I don’t know exactly when I ditched Nebraska, but if I’d seen that great “WYOMING” sign I might’ve pulled over and set off a barrage of celebratory fireworks. I didn’t notice the sign for the same reason I don’t notice any number of road markings on long trips in my Bus, I was tuned into the vibrations of the vehicle.

Driving an ancient VW halfway across the country is nothing like hopping into a Honda Civic and just plain going. The experience is so drastically different that comparing the two is like comparing traveling in . . . well, a Honda Civic, to traveling on the back of a middle-aged pro football player with no tongue. You know he can run, but probably not as well as he did in his prime. Lots of parts have broken and been replaced over the years (knees, hips, etc.), but you can’t be sure what’s in healthy working order or what’s a few yards away from breaking after so many years of abuse — he sure as hell can’t clue you in, he can’t talk. You’ve got to learn to listen carefully to every whine, growl or belch.

Yeah, it’s pretty much like that. Only an old VW will never get busted for sending boner pics.

You mad, bro?

It felt good to be free of Nebraska. That state was two days of carnivorous shit; setbacks piling on setbacks, each one chipping away at my window of time. Wyoming was a new hope. Wyoming was Luke to Nebraska’s Anakin Skywalker. But the cruise across the cowboy state was not without incident, my determination continued to be put to the test.

The bitter cold temperatures I encountered in Nebraska were colder still in Wyoming. Nighttime temps with wind chill were hanging around the -30 degree notch. Standing out in the open with this behemoth of a storm touching me directly redefined my entire notion of “cold.” The air itself felt like it was out to get me.

When the deep freeze wind blew, it blew right through me — through the threads of my clothes, through the pores of my skin, through the sinew of my muscles, through the marrow of my bones. Every physical system in my body fired emergency signals to my brain, which was locked in a tumble cycle of fear, disbelief, frustration, anger, discouragement and just plain pain.

The VW didn’t seem to notice, she could’ve rolled straight through to the coast at a steady 60 mph, no problem. I was the weak link, here.

I had no recourse but to continue my strategy of stopping for five minutes every hour and a half to warm up in gas stations. I hated having to do this because I knew how quickly these stops would add up in overall lost time, but I couldn’t come up with any other options.

My enemy the storm proudly revealed a new kind of hate just outside of Rawlins, Wyoming, hard packed ice running from shoulder to shoulder on the roadway.

“Oh, shit.” I clicked on my emergency flashers while slowly lifting my foot off the accelerator. Isabella tracked fairly straight on the slick, uneven surface, and seemed to turn where and when I wanted her to. And I knew the road was essentially straight until Rock Falls, having driven this route a few times before. I derived a small amount of comfort from these realizations. But, shoulder to shoulder ice on the interstate is just plain terrifying; no amount of compounded small comforts can change that.

I was confident that if I kept my speed down, crowded the shoulder and generally drove with the mindset of an open heart surgeon (“slow and deliberate, now, slow and deliberate”) that I could traverse the I-80 ice rink for many miles relatively clear of the shivering specter of death.

NOTE: Not my photo. Snapping a pic while driving on this road would've been incredibly moronic.

But what about the other guy? I was only as safe as the most ham-fisted lunatic currently on the highway. A road in this condition doesn’t just laugh in the face of swift evasive maneuvers; it twists them into catalysts of disaster themselves.

I trundled along the frozen highway at 30 to 40 mph behind a line of semi trucks with their hazards on for at least an hour. There were occasional breaks in the ice, but they were never any longer than a few hundred feet. Speeding up for such sections was pure folly. Sporadically, a semi truck would zoom past me at probably 65 mph and disappear beyond the horizon.

“What the hell are you thinking, you goddamned maniac?” I bellowed something like this each time a semi passed me at speed. “Fuck you for Ice Road Truckers, History Channel! If I’m smothered to death by an 18-wheeled avalanche tonight, my blood will be on your hands!”

The semis I’d been following gradually began speeding up until I was the only vehicle on this section of road running on an illusory safety program. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that it didn’t matter if I was going 30 or 60; ninety percent of the vehicles on the road that night were semis. A collision between a speeding semi truck and a Volkswagen Bus traveling at any velocity will almost certainly result in incredible fatality every time. The only recourse for the safety conscious driver was to immediately exit the highway and book a hotel room.

So I sped up.

——-

“You’ve got to be kidding me. You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” I cursed at the sickly brown, half-melted wheel-bearing grease splattered on my front left wheel. It was sometime after two in the morning, I was fueling up in Western Wyoming and the temperature was -26 degrees with wind chill.

Miraculously, the gas station’s convenience store was open. I walked inside and met a short man of about 70-years-old in a plaid short-sleeved shirt, tan slacks and a pair of Elderly Man Standard Issue navy blue Velcro sneakers. He was busy restocking a display of Bic lighters next to the cash register.

“Hi there.”

“Hello,” he replied, looking up just long enough to size me up.

“Hey, I just found out that I blew a front wheel bearing, is it alright if I work on my car in the lot beside your store?”

“Oh, that’s no fun. Yeah, go right ahead.”

Luckily I had one new inner front wheel bearing and one new outer front wheel bearing packed in my spare parts box. I backed Isabella into a spot near a streetlight in the parking lot and set to work. When I got the bearings out I cleaned and closely examined them, they had turned an ugly rust color indicating that they’d gotten too hot, which meant I over tightened the bearings when I last repacked them with grease. Oops.

“– Hey, how’d you like some donuts and a cup of coffee?”

I looked up from my damage assessment to see that the man from the gas station had come over to check on me.

“Wow, that’d be fantastic. Thank you.”

“OK.”

The two free glazed donuts and the large cup of free coffee were a revelation in that cold parking lot. I often don’t realize how much I’ve been neglecting my body on road trips like this until I finally take the time to sit and eat. After I finished my free breakfast the old man came out again with a large LED flashlight.

“Here,” he said. “I thought you could use some more light. Just put it on the dashboard of the grey Chevy Suburban over there when you’re done with it.”

I’ve traveled many miles around the country in Isabella over the past two years. And it’s been my experience that most people will go out of their way to be nice to a polite, smiling VW Bus driver. Whether it’s out of admiration or pity, I can’t be sure.

I had the bearing job all buttoned up in an hour, including my break for breakfast. I will admit to one short cut, the old bearing races appeared re-usable, so I left them in. I had a nagging feeling that reusing them was a bad idea, but I knew I was getting close to the point of no return in terms of drive time lost, so I reused the races and headed back to the interstate. Utah wasn’t far off and I was really looking forward to rehydrating myself with some of their beer flavored water.

“I don’t know if I’m gonna make it.”

“Why, what’s going on,” Cory asks over the phone. I can barely hear him over the roar of his ‘60 Volkswagen Type II panel at (relative) speed. He’s on his way from San Francisco to Reno to pick up four new all-terrain tires for the eleventh annual Shasta Snow Trip, running it down to the wire. I’m somewhere near the Wyoming/Utah border, rolling West in my ‘65 VW camper. It’s 3 a.m., I haven’t slept since Nebraska and it’s brutally cold.

“I’m just now getting to the Utah border,” I howl, competing with the supercharged sub-arctic wind blasting through the cracked old door seals of my Bus. “I blew a front wheel bearing in Buttfuck, Wyoming and had to replace it in a parking lot. And it’s so damn cold that I have to stop every hour and a half to hang out in a gas station to warm up my feet so I don’t get frost bite.”

“Damn, dude, that sucks. But you’re almost here, pick up some energy drinks and just charge it.”

“I’m gonna try, but it’s pretty touch and go. It could be because I’m so out of it, but I think the other front wheel bearings are growling, and I’m running out of time.”

“When do you think you’ll be here if you make it?”

“God, I have no real idea, maybe two or three in the morning tomorrow if I’m lucky. But I’ve gotta let you go, I’m running over hard-packed ice on the interstate at sixty right now.”

“Damn. Good luck.”

–

Weather forecasters all over the Midwest were doing their best Chicken Little impersonations the last week of January, 2011. A real hate monger of a blizzard was scheduled to drag its long, cold claws across the soft belly of the heartland on the days before the eleventh annual Shasta Snow Trip, a Volkswagen Bus exclusive outlaw adventure rally. “Temperatures well below zero . . . wind gusts of 40 mph . . . two feet of snow,” the voice in my head echoed as I desperately wrenched on my Bus, Isabella, to prepare her for an odyssey of abuse. “You’re headed right into it, you fool,” the voice said, “just to put yourself into another dangerous situation. You’re risking your life to risk your life.”

