they replaced the test ECM with a “new” one, and I then made reservations near Grand Lake, the supposed headwaters of the Colorado River.   Since it was already Friday afternoon, I realized that getting a reservation was going to be a problem for that night and the rest of the weekend, so I started with the highest priced place, figuring that would be the last place to fill up, and of course they had an opening.

We headed out after 2 pm on Friday and took 1-70 west into the Rocky Mountains.  (July 29th)   It was about a 2-3 hour drive, and about half way there the CEL came on and the engine would barely run if the RPM’s were between 1100-1400.  This was a new problem and not a good one to have driving in the mountains.  It had just started raining, and when I turned on the wipers, my driver’s side wiper just disappeared, dropping down where I could not see it.  My thoughts were it fell off.   I asked Kathy to stand up and see if she could still see the wiper.  She could, it was just below the windshield propped on the right-side wiper; so at least I didn’t need to find a new wiper assembly!

It started raining harder, so I had to find a place to pull off and see if I could fix that new problem.  I saw a spot and pulled over on the freeway, never fun.  I took the wiper off and it seemed to be ok.  I put it back on in the right spot and tightened it up good.  Turns out the painters had put it back on but did not tighten it all the way; so me putting it back and giving it a good turn worked and should continue to work.

Not long after we got back on the road, the sun came back out and it was dry the rest of the way to Granby, CO.

Unbeknownst to me, Granby was on the other side of a very high pass, and that pass turned out to be a couple thousand feet higher than we had ever driven the Bus since we got it close to 6 years ago.  There were a lot of switchbacks on the way up to the 11,307 foot pass and again on the way back down.   Having the engine cut out in the 1100-1400 RPM range made that climb very interesting!  (And not in a good way.)

We made it to the RV resort in Granby and settled in for the weekend.  I sent some emails to Cummins informing them of what transpired (not the wiper issue)  and asked for an appointment on Tuesday morning.

We arrived Monday afternoon (August 2nd) and before I set up the coach for staying the night, I went inside to make sure we had an appointment for the morning.  The gal said the techs were waiting for me and wanted to look at it as soon as I got there.

They pulled it in and put it back on the computer.   Afterward they brought it back out so we could stay in it till the morning.

They took it back in around 7 am and pulled out the muffler so they could see and work from underneath more easily this time.   A couple hours into the process, one of the techs came out (Maximus) and said they found a loose ground wire attached to the engine block and were going to test it on the dyno to see if that had fixed it.

It had fixed it!!  Then we left for a few nights in Cheyenne, WY,  (August 3rd) about $4,000 poorer from the whole experience.   Quite a bit of money for a  loose ground wire, in my opinion.

We ended up staying in Cheyenne for some extra days, and we both tested positive for Covid the day after getting there.  I was feeling pretty bad, so we went to an urgent care where the test came back positive.  They did one for Kathy even though she was not sick and she tested positive too.  I then had to get my PCP to prescribe Paxlovid as the urgent care wouldn’t do that.  They wanted you to be able to follow up with your regular doctor.

A couple days later Kathy started feeling sick and she got a 5-day course of Paxlovid too.     It’s a weird drug, actually two different drugs, 6 pills a day, and it gave me the worst metallic taste in my mouth for the 5 days I had to take them.

I avoided Covid for so long, I was thinking I must be immune… stupid me..

 

 

 

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Granby, Grand Lake & Western RMNP.

We headed west from Denver toward Idaho Springs, then up the highest pass we had ever traversed at 11,307 feet, Berthoud Pass, with the Bus pulling the car!

We arrived at the campground and it took a while to find the entrance.   It is a HUGE place and there appeared to be hundreds of small, very new cabins that could be rented.   The campground was so large that each time we drove back in the car, I had a hard time finding our spot.  I actually had to look for our uniquely painted bus to find it.  That was a first!  And it happened each time we came back from somewhere.   No wonder they do a brisk business renting golf carts so people can get to the front where all the facilities are!  The down side of that is kids are frequently allowed to drive, and we have seen some bad outcomes from that!

That campground was very nice, and I personally think it qualifies to have Resort in the name.   Very few, in my opinion, of the parks with resort in their name are.

We drove up to the western entrance to the RMNP before 9 am so we wouldn’t need another reservation, and then drove up to the Continental Divide to a lake I thought was really the headwaters of the Colorado River.   It wasn’t.  It was actually just on the other side of the Divide that would drain toward the Atlantic Ocean.

The next day we headed to Grand Lake in the morning to hopefully beat the crowds, and it worked.  It’s a tourist town, zillions of shops selling trinkets or food.   The lake front was very nice.   The city had spent its money well.  It was much smaller than expected with the name Grand Lake.  There were a couple of much larger manmade lakes just south of this one.

We spent the morning walking around and eventually had lunch there on an outside patio with Dusty in tow.   We headed back to the Bus, having felt we saw all of Grand Lake, except from the water.  And it was odd, there were a lot of boats on the water, but I didn’t see any place to rent one.  Busiest lake we have seen while traveling:  boats, paddle boards, canoes, kayaks, jet skis, sail boats, pontoon boats (which Kathy would love to try!).  By noon it was packed!  I think it was worse than San Diego Bay in the summer.