There’s some truth to that. There aren’t many people in the world that’d drive a slow, dangerous, heat challenged 46-year-old car through 1900 miles of apocalyptic winter just to get back behind the wheel to knowingly flirt with the edge for a few days on Northern California’s most treacherous back roads. And, of course, there’s the 1900 mile haul back . . .

The great storm was coming down from Canada. It looked like I’d skirt the worst of it if I left on Sunday, January 29th. The Shasta Snow Trip wouldn’t officially start until 4:20 a.m. (ha-ha, yeah . . .), Friday, February fourth. This would give me five days to arrive in Northern California, more than enough time to deal with any potential breakdowns on the way out. Well, Sunday still found me prepping Isabella for the journey. I gave her a final check sometime in the mid-afternoon and remembered at the very last minute that I hadn’t checked the transmission fluid. It was a damn good thing I did, it was almost bone dry. I spent the rest of the day trying to source the correct transmission fluid. By the time I filled the transmission back up it was too late and I was too tired to hit Interstate 80.

I began the great western trek Monday morning. I didn’t encounter any signs of the storm until a few miles before I crossed into Nebraska, where I encountered a steady spattering of big, wet snowflakes.

The farther West I traveled the worse the weather got. Snowfall stayed about the same, but temperatures dropped like a sex offender’s pants and the wind began to blow the Bus all over the road, not to mention the snow, which dreamily snaked back and forth across the slate grey pavement in wisps. At night, after a few more hours of accumulation, this blowing snow had piled up into one to three foot long triangular drifts up to six inches deep that looked like the teeth of some great predatory beast gnawing into the roadway. Gradually these teeth transformed into strips of hard-packed ice as vehicle after vehicle compressed the snow into the cold highway. Blasting over these horrendous incisors at 55 mph in the angry wind was a bit frightening. Hitting the lip of ice at any angle but straight on upsets the suspension of the car just enough to send it into a brief yet unnerving glide across the ice. This ends with an anus puckering jolt as the tires hook back up to the road with the car ever so slightly skewed off course. Many miles of this in combination with annoyingly persistent high winds and obscenely low temperatures took its toll on me. I found myself a cheap room at a Super 8 at around 9 p.m. in York, Nebraska, some fifty miles short of my goal for the night.

It wasn’t the wind, the snow or the teeth that stopped me, it was the cold. This was the case all the way into Utah. Ambient temperatures where hovering around the 0 degree mark that first night with a wind chills of -13. I wore thermal underwear, jeans, a thick sweater, a pair of winter hunting socks, a pair of hiking boots, quilted coveralls, two winter coats, a woolen winter hat and a pair of fleece gloves. No match for this kind of cold.

My feet were taking the brunt of the abuse. A previous owner of my Bus, like just nearly every previous owner of a split window Bus, felt the pedal pan under the front floor that blocked water, muck and cold air from shooting up into the passenger compartment was frivolous. He probably threw it away, just like that rear bumper the poor girl was missing when I first got her. Anyhow, I stopped early because I could no longer feel my toes when I tried to move them. After I booked my room at the luxurious York, Nebraska Super 8 I picked up a pair of insulated rubber galoshes at Wal-Mart. The tag claimed they would keep my feet warm all the way down to negative forty.

I woke to the same high winds I hoped would die off the night before. Great. And I forgot to put cardboard over the engine compartment vents to keep snow from blowing into the engine bay. Upon opening Isabella’s deck lid I found her 1.7 liter, dual-carbed heart half buried in snow. Photo opp! It was at this point that I discovered all the batteries I left in the Bus, the batteries in my camera, the batteries charging on the parcel tray, and the brand new, unopened spares in my gear bag were completely drained by the cold. Damn.

I scooped as much snow out of Isabella’s engine compartment as I could with my hands, made sure all the electrical connections were clean and dry and gave the ignition key a twist. She wasn’t too happy to get going, but after a bit of coaxing she fired and I let her idle for a few minutes to warm up while I took advantage of Super 8’s continental breakfast. After loading up on free cereal and juice I pulled on my cold weather gear, hopped in the driver’s seat and took off sideways out of the Super 8 parking lot.

The Bus ran pretty much incident free all day, cruising at a confident 60 mph. I can’t say much for me, though. The winds blew stronger then the night before and the wind chill was lower already, even in the light of day.

Combine an ambient temperature of -5 with a 60 mph cruising speed and you get a wind chill of -40 degrees. That’s what my feet had to contest with. And I’ll be damned if my new Wally World boots were performing as advertised. I had to stop every hour to hang out in gas station for a while or so to keep frostbite at bay. But if I stayed long enough to warm my feet completely the Bus would cool down to a point where it was hesitant to start. Awesome. After a few stops I discovered that five to seven minutes was an ideal warm up (cool down) time.

Somewhere around Kearny, Nebraska, Isabella’s hex bar carburetor linkage began to bind up from the cold. After some searching I found a self service car wash from which I could re-lube the linkage, perform a few checkups and get myself out of the murderous wind for a while.

I had to dig out a snow drift to make my way into the only unlocked wash bay, but goddamn was it worth it. The temperature inside felt at least twenty degrees warmer (which was pretty much spot on according to the reported wind chill of -20 there in the mid-afternoon). I shot the old, frozen lube off the linkage with carb cleaner and experimented with Tri-Flow, spray on white lithium grease and WD40. The white lithium grease seemed to free things the best, so I gave the heim joints on the linkage a liberal coating as well as the pedal pivots under the front of the Bus and any other spots I thought might need a bit of re-lubrication. I was back on the road in good mechanical health! But not before I 86’d my brand new Android cell phone in the snow. Fuck.

It took an hour to find a Sprint rep in Lexington. I ended up hitting up a Best Buy where I switched to a backup phone I brought just in case. This took entirely too long, of course, as Sprint’s corporate servers were glitching out due to the extreme weather conditions. I came out of Best Buy two hours later with a new (old) phone and a bad attitude about losing even more drive time. But finding a small note in the tell-tale handwriting of a young female under the windshield wiper of my Bus improved my mood a bit, “My name is Marlie, I’m 23 and I like your car. Call me (308)xxx-xxxx.”

I stopped at a Wal-Mart in Ogallala to warm my bones a few hours later and ended up rewiring my headlights/fog lights in the parking lot. Freezing, exhausted and overwhelmed by the amount of ground I had left to cover in a little less than three days (at this point I’d only covered 629 miles in two days of driving. I had 1,372 miles to go), I was considering booking the cheapest room I could find that wasn’t a meth cooking front and throwing in the stiff, frozen towel. It was just then that I got a call from Cory.

“What up, bro, where you at?”

“I’m still in fucking Nebraska, freezing my ass off. It’s -20 degrees with wind chill here, I’m wearing a snowsuit, two winter coats, and a pair of boots rated to -40 and I’m still fucking freezing,” I whined while cutting out a length of bad wire from under the dash — the ability to multi-task is essential for successful long-distance travel in a vintage automobile.

“Damn, that sucks,” Cory replied from the relative warmth of San Francisco, which appeared as a tropical heaven of immaculate white sands and glistening topless women in my frostbitten mind’s eye. I imagined Cory phoning me from atop his surfboard, gliding along the crest of a perfect cerulean break — he’s been driving old Volkswagens all his life, he can multitask, too.

“Yeah, I’m in a Wal-Mart parking lot right now re-wiring my headlights. I don’t know if I’m gonna make it, man.”

“What? Come on, you’re already on the road, just keep going. Are you running your Mr. Buddy heater,” he asked, referring to the portable, “safe” heater that most of the Shasta trip veterans run while camping in their Busses the night before the event. This small propane heater features a tip sensor which automatically cuts power should the heater topple and a low oxygen sensor that’s supposed to shut the thing off long before one drifts off into the black abyss of eternal slumber.

“I tried running it, but the roads here are too bumpy, it keeps shutting off. And it’s not just that, it’s . . . I don’t know, I’ve got a lot of play in the steering wheel. I knew my steering center pin needed replacing before I left, but I didn’t have the time or money to do it. I thought it’d be OK, but I think it’s getting worse from constantly fighting the wind. And I don’t like the idea of it snapping in half on curvy mountain road.”

“How much does the wheel move before you start to turn?”

“Maybe an eighth of a full turn”

“Eh, that’s not too bad. My steering wheel used to turn almost half way around before it’d work and I did four Shastas like that. It’s probably your drag link. That’s an easy job; we could do it the night before Shasta at the rampaging spot.”

“I dunno, man. …”

“You’re probably just tweaking out because you’re tired and cold. Just take a break for a while, warm up, hit up some coffee and food and hit the road.”

“Yeah, maybe. I’m gonna try and keep going,” I said, testing the now re-wired headlights to make sure they work. They do, multi-tasking for the win. “I’ll keep you posted.”

COMING SOON: Wiley Wheelbearings in Wyoming, Undulating UH-cross Utah, Nocturnal Nincompoopery in Nevada, and Cacophonous Calamity in California!

Taylor's Riviera Camper (green) at the Old Volks camp out.

If you get any sort of rise out of this blog at all, you should dig my friend Taylor’s blog as well @ http://vwcamper.tumblr.com/

We’re at least three hours behind the big Shasta pack. It took a long time to bleed the brakes on Cory’s panel – when his brake pedal hit the floor it probably forced most of his brake fluid straight out the rip in the bad wheel cylinder. This would’ve left him with absolutely no brake response at all. Terrifying.

With your powers combined . . .

All three team Deaf Volks Busses have decided to stay behind to further asses their post break-down options. Two things brought down their grey camper, a dead throw-out bearing (which would’ve been OK by itself, I gave them my spare) and a disintegrated clutch fork. The clutch fork killed them. None of the four other Busses on the ridge had an extra and the big Shasta pack was out of CB range by the time the utensil came out in three mangled pieces.

This leaves Cory, in his panel, and me, in my beloved Isabella. Neither of us have any clue what the official SST route is this year nor do we have any way to ask for directions. But there’s no turning back. No way. Each and every Shasta participant signed on for one thing, adventure. Adventure fraternizes not with the prudish forms of strict schedule and meticulous plan but with the lustfy figures of chance and serious risk.

Cory tries to call for directions to no avail on Bartlett Springs Rd.

Cory and I encounter a three-way intersection about a mile down hill from Clutch Fork Ridge (officially named thus at this very moment) and we dismount to examine the tracks. Shit. Nearly every muddy road in the area is covered in tracks. There’s no way to be certain which path the big pack took, we’ve got no cell reception and it’s unlikely anyone in the pack does either. Our only option is to try the roads that feel right. My intuition isn’t 100% at this point because, as the day rises and the invigorating mountain air mixes with the distinct funk of old VWs, just about any road feels right. Trial and error has got to pan out every now and then, right? We select a rough, muddy route twisting down into a pastoral valley glowing supernaturally green in the new morning sun.

—

“This can’t be it,” I say over the CB. Cory and I are stopped at another three point intersection where the beat-to-hell dirt road we came from intersects with a beat-to-hell paved road.

“Are you sure,” Cory’s voice enquires from my CB speaker.

“I’m 99.99 percent sure this is the way that I drove in last night.”

We’re parked next to a sign that says the town of Williams is 12 miles to the east. It doesn’t seem likely to me that the pack took this route. I mean, it’s paved. But I’m a Shasta newbie, what do I know? Cory pulls a wrinkled triple-A map of Northern California out of his Bus. Even if we do follow the correct route we’re too far behind to catch up to the pack. He suggests we head back the way we came, follow Bartlett Springs Road west, catch the 101 and head north towards Willits where we’ll stop by the local VW guru’s place to check for broken down SST goers. If that doesn’t pan out, we’ll find a few nice dirt roads to follow back into the mountains where maybe we’ll run into a Bus or thirty, if we’re lucky.

Lake Somethingorother

I follow Cory closely as Bartlett Springs Road climbs up into the morning fog. It’s a dance of 2nd gear downshifts, hopping rear wheels and quick, smooth steering input. We zoom past downed trees, large rocks and sheer drops. We sail over chuckholes, splash through water crossings and kick up mud around the corners in vain attempts to get these ancient death traps sideways. There’re no guardrails, lane markers or, thank god, other drivers on this route. A few cabins peek out from behind the fir trees near the top. As the road turns downward, the tree line thins out. I see a very large, very blue lake out my driver’s side window. There’s a small town cuddled up to it and a shiny, grey two-lane carries comparatively heavy traffic through the middle. Only a few more switchbacks to the 101.

All I hear is the erratic beat of mud flinging into my wheel-wells now that we’re back on pavement. I tell Cory over the CB that I need to refuel. We pull into an unnamed, locally owned gas station – a rare piece of Americana all but extinct in a modern world in which the warm familiarity of corporate branding evokes feelings of home.

It’s the unfortunate truth, ye faithful. Giant, fluorescent “Shell” or “McDonald’s” signs are today’s lighthouses, holy beacons guiding interstate travelers away from the potential horrors of cultural diversity and new experience. “Sure, the tacos at Raphael’s Taquiria might be delicious, Rachel, but they could give me all manner of diarrhea,” Toyota Driver X says. “If we go to Taco Bell™ I know exactly what the tacos will taste like and exactly what kind of diarrhea to expect. Now, can we please turn the radio back up? I wanna hear some Nickleback!”

Terrible.

It’s an easy drive at 55 heading north on the 101 to Willits, where certified VW swami, Christopher Moore keeps an ever changing collection of VW’s on his property. I follow Cory through town and into the gravel driveway of a rustic two-story farmhouse behind which sits a barn or two full of Germanic automotive paraphernalia. No Shasta Busses. Christopher, a short, later middle-aged man in bluejeans and a grey sweatshirt greats Cory with a smile and a handshake, I introduce myself with the same while my eyes pour over the two dead split Busses sitting just off the side of his driveway. They’re begging me to buy them.

Cory pulls out his mangled AAA Northern California map and consults Christopher on possible back roads routes to Mt. Shasta city. We’re hoping to traverse the treacherous, beautiful Mendocino pass. But it’s not to be. Christopher says the pass is closed; snow accumulation is just too damn high. We decide, unhappily, that our best bet is to take the 101 back the way we came and follow it south until we run into Bear Valley Road. At least it’s dirt.

—

There’s a barricade in the middle of Bear Valley Road that reads “Road Closed.”

“What’dya think,” Cory asks.

“How bad could it be,” I reply. “I mean, I ignored a road closed sign to get to camp last night. I say let’s go for it.”

Cory skirts his Bus around the barricade and I follow. The deeper into the road we get the better it feels – the rushed pavement world of the 101 moves further and further away as we sail over chuck holes, scoot around low traction corners and splash across drainages.

“Oh man, this is more like,” I exclaim with a smile.

“Yeah, this is much better,” Cory says. He’s picking up speed for a ten foot section of thick, wet mud. I watch the red panel swing its ass left then right, mud shooting off its huge off-road tires — like the car is trying to decide just which tree it wants to slam into. It looks like fun. I downshift to third, feed the throttle and punch it in the muck.

“Whooooo-eee!” I let out a Dukes of Hazzard scream as the Bus slides back and forth at speed like a proud bull trying to ditch its rider. The tires catch the dry dirt on the other side, the suspension compresses hard to the left for one sickening moment and I’m back to relatively normal dirt road driving conditions.

Shasta Cattle Drive 2010

“That was fun,” I say as Cory begins to slow down. Free-range cattle. Right in the middle of the road. Cory’s horn is working hard. We’re pushing the cattle straight down the road. The lazy bastards don’t like the very lightly sloped hills on either side of the road. They walk slowly and seem to forget we’re even there until Cory blasts his horn again. They look back over their cow shoulders, their eyes widen in cow horror and they pick their cow legs up to a trot.

“Shasta Cattle Drive 2010,” I say over the CB.

“This is bullshit,” Cory replies unaware of his ironic choice of words, “get out of the way!”