 

 

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Estes Park and Rocky Mountain National Park.

We headed up the mountain after staying a single night at St. Vrain State Park which was outside of Longmont, Colorado.  If you do stay at St. Vrain, pick a spot as far west as they have available.  The eastern edge fronts the I-25.  From our western-most site, we couldn’t hear the freeway.

It’s a bit of a twisty road heading up toward Estes Park, but a fairly short drive from Longmont.  We camped at Elk Meadow Lodge & RV Resort.  It’s not even close to being a resort.   No paved roads, not even gravel, just dirt; and when the wind blows — and it really can blow — it creates a dust bowl effect.  The sites are terraced into a small hillside, but for some reason, they didn’t make them level when they easily could have.   Some of the sites had a small area cut out of the hillside so the picnic table could be level.  Our site didn’t have that feature, the table listed at probably 10 degrees from level.   That said, it was a great base camp for seeing the RMNP and Estes Park.

 

That first evening we walked to a restaurant right out the driveway a friend had recommended and tried the Devils on Horseback.  They were delicious, quite a unique taste!

 

 

 

 

 

 

The first morning there we headed to the Rocky Mountain National Park gate to get in the park prior to 9 am when you must have a reservation to go to the western area of the park.  (Bear Lake area needs you to be inside prior to 5 am)   We drove out to the Alpine Visitor Center, which was about 25 miles of steep, twisty mountain road.  The views along the way were pretty spectacular and there are many overlooks along the way.  It was a beautiful morning to head out there.

For some reason the Bear Lake area of the park requires reservations from 5 am till 6 pm, and the rest of the park needs them from 9 am to 3 pm.  This National Park reservation thing is very new, starting last year.  I had not heard of it prior to a few weeks before.

I looked at making a reservation for Bear Lake, but there was nothing available the whole time we were going to be in the area.  (Bummer!)  I really didn’t want to get up at 4 am to drive there in the dark before a reservation was needed.   Lucky for us, Kathy read something about the reservations.gov site selling tickets every evening at 5 pm for the next day.  Seems they hold some reservations back.   So that evening I was ready with a CC and on the site just prior to 5 pm.  I was able to purchase a reservation for 10 am the next morning!  $2 is what they cost at the moment (2022).

The next morning we left a bit before 10 and got into the park fairly quickly.   We sure love the fact that we purchased a senior park pass back in 2017 for $10 at Montezuma’s Castle.  That thing has saved us many hundreds of dollars in park entrance fees and even more in camping fees at certain types of government facilities.  Two times into the park from the Estes Park side would have been another $60 ($30 each day), but the pass waived those fees.    It’s pretty amazing what that $10 investment 5 years ago has saved us.  And what a nice benefit for seniors!

We got to the turn for Bear Lake and there was another line to get thru a checkpoint where they again validated your reservation time and whether it was for the Bear Lake road.    It’s only about 10 miles of more twisty road to get to the lake.   It’s also very crowded as it seems everyone wants to go there.  The park service wants you to park about 1/2 the way there and take a shuttle bus.  We decided to ignore those signs and drive all the way up there.  That parking lot was fairly small, but the parking gods were with us and we lucked out and found the one parking spot that was open when we drove in.  It was even at the front!

The lake is a very short hike from the parking lot, a few hundred feet.  We had to take turns going there as Dusty wasn’t allowed on the trails.  It’s a pretty lake and an easy hike.  Kathy made it all the way around it.  At 9,500 feet elevation that’s still saying something!  I guess this place is so popular as it’s such an easy hike?   It was nice, but based on the popularity/reservation restrictions, I was assuming there would be something spectacular there.  I personally thought the way out to the Alpine Visitor Center was much closer to “spectacular”.

[A lot of the hikes started from that area to other lakes, waterfalls, and just beautiful hiking trails.]

The rest of the week we spent as tourists in Estes Park proper.   Went out to see the Stanley Hotel, which was the model Stephen King used for The Shining, but didn’t actually film here.)

There is a small riverwalk downtown that was very nice.  Going into the town on the weekend is a zoo.  Bumper-to-bumper traffic all day.  And it’s not easy to bypass that area, even to get to a grocery store from Elk Meadows.   There were some signs downtown saying they want to kill the proposed bypass the town wants to build, but it’s really needed.  If you were a local resident, you would really need to plan your day to avoid going anywhere because of that super-congested area.

 

 

 

 

 

We never did see any elk at Elk Meadows.   But we did see the cutest little Black Mini Schnauzer a lot as the couple next door walked their 6 month old often.

 

 

 

 

 

RMNP Pictures:

 

 

July 19th thru the 26th.

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Colorado Springs.

We couldn’t any campgrounds with vacancy so we left early from our Royal Gorge campground to see if we could get a FCFS campsite at the Colorado Springs Elks lodge.   We lucked out, there were two spaces unoccupied.   We had a base camp for the area now!   We had tickets for the next morning on the Cog Railway to the Pikes Peak summit.   Then we wanted to check out the Garden of the Gods and the Air Force Academy Chapel.