Finally the cattle retreat up the hill on the right side of the road – a hill that looks far steeper than the ones they just weren’t comfortable with back a few hundred feet. We accelerate back to a speed just on the verge of “too fast for conditions,” the landscape opens up, the sky grows and the desire to catch the big pack slowly recedes. Sure, it’d be awesome to follow that giant group of Busses down all those questionable roads but at this moment things are feeling great. The dirt, the scenery and the fact that these two old VWs are certainly the only vehicles on this closed, middle of nowhere road combines to create a damn good time.

Speeding on a closed road. Ain't no thang.

—

“What the hell does this guy want,” I ask over the CB.

“I dunno,” Cory says as the driver of a big, red Ford F350 extended cab on the other side of the road pulls his arm out the window, presumably signaling he wants to talk to us. He slows the giant truck to a stop and we do the same.

The area that the Shasta Snow Trip runs through is sporadically dotted with ranches. It’s not hard to imagine that some of these folks aren’t too keen on hosting a kind of deranged hippie Le Mans on the roads they drive every day. I’ve got a feeling Cory and I are in for some kind of mild confrontation.

“Hey, you know, my wife has wanted one of these for a long time,” the intimidating looking rancher says with a half smile, ”I saw you guys coming down the road and I thought, ‘these look like just the guys to ask about it.’”

I give the rancher the Bus run-down and explain that if his wife wants a split-window Bus rather than a later bay-window model he should be ready for some laugh out loud ridiculous prices. We give him the scoop on finding the good deals and head further down the road – which just so happens to be the road I was so sure the pack didn’t take earlier that morning.

“Man, I thought he was going to tell us to slow down or something,” Cory says.

“Yeah, me too. He’ll never get a Bus.”

“Nope.”

—

It’s around 9:30 at night when the red ’60 panel and the blue and white ’65 Riviera camper pull into the parking lot of Mt. Shasta city’s Cold Creek Inn. And there they are, the ghosts we’ve been chasing all day – through creek crossings, over rocky crests and around road barricades. Every space in the parking lot is held by a Bus, except for one in which a maroon Toyota Prius cowers in total disbelief and temporary suspension of overzealous self-righteousness.

The Cold Creek Inn suffers from a peculiar kind of seasonal infestation.

It feels good to get out of the driver’s seat for a reason other than checking a map. Cory and I routed essentially a zig-zag of back roads on either side of I-5. Anything that the AAA map said was dirt we investigated. Unfortunately, the map proved itself untrustworthy or at the very least woefully outdated. More often than not the roads shown as dirt were anything but. Well, at least we stayed off the interstate longer than those in the big pack. Cory heard from Hippie Tim at around the halfway point of our odyssey that the pack got on I-5 near Redding and rode all the way up to Mt. Shasta city, a distance of some 60 miles. We were only on I-5 for about 20 miles. Small victories.

After dinner and some beers with more new VW friends I stumble to my Bus, convert it from car to cabin and crash happy with the realization that there’s no set waking time tomorrow morning.

Line 'em up!

Groaning starters, heavy revs and staccato horns — It’s a little after 4 o’clock in the morning and the newts are coiled up and ready to rage. I try to think of any other instances in which three hours of sleep seemed to do the job as sweet adrenaline blasts me through the other side of a pre-dawn disorientation. The bed is folded back, the boots are on and I’m off and running . . . to find a push start.

With very little effort I recruit several Shasta goers I’ve never met to push start my Bus in the mud before sunrise. I’ve often written about the instant friendship that develops between fellow air-cooled VW junkies: from Rick in Sacramento helping me tune my carbs late on a Monday night with no forewarning, to Kyle in Bozeman giving me the keys to his shop just 10 minutes after we initially met, this phenomena is tried, tested and ready for text books. This is a new example of fantastic air-cooled camaraderie to add to the list, and it won’t be the last. There’s a certain amount of Karma living in old VWs, if you’re not one to pay it back you’re not going to be in the hobby for too long. It’s with this in mind that an unrecognizable face dips near my opened passenger window.

“Hey, just so you know, you just drove over a bunch of barbed wire,” he says.

“Really? Shit.”

“Yeah, so watch your tire pressure.”

“Hey, thanks!”

I’m now 100% awake.

Bus after Bus slowly motors out of slumber and guns it through the mud to make it up the 5-foot embankment (which reminds me exactly of a roll-in at a skate park made of earth rather than concrete) that leads to Bartlett Springs Road. There are somewhere between three and four “roll-ins” that climb out of the rampaging spot to the road. From East to West each roll-in is a little less gnarly (not as steep, not as high, etc.). At this point, in the dark, I aim for the closest one, 2nd on the gnar-o-meter. I approach slowly and then floor the accelerator, doing my best to find the happy medium between jumping straight into the trees on the other side of the road and rolling backwards into another Bus. Up we go! Two hops from the rear wheels on the exit and we make it.

Ready to rampage.

The line-up is looking increasingly unbelievable as each Bus backs diagonally on the road for the Le Mans start. I’m sixth in what seems like an endlessly multiplying row of Busses. When the motors stop revving and the headlights are static, Brian Piercy, AKA “Kombisutra,” the originator of this mad annual romp, calls for a driver’s meeting (if anyone reading this has a video or audio recording of the driver’s reading, please send me a copy so that I can fill in the specifics, thanks). Brian, an ex-marine, is about as determined to chase down real adventure as anyone you’ll ever meet. He’s serious about fun and knows his shit when it comes to VWs. He sits on the roof rack of his mostly purple, recently rescued panel and delivers his speech over the din of 35 idling Busses. There’s discussion of the route, discussion of the number of participants (35 Busses, the largest Shasta Snow Trip ever!) and most importantly discussion of safety. Brian covers both the type of road obstacles and the conditions we’ll likely run into as well as the importance of each driver staying within a pace he or she is comfortable with. The sobering word “fatality” is uttered at least once as a terrifying but realistic possibility. Last year one of the Busses rolled on a gravel corner, miraculously no-one was injured. Sometimes it takes unfortunate close calls like these to grasp the danger inherent in the Shasta Snow Trip.

Most SST participants understand the risky nature of the trip – by actively participating, each team-member willfully opens themselves to the chance of a fatal wreck, catastrophic mechanical failure, the wills of nature, red in tooth and claw, or potentially all of the above. To most of us the uttering of the word “fatality” came with no adverse jolt. Even as a first timer I knew what I was getting into. As a lifelong VW geek, I’d poured over every bit of text on the Shasta Snow Trip for years, dreaming I’d soon own a split-window Bus worthy of the SST, one of the pinnacle events of the air-cooled Volkswagen world. In these texts I found no small amount of fair warning.

But it’s damn near impossible to smother the Shasta stoke, it’s palpable, jumping strange and true through the morning air, mingling with a deluge of Germanic exhaust smoke and the occasional wandering puff of green California fog.

Drivers to their cars, belts strapped, CBs on. Ahh, the sound of 35 flat-fours revving free as I slowly move my left foot into position over the clutch. I don’t recall a gunshot or even an amplified scream of “GO,” but we’re off and running – and I mean running. The five Busses in front of me shoot East like last chance moonshiners with a siren in earshot.

Forty miles per hour at the top of third gear, trees blurring in headlights, bumper to bumper, both hands tight on the wheel, watching for rocks or large holes, arms sawing smooth with clairvoyant counter-steer, stabbing at the brakes, double clutching to second and on the gas through water crossings, climbingclimbingCLIMBING, whooping and howling like a man insane as the cool morning air streams in through my opened windows.

Uh-Oh.

Later in the trip it’s mentioned that this year’s take-off was one of the fastest in the history of the SST. The blistering speed isn’t for long, there’s no sign of headlights behind me and the six of us aren’t the only Colin McCrea wannabes on the romp this morning. We’ve taken a wrong turn. A few hundred feet to the top of a ridge and there’s a muddy area large enough to flip a u-turn in. Busses one through four turn around and head back down the hill with no issue, Bus number five, team Deaf Volks’ faded gray ’60 camper, appears to be stuck in the mud. Having buried my own Bus many times before, I hang back to offer a hand.

Unfortunately the mud isn’t the problem, the clutch is no longer engaging. The driver (I’m sorry, in the chaos I never got your name), a man in his mid-twenties of average build wearing black boots, muddy jeans, a gray sweater and a neatly trimmed sandy blond goatee that matches his closely cropped hair jumps out and slides under the side of his Bus to check the clutch cable. The cable looks fine, the clutch arm is operating exactly as it should . . . diagnosis continues. I walk back to my Bus and pull out the CB.

“Team Deaf Volks is stuck at the spot where the leading Busses turned around, their clutch isn’t engaging.”

“Who’s this,” the radio squawks.

“This is Adam in the blue and white Riviera. I’m new. Riviera Adam.”

An overwhelming flood of advice scratches out of the static. I can’t help but grin as I marvel at the amount of call-backs. I pull the mic from its holster and I’m back on the radio.

“Yeah, we tried that — No, it’s not — No, I don’t think so – Yeah, I’ll keep you posted — Does anyone have a spare pressure plate?”

Among the responses is a disembodied voice in possession of a spare clutch pressure plate, he says he’s on his way up the hill to offer assistance. Two more Busses come up the hill, a flat red early panel with black Hurst bumpers and a pearl white Riviera camper – one of only three on the SST, mine being the oldest. Our reinforcements stop their steeds and dismount. I approach them to ask a question and quickly realize that all of them, much like all but one of the gray camper’s occupants, are deaf. Adrenaline apparently hasn’t stirred all of my mental faculties. We assemble behind the grey camper and push it to a smooth, relatively dry spot so team Deaf Volks can pull the motor. No idea what time it is but there’s no sign of the sun.

Time to pull the motor!

As the black rear bumper on the busted Deaf Volks camper hits the ground, we collectively wonder where our stated reinforcements are. There’s been steady CB chatter but I’ve either been too far from my rig to understand it or it’s been unrelated. I pull my mic searching for an update. The response is nicht so gut, the man with the pressure plate blew a wheel-cylinder – he went for his brakes coming downhill and the pedal went straight to the floor. In instances like these the human brain’s natural response is to ground out, widen the eyes and set the extremities to chaotic flailing. No good. That’ll cripple your ass. Even in a “normal” car. In a Volkswagen Bus, a vehicle in which the driver sits directly above the front wheels . . . use your imagination. Our as-of-yet named friendly pressure plate possessor says he’s fine. Presumably he went for the emergency brake or punched the gear lever into first gear and let out the clutch. Maybe both.

View from the top of the ridge.

“I’ve crimped off the hard (brake) line to the bad wheel, I’ll be on my way up soon,” the CB crackles.

“Cool,” I reply as the first rays of the rising sun peer over the ridge, “I’ll come down the hill to meet you to make sure you get here OK.”

I relay my mission to the one member of Deaf Volks I can speedily communicate with, hop in my Bus and head down the hill. The sky now brightens to ice blue and the beauty of the ridge we’re stopped on emerges. About a mile downhill I run into a mean looking flat red ’60 panel with a raised front suspension, huge bias-ply mud tires, and a rust-pitted, white full-length roof rack carrying two auxiliary gas cans and a couple of fog lights. Cory’s ride is straight out of Mad Max. We turn around and head up hill facing an impromptu brake job and whatever blown-out surprise hides behind the gray camper’s motor.

Limping back for repairs.

More Later.

-A

Headed South on I-5.

I prepare for the tenth annual Shasta Snow Trip just like I prepare for anything, at the very last conceivable second. By the time Aaron rolls his Mango Kombi into Eugene from the tippy-top of Washington I’m still in need of a CB radio and antenna, a set of tire chains and some general supplies. Most of the things I need (food, camp stove, water, propane heater, propane cartridges, garbage bags, etc.) are organized in a clear plastic bin which is ready at any moment to be loaded into the Bus. My cold weather gear and one change of clothes sit on a chair next to all the electronic bullshit I’m to take with me. But I’m in class attempting to look like I give a shit about our discussion, trying desperately not to interrupt the professor with an eruption of maniacally delivered Volkswagen Adventure Super Stoke. I barely make it.

Aaron picks me up on campus in the Mango and we head out to No Name Garage on the other side of town to pick up my Riviera from the free oil change/valve adjustment that was included with the price of the new 1776 and rebuilt big-nut transmission.

Aaron has the bug to get on the road bad, and rightly so, so he hits I-5 South to pile up some miles while I load the Bus with supplies, spare parts, heavy blankets and two extra wheels wearing studded snow tires and cable chains. No time to test the new CB. Hit the 5 at about 7 p.m. and gave the new motor/trans combo its first real highway test.

Good morning, officer!

I catch up with Aaron in the Wal-Mart parking lot in Yreka California. Sleep. Wake up, pick up some more supplies (knee-high rubber boots, a better CB antenna, etc.) and do a bit of work on the Busses in the lot. I adjust my carbs and test the CB radio while Aaron wires in his radio, checks his starter, adjusts his carb and tries to figure out what’s going on with his distributor.

We evacuate the Wally World lot a little before noon and head towards Weed to pick up Aaron’s friend Corey, a Bus guy through and through from Sacramento. There are many hours driving south on the I-5 in pouring rain. My Bus is dripping water like crazy and the duct tape I used to seal off the leaky front window seals isn’t quite doing the job. Oh well.

We fill our tanks and auxiliary fuel canisters at a Shell station just outside of Williams where we pick up highway 20 west to meet Bear Valley Road and then Bartlett Springs Road on which we’ll run smack into the so called “rampaging spot.”

Aaron adjusts the gas can on his rack as Corey looks on.

Bear Valley Road is our first venture off pavement. It’s dark, probably 9 p.m. or so and the rain is coming down cold and steady. Aaron and Corey lead and set a healthy pace of around 40 mph. I’ve no idea what kind of terrain we’re traversing, the lights from both Busses do a bang up job of illuminating the deep, water filled chuck holes in the road but do very little brightening up of the surrounding environment.

Coming around a corner at around 40 mph we run into what I can only describe as “mud ice,” the middle of the road gleams under my “off-road use only” H4 headlights and disappears just as quickly under the wheels of the Bus, which at this point don’t so much go round and round as they do sideways. Aaron makes it through with a bit of a slip but my Bus, Isabella, hangs her ass out like a hooker with a new mouth to feed. A quick slip of the steering wheel to full opposite lock keeps me from spinning backwards into a barbed wire fence. From this emerges the inevitable “oh, shit” moment, which is, of course, followed by the “YEE-haw!” chuckle and grin.

“How’s this for a pace,” Aaron’s voice crackles over the CB.

“I just about lost it on a third gear turn back there, maybe slow it down a bit,” I reply.

“Will do.”

And that’s the last time I wuss out . . . maybe.

We stop at a three way intersection to check the map. My Bus dies. Shit. Aaron and Corey give me a push start and we head up what looks to me like a completely insane route, Bartlett Springs Road. Mind you, at this point I’ve done very little backroads Bussing. Sure, I’ve hit the gravel and dirt in many places and even gotten stuck a few times but I’ve never encountered anything like this. To my tired, inexperienced eyes this route looks a lot like a miniature version of the “Bolivian Death Road.” Aaron leads us around switchback after switchback up this single lane, muddy, rock strewn road. We lift wheels, hop and throw dirt around each turn. We goose the accelerator pedals mid corner with visions of glorious power-on oversteer drifting through our tired heads. We climb further.

Crap shot of the rampaging spot as the rain comes down.

It’s here that I bust my stream-crossing cherry on something that looking back at this point seems so very small. Aaron slows, downshifts and powers through the 4 or 5 foot drainage and I do the same. And just like that I’m hooked and jonesing for more and bigger water crossings the rest of the trip.

Now we’re headed downhill and those switchbacks are tackled with stabs at the brakes and the quick double-clutch work. We shoot past the chain-sawed remains of downed trees, jerk at the wheel to avoid large rocks and smile toothy and wide as the throaty exhaust blasts of 2nd gear downshifts echo off muddy berms, sending Sasquatch sprinting for the relative safety of rural California night.

Keepin' it real.

There’s a bridge over Cache Creek in the middle of the Mendocino National Forest. Just on the other side of it the wild-eyed beasties, the far-out, far-gone, screw-loose goons of the vintage Volkswagen Bus world keep a transient Valhalla. Down a 5-foot embankment on the North side of Bartlett Springs Road over 30 split-window Busses wait – their owners are sleeping, drinking, smoking, cursing, eating – are playing music, starting fires, cleaning carburetors, testing starters, shooting fireworks and generally kicking up dirt like the full-moon crazies they are. A quick whoop down the dirt roll-in, a splash in a mud puddle and we’re there. Welcome to the rampaging spot.