I was also trying to get someone to replace the Intake and Exhaust Camshaft Solenoids on the car.  I purchased an ODB2 Code Reader and figured out the issue was with the those two solenoids.  For a while now, everywhere I called was too busy for many weeks before they could work on it.  I really didn’t want to do the work myself, but I was thinking I might have to.  I drove over to the local Chevy dealer in the north end of CS and they were able to do the work in about an hour.

One afternoon driving around the city on the freeway I saw an object that made me think we would find Richard Dean Anderson, AKA Jack O’Neill.  We had to drive over and get a closer look.  From the distance it really looked like the SG, but not once we got there.

July 13th thru the 17th.

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Manitou Springs morning walk

As I had mentioned in a prior post, we wanted to come back to walk around Manitou Springs some morning.   Today was the day.   Lots of touristy shops and restaurants and nice parks, and surprisingly lots of springs plumbed right into buildings or rocks on the side of the road.  Some a bit ornate, others just look like they grew there.  There were a few signs that explained the mineral content of each spring.

We walked uphill on the shady sidewalk till Kathy said she could go no more..  Then we went back down the other side of the narrow roadway, with cars and buses heading up the hill to the cog railway station, till we were done shopping and found a place to get lunch on the patio.

July 16th 2022

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Garden of the Gods and the Academy Chapel

This was another place I found when we got to Colorado Springs and figured we would make a trip over to check it out.   It was a pretty amazing place.  You’d think it was a national park, but it’s actually a city park.   There are some pretty amazing rock formations of vibrant colors with smooth sidewalks paved to wander around all of them.   And another amazing thing is there wasn’t a charge to visit.  Most of the national parks are around $30 a day now.  I kept driving thinking I would find the pay station, but there wasn’t one.  Nice!

I call them rocks, but they were really 1,000-foot-tall mountains that just looked like one big rock.  It’s something you must see if visiting Colorado Springs and only have an hour or two.

I looked up the Air Force Academy Chapel to find out its hours, and it’s closed till 2027 for repairs.  What a bummer.   2027 is a long way away, there must be something terribly wrong with it.   July 16th 2022

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Pikes Peak Cog Railway Trip

We purchased reserved seats for the Cog Railway out of Manitou Springs to the top of Pikes Peak for a 9:20 am departure.  We arrived early as everything we read said parking was scarce.  And it really was; but as we got there around 8:20, an hour before, we had no issues.  There was so little parking up there, I bet the 10 am train folks would be either walking a mile or two or would have to take a shuttle from parking down in the town.

Boarding time arrived fairly quickly and we found our seats.  We were in one of the older trains and the seats were two abreast and faced the two seat in front of you.  My knees were touching the seat in front of me.  Yikes!  Lucky for me a small child sat there. Some tall guys were across the aisle from us and their legs were straddling each other.   And then, we both lucked out even further as a woman gave up her seat a row in front of us to sit with friends elsewhere in the coach, and the folks in the seats facing us could move ahead to be with the rest of their family.  Wow!!   If I ever had to go again, I would buy all 4 seats for two of us.   The newer trains may have more room.  Looked like it from a distance.

The engine was fairly loud and roared all the way up to the top; and coming down, seemed a bit louder.   It’s a single-lane track with occasional sidings to allow trains to pass each other.  My thought is it’s normal to pass two trains on each way as they leave about 40 minutes apart.   It’s an extremely steep grade, so it makes sense they use a cog (gear) to keep moving at a safe speed.  It’s probably even more important when going back down.

The ride is about 1 1/2 hours each way with about 40 minutes at the top.  It’s windy and cold up there.  It was close to 90 in Colorado Springs and probably 40 at the top.   It’s over 14,000 feet, and you will notice how thin the air is just moving around, and the stairs will have you huffing and puffing in a few steps!  I guess one of the features of being up there is you get to see kids throwing up.  We got to see a couple.  Not sure if the parents had them eating at the snack bar or it was just the lack of oxygen or possibly a combination of both.  That part is not mentioned in the brochure.

I had purchased two cans of oxygen at a local store prior to going there just in case.  They are both still unopened.  I had read about them always being out of them at the top.  I didn’t see anyone else using them.  Ours never came out of the backpack.  They are in thin aluminum canisters that seem to be empty as they are so light.

Anyway, beautiful views in all directions while we were there.  We had picked a perfect day, hardly any clouds in the sky.   I had forgotten you can also drive to the top.  I was talking to a guy that had driven his Tesla up with his family.   I bet that regenerative braking was very helpful on the way back down!  I heard there was a brake check on the way down where someone comes out and lets you know if you can go further or not based on your brakes.  (temperature?) Not sure what happens if they determine your brakes are a problem.

The trip up and back down were uneventful, until the boy in the seat ahead of us started throwing up out the window.  Felt bad for him.  When we drove back down through Manitou Springs, we noticed it had a pretty nice old downtown and we would come back and visit if we had time later in the week.

July 14th 2022