More soon.

-A

Izabella looks over the Sonoma Coast.

It was a short trip. Too short. Circumstances dictated that it be short in the first place and unlucky mechanical happenstance jumped out to make it even shorter.

On my way back to Oregon from Iowa I got a message from a gent named Jay from L.A. Jay had purchased a rare, original condition VW Bus roof rack from a guy in Boise, Idaho. Jay wanted to know if I could transport his roofrack to the West coast. A deal was struck, if he could source me a good rear bumper for my Bus, I would meet him in San Francisco with his vintage roof rack. Well, he found a bumper and I picked up the roof rack.

Friday morning at 10 a.m. I loaded the Bus up for a weekend trip to the Bay Area. I took I-5 down, which is against my religion, but even devout catholics occasionally dabble in quick and dirty sex. That was the idea, to get to the Bay area as fast as possible so that I’d have as much time as possible to bum around and see this and that.

I-5, now featuring Mt. Shasta.

It took 11 hours to get to San Mateo from Eugene. Not bad at all considering I was traveling at 55 mph and that I stopped on the side of the road for 20 minutes to inspect the transmission, level of gear oil, etc. Out there on the 5, maybe 2 hours into the haul, fourth gear decided it wasn’t going to stay selected without force. From this point forward I had to hold the gear lever into the position for fourth gear so that it wouldn’t kick itself out (which leads to the eventual loss of 4th gear altogether). If I lost 4th gear my top speed would’ve been a high revving 45 mph. No thanks.

I had spent a bit of time online before I left trying to find a nice park to camp in on the north side of the Bay. I found one, China Camp State Park, which looked pretty fantastic. The website said nothing of the park closing all of its gates at 8 p.m. Who the hell gets into a campsite before 8 p.m.? Not me. Not ever.

I don’t like to use the GPS unit. When I drive the Bus I get into a certain historical mood. I don’t want electronic gizmos, I want 1965 technology. Sometimes, though, you’ve got to let go of your pride and get sucked back up into the giant, hungry orifice of modern technology. *Schlorp!*

When I set up the GPS unit I selected British English for my language setting (American English being the other choice). A fine, scholarly English woman serves me directions on a silver tea tray. She’s no doubt a MILF. This does ease the tension of dealing with a pushy GPS unit in most cases. But the bitch was of no help at all. She sent me to two alternate campsites that no longer existed. I had to settle for a Motel 6. And why do I always get a room next to an amateur porno shoot? Luckily I found a set of small, purple foam earplugs in the pocket of my jeans left over from a show a friend’s band played back home.

Frisco bound, Saturday morning.

In the morning I checked out and headed straight for San Francisco proper. It was foggy. I couldn’t see much of the Golden Gate bridge, and the Rice-A-Roni guy was no where to be found. I programmed the corner of Haight and Ashbury into my British MILF because, well, where the hell else do you go if you’re a liberal graduate student that drives a Volkswagen Bus? There are no photos of the Haight district because it was incredibly crowded and I could find no place to park. No matter anyhow, Jay called not long after I arrived to set up a meeting place for the parts trade. He chose Candlestick Park. Fair enough. The transaction was quick, Jay and his friend were really cool guys, would have been fun to bum around San Fran with them but they had to book back to L.A. because Jay had a gig to play that night.

I’ve got a friend, a Mr. Josh Marx, who lives in the Bay Area. I gave him a ring and it was decided that we’d meet later in the day for some alcohol and conversation in Menlo Park. Before pulling out of the parking lot of Candlestick, I produced my trusty Road Atlas and scoured the map for something to do in the meantime. La Honda was about 40 minutes from San Fran and about 15 minutes from Menlo Park. I had a plan now, I was going to find Ken Kesey’s infamous cabin in the woods of La Honda, the cabin where he and the Merry Pranksters led the West Coast into a day-glo acid wave. The very same cabin where the Hell’s Angels partied with the hippies and the beats one odd day in 1965. A laundry list of my idols and/or well liked historical figures had hung out at this cabin, Ken Kesey (of course), Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsburg, Tom Wolfe and the man himself, Hunter Thompson. So, it was important I see this place.

Keeping up with the Bimmers on the way to La Honda.

The road from Menlo Park into La Honda is the kind of henious black vein that adrenaline deranged motorcyclists, back-road auto racers and other twisted speed humpers visit in the wettest of their dreams. Smooth asphalt undulates mad through the hyper intensified splendor of the great Redwood Forest. My vehicle is ill-equipped for the sort of dangerous, adolescent hooligan behavior my brain is hardwired into upon sight of such a route. I wasn’t going to keep up with the serious maniacs, obviously, but I’d be damned if I was going to fall behind the Sunday drivers. There’s a saying known far and wide among car enthusiasts, “It’s more fun to drive a slow car fast than it is to drive a fast car slow.” I’m here to tell you that’s true. It must have been a spectacle, an old VW Bus hammering the brakes late, lifting off and careening headlong from corner to corner, exhibiting a biblical amount body-roll. Fun.

I couldn’t find the cabin on my own. But that was okay, it was time to head back into Menlo Park to meet up with Josh. I turned the bus around and did the whole freak dance all over again. Met Josh at his grandmother’s house where he and his father were visiting for the weekend. Hung out and talked with his Dad for a while. Cool guy. He had Volkswagen stories to share as well as La Honda stories from the 60s. Josh and I decided to cut to grab some drinks, Josh’s dad told us to check out the Alpine Inn, an old saloon on the other side of Menlo Park.

One of the things I’ve learned from traveling around is that, in most cases, the older and shittier the bar looks the better the bar is. This was the case with the Alpine Inn, which was fairly crowded with an odd mix of Stanford students, diamond encrusted soccer Moms, work-a-holic lawyers and even a few standard suburban families. Another thing I’ve learned over the years is that the older and dirty the grill looks, the better the burger will taste. That’s just pure fact.

The blurry spectre of Josh Marx approves of driving like a dickhead.

Josh had never been out to La Honda. I still desperately wanted to find the cabin. I didn’t ease up on the road out there, I may have even pushed it a bit more. Josh was impressed with how well my clapped out old Bus took the terrible nonsense I was throwing at it. I was, too. The plan was to patronize the local watering hole (yes, it was old and shitty looking) and ask a local for directions to the cabin. I pulled the Bus into the parking lot and as I got out a 1970 Beetle covered with a graffiti paint job pulled up. The driver, a man of average build and around 45 years, began asking me questions about my Bus. I only had one question for him and I asked as soon as there was a lull in the conversation.

“This is entirely unrelated but, you wouldn’t happen to know where Ken Kesey’s old cabin is, would you?”

“Yeah, it’s just right down the road.”

“Oh, ok. Is it down that way” I asked, pointing South.

“Hop in and I’ll show you.”

Josh crammed his lanky 6-foot frame into the back seat of the Beetle and I claimed shotgun. We took off. The driver did not slow down for the curves and the Beetle soared through them with no complaint, steady and smooth.

“Did you do something to the suspension in this?”

“Yeah, it’s got front and rear sway bars, bilstein shocks and wider tires.”

“It handles great!”

“I drive this road every day, you know, I think it was a necessary upgrade.”

That little ‘70 Beetle was one of the best handling street cars I’ve ever ridden in. No shit. It gives me bad ideas for my own ‘59 Bug…

Our La Honda tour guide.

There it was, on the left side of the road and in plain view. It looked exactly like the photographs that I’d seen of it, sitting back about 100 feet into the woods on the other side of a small creek. The Bug pulled a U-turn and cut back for the bar. Josh and I exchanged a pleasant goodbye with our driver, another air-cooled Volkswagen instant friend, and decided to head back to the cabin in the Bus to grab some photos. All of which turned out blurry — I’ve got the hands of a speed addled Cowboy Neal.

Kesey's old cabin in La Honda. Why he moved from here to Eugene is beyond me.

Cured by beer. Boont Amber is particularly tasty on a beat-up wooden porch on the edge of thick redwood evening while The Doors’ “Waiting for the Sun” drifts out the opened back door. There are certain places that leave a mark on you, something you take with you when you leave. A gentle, almost imperceptible realization that this is life, that this moment, that this place is one you’ll remember over so many of the others in day-to-day life. If you hunt for these things, I tell you, you’ll miss them entirely. Wait it out, they come just like anything else worth a shit in life, by the hair of a baboons ass.

I dropped Josh at his grandma’s place after another rousing game of Bus v. Apex and boomed for Highway 1, which I intended to follow until I found a suitable campsite on the coast. And that’s where I’ll leave this entry because, what kind of maniac writes a 2000 word blog entry about a single day? Exactly.

-A

Glacier National Park. Go there soon.

That was our pick-up line, if you could even call it that.

Two summers ago my friends Devin and Dan and I set out on an epic road trip from Iowa to the Badlands to the Black Hills and, finally, to Glacier National Park in Montana. My first real taste of a seriously maniacal road trip; probably the same for them.

My friends and I as a group are generally odd. Not odd like “I wonder why Johnny has been putting on eyeliner lately.”, but “I can’t believe Johnny said that in front of Grandma!” It’s not often that this many head trauma babies get together and whoop it up later in life, but I suppose we’re lucky. What I’m trying to get across here is this general haze of absurdity that emanates whenever we get together in groups of two or more. Anyhow…

The summit of Oberlin Peak is conquered.

We made up a lot of serious dumb shit on that trip, most of which has been canonized into our general vernacular. “Ever been to Montana?” was probably the very first thing that stuck on that particular expedition. We decided very early on that if we ever ran into an attractive young lady that we would sidle up to her, play it cool and then, with a half-hearted sideways glance ask “Ever been to Montana?” The scenario played constantly in our minds and would obviously work like Everclear every time.

We weren’t entirely serious. Or, at least most of us weren’t. For some reason this oh so suave, fool proof pick-up line wasn’t altered at all when we crossed within the boarders of Montana.

Was the pick-up line tested? Not in the real world. Despite the fact that any unsuccessful attempt at romance via this pick-up line would only haunt us for an extremely short period of time, we just couldn’t get the mental bone up hard enough to try it out.

There are two doe eyed female encounters that I remember specifically on the trip.

For some reason, from mile one on this trip, it was decided that I was the guy who’d hit on/score with all the ladies. Particularly odd seeing as Dan, at the time, was the only one of us not attached to a long-term girlfriend. I believe I argued this point at least twice on the trip to no avail.

Both of these unlucky ladies we ran into in the Many Glacier area of the park, an area famous for both its beauty and its comparatively larger grizzly bear population. Coincidence?

The first girl made her appearance on the first day we drove out to Many Glacier. We had just had a phenomenal, cliche life moment following an ice blue raging river while listening to Dark Side of the Moon and were pulling into the parking lot of the Many Glacier Hotel where we were hoping to catch breakfast.

Many Glacier Hotel.

I remember pulling the car into the lot, admiring the Hotel on the passenger side, scanning for parking lot bears and then, finally, looking out the driver’s side window of the car. My eyes followed a cement stairway up to an iconic image of a beautiful creature. I must have made a face worthy of the moment’s stupification because she looked back at me, smiled and laughed. And when she smiled, no shit, the area immediately around her head became brighter. There was absolute silence in the car for a few minutes and I knew that they had seen it, too. One of us, or all of us, followed her with our eyes to the door into the hotel. She was some kind of holy incarnation of a pre-alcoholism Kirsten Dunst.

I don’t remember all of what was said, but here’s what I do remember:

Adam slowly pulls towards an empty parking space, eyes wide, mouth agape with a nearly silent “WOW.”

“Oh man, dude, did you see that? Did you see her?”

“Uh-huh.” (Eyes widened, slow vocal delivery for effect)

“Man, you gotta hit on her, dude.”

“What? Me? Why me?

“Don’t question it, just go with it.”

Well, how in hell do you argue with that?

After some degree of creeper sleuth work we decided we’d probably run into her in the restaurant area of the Hotel. Perfect, we came here for food anyhow.

We were greeted by a young, brown haired waiter. Damn. He seated us in the corner of the room near a large picture window with a fantastic vista.

“Your server will be with you shortly.” Score.

And then she approached us and the pressure was on. It was time to man up and do what needed to be done. The delusional sexual tension in the room was suffocating. But when she got to the table everything went wrong. I mean everything. Not only did I completely botch every bit of the advance by admitting that we were the guys who nearly ran into a parked Maxima staring at her in the parking lot, but I think in an effort at self depreciating humor I mentioned the word “creepy” or the phrase “creepy guys” at least twice. And, of course, that just happened to be the truth. She also didn’t live up to the holy parking lot vision that should have been left alone. She looked more like a slightly puffy D’arcy Wretsky than my glorious vision of blond perfection. But she was from Norway and she had an accent. The rest of our interactions with her were brief and awkward. That was that.

Dan contemplates suicide at Ptarmagin falls.

I was crushed. Absolutely crushed. It wasn’t because I had been heartbroken at second sight. It wasn’t because I had savagely fucked up the possibility of some shimmering, paranormal, nymphet summer fling, it was because I had fucked up the one thing that my friends were counting on me to do.

OK. It wasn’t because I let the boys down, it was the principle of the thing. This thing that was trumped up ridiculous in jest before we even knew it existed. This thing that for one absurd second had seemed so damn important.

I was hard on myself the entire day. I even took some time to write about my monumental, hair pulling disappointment in detail in my trip journal (which was inked out when I realized the monumental absurdity of this scenario two days later). That particular day we hiked six miles round trip to Iceberg Lake, a place disappointingly devoid of its namesake. Three icy cold dips into the just above freezing lake didn’t wash the shame off.

A swim in iceberg lake.

The hike back sucked hard, as hikes back are wont to do. About a half mile before we got to the car we encountered a middle aged couple and a twenty-something guy all chatting to each other on trail. Hiking in front of them, alone, was a beautiful girl with long strawberry blonde hair (which is my hair color when the sun doesn’t bleach it out). I knew I had to redeem myself. When I went to pass her on the trail I turned to her and said “You have beautiful hair.”

“Wow, thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” And I pulled off my cabby hat to reveal my bleached out blonde hair, which would have been strawberry blonde had I not been out in the sun all summer. I didn’t realize the blunder in this move until I looked in the car’s review mirror. This time, though, there was laughter. The shame of the earlier screw up melted away because, right after I commented on this girl’s hair the twenty-something guy from behind her (her boyfriend) went up and held her hand. A minor success, the boyfriend was threatened.

Devin, Dan and I at our campsite in Two Medicine on the last day in GNP.

Ridiculous.

At attention near Craters of the Moon National Monument, Idaho.

Replacing the dead generator with the brand new alternator turned out to be a much easier job than I really could have imagined. I pulled the Bus into Kyle’s (Bozeman AIRS member) shop at around 10 a.m. and began the small task of dissassembly. I was a bit worried about the job at this point, a lot of VW gurus were saying it would be best accomplished with the motor out. This is not as difficult to do as it is in just about any other car but, it’s a dirty, no fun job. Thankfully I was able to reach around the back of the motor to wrench the huge (36mm!) generator fan nut off. The job was relatively straight-forward. Since most of the readers of this blog aren’t of the mechanical ilk, though, I won’t write up the whole process.

Half way there!

I did run into a one issue, a rather disconcerting metal squeal noise that after a bit of tinkering and diagnosing, Kyle and I decided wasn’t enough of an issue to warrant redoing the job.

Kyle and his '59 SO-23 Westy.

I pulled out of Bozeman and back onto I-90 at around 6 p.m. Driving from this point forward was not much more than a chore. The wind in south west Montana, southern Idaho and even eastern Oregon had some sort of grudge against old VWs. If I wasn’t driving straight into this heavy wind and struggling to keep a speed of 50, I was being pushed around the highway like a new kid on the playground.

Kyle's shop.

Not much to report on the I-90 front. Mostly frivolous cursing at the wind and a few conversations with people at gas stations. I did, however, try out a bottle of five hour energy that night. That stuff is a crock of shit, it gave me two hours of energy at best! Crossed the state line into Idaho at around 11:30 p.m. and found a National Forest to camp in at around midnight. It was completely empty except for one Dodge Ram with a camper shell, and those people were asleep.

Welcome to south-central Idaho, you are now sterile!

Another reason I’m never doing five hour energy again, PARANOIA! I have no idea what’s in this stuff and I’m currently too lazy to research it but, something in there or maybe the combination of all of those things gave me ridiculous paranoia that night. I was certain that I was going to be stabbed to death that night by some crazed drifter with absolutely no motive besides general hatred of humanity. I remember constantly pulling my head up out of the sleeping bag and looking out the rear window to see what was going on outside. It was nothing every time, but for some time I was still cowering in that car. I spent a good deal of time debating which tool in the cabinet next to me would critically injure but not kill a would-be assailant. Ridiculous.

No caption necessary.

In the morning I found myself completely alone. So I covered my naked body with satanic runes made of wheel bearing grease and… There’s no reason to continue this blatantly ridiculous scenario, I just got back on the highway towards Boise. Which is where I met a guy named Mike at a VW shop to pick up an original 50s era roof rack for a guy in SoCal. We’d made a deal a few days earlier that I would pick-up and transport his rack to him in exchange for a rear bumper for my Bus.

Oh, the atomic age, how I pine for thee.

What else is there to tell? That particular part of Idaho was alright. Nothing to flip out about. More wind, of course. Eastern Oregon was about the same, only with more sage bushes.

Western Oregon had a wonderful greeting prepared for me that night, near freezing temperatures, drizzle and patches of dense fog on a slick, steep mountain pass. Yeah, I’m just as happy to see you, too, asshole.

Highway 20, eastern Oregon.

Got the Bus in my carport at midnight and immediately crashed out. Thus ends this particular journey. Depressing, both in its quite boring end and in its realization that my days of this sort of adventure are probably numbered. You see, I’ll be graduating soon and with graduation comes the realization that I have to be a “responsible, contributing citizen.” Sounds pretty shitty, doesn’t it? The real issue at hand is the titanic, bloodthirsty monster that is my student loan debt.

But there are still a few adventures of this caliber to be had. I’m not going to give up completely. But I am for tonight. Six a.m. flights come early.

Morning. Just inside the North East entrance to Yellowstone.

I’m sure you’ve been wondering what’s happened to your hero and his uppity stead. Or maybe you haven’t. It doesn’t matter one bit. I wouldn’t say that I’m “stuck” in Montana. I’ve always loved western Montana. I’d rather spend more time tooling around this area of the country than go back to school in Oregon. But, I think I’m just getting too much into this lifestyle which, unfortunately, is not entirely sustainable in the face of monumental student loan debt.

A section of highway 212.

When we last left off I was going to meet a guy named Randy outside of Billings Montana to pick up an alternator conversion kit for the Bus. I did. Randy was probably in his late 50s with gray hair flowing past his shoulders and a not quite David Crosby mustache. His compound was out in a large valley east of Billings. I say compound because there were over 200 VWs and Audis in his rather large back yard. His shop was a barn customized to meet his needs. Unfortunately, Randy couldn’t help me out with the install that day nor could he let me use his shop, he had to drive out to work on his cabin in the mountains. He must have a terrible life, right?

I decided shortly after that point that I would try to get as west as I could in the daylight on battery power instead of spending the better part of the day cursing under the decklid of the Bus. I was hoping I could get into eastern Idaho that night. Well, that didn’t work out.

The line down 212.

I took highway 212, which was an amazing drive that climbed high enough to see a few glacier remnants. Eventually, when I was as high as I could get on the road, I ran into road construction. Fifteen miles of road construction. One lane only with a pilot car. That business took about two hours off my daylight driving time.

View from my campsite.

I made it the north eastern Yellowstone entrance in Montana before nightfall. No campsites close enough to the entrance that I could drive into the park and camp without having to utilize my headlights (thus killing the battery). Headed back into the tiny town just outside the entrance. Made camp between two mountains, right next to a river and a bonfire tended by 20 something pseudo hippies. I don’t remember their names, there was beer. Enough to make all four of us go to sleep relatively early.

One of these cats was a New Hampshire boy who’d been working at the cabins in this small town for a few years in the summer. He looked more granola, or even college boy than hippie, in his expensive, name brand soft shell jacket, stain-free un-tattered jeans and baseball cap. Another was a California snowboard chick. She had that pseudo surfer drawl that is nearly impossible to put on a page but instantly recognizable by ear. She’d been working summers there for a few years, too. Winters she spends living in Jackson, Wyoming with her boyfriendm trying to pull sponsors. The boyfriend was the hippie. Or at least he looked, talked and acted like one. He was blond, unshaven and unbathed. He wore a red pendelton shirt, a distant stare and the kind of dumb smile you get when your inner monologue recalls your best friend in grade school running his bike into a parked car.

Hippie fire pit, the morning after.

I think we had fun. I remember having a rough time walking back to the Bus, being mistaken for a rogue buffalo while walking through the dry, knee high grass and finding nothing at all particularly amusing while trying to fall asleep.

Your great, great granpda killed a LOT of these.

Woke up with the sun, transformed the Bus from cabin to car and took off for Yellowstone. It wasn’t until about an hour into driving around that wondrous place that I realized I was really behind where I needed to be. This is when things began to get a little less fun. I was zooming past many, many places that I remembered from the last time I was in Yellowstone, some three years ago (?) and the time before that. I kept thinking about Edward Abbey’s “Industrial Tourism” concept from Desert Solitaire. And I was feeling pretty guilty.

…Industrial Tourism is a threat to the national parks. But the chief victims of the system are the motorized tourists. They are being robbed and robbing themselves. So long as they are unwilling to crawl out of their cars they will not discover the treasures of the national parks and will never escape the stress and turmoil of the urban-suburban complexes which they had hoped, presumably, to leave behind for a while.

I recall feeling a lot of angst towards the sheer amount of immaculately paved walking paths and other such nasty business in Yellowstone in particular when I was younger. I’m not as pissed about it now. But, maybe it’s because I didn’t get a chance to go out there and see them this time.

Frank, his awesome dog and his awesome Beetle.

More things outside of my control were conspiring to keep me in this part of the country, one of my favorites anyhow. A road on the fastest route to Idaho was closed so I had to take a very long loop to access the other route. More calamity came. I took a wrong turn, or rather instinctually turned away from the glowing blue and red lights of park police. I realized I had taken a wrong turn after I went halfway around beautiful Yellowstone lake. It wasn’t the worst thing, though. Heading back I saw a blue ‘65 Beetle parked at a turnout next to the lake. I stopped to take photos and ended up talking to the owner, Frank, for a while. He was a very nice guy. Lived and worked there in the park with his very affectionate beagle named “Annalese” (if I remember correctly, my brain was pretty burnt by that time.) I bent down to pet Annalese and she jumped right up and sat on my knees. What an awesome dog. Frank told me she didn’t do that with many people but that she liked Volkswagen people. She probably smelled the combination of airing horsehair seat stuffing and gasoline fumes and realized that I was an OK guy.

She just hung out there for a while!

Heading back to the turn that I needed to take I ran into a major traffic jam. If you didn’t know it before, you know it now: Bison don’t care about anything but Bison stuff. They’ll hang out in front of your car all day if they want to. They’re not dumb, though. They were using the paved bridge to cross a river that their ancestors would have forded back in the olden days.

Tatonka!

And then I found out that the only other reasonable route west was closed due to a natural fire that was encroaching closer and closer to the road. Great. So I had to retrace my steps all the way back up to Montana out the Northwest exit into Gardiner then Livingston and, finally Bozeman. I’ve never really spent much time in Bozeman outside of the pages of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance but from the little bit that I’ve seen, I really like it. We’ll see how I feel once Phaedrus pays me a visit.

Original entrance gate to Yellowstone. First national park. Yosemite cam earlier but was a state park at that time.

Contacted a Bus guy named Kyle who was listed on the AIRS site (God Bless this Site) and left him a message about help with replacing the generator. He called and said that he was going to be working in the morning but that he would let me use his shop and his tools. He came to pick me up from my hotel in his beautiful original paint 1959 SO-23 Westfalia (which is my dream camper) so he could show me how to get to his shop. It’s not far from the hotel, which is nice. Inside the shop was another awesome original paint Bus, his bullet signal, Dove Blue single cab. Kyle gave me the tour and gave me the key to his shop. It never ceases to amaze me how nice VW people are. People like this keep me in the VW game (among other things, of course.)

So, now I type this in my hotel room, quite anxious for sleep. Yeah, that’s what I’m gonna do.

-A