395N July 2017 Trip Report

Well this is the story about how my trip to Colorado and Utah turned into a trip up and down highway 395 here in CA.....So for weeks I had been planning a trip out to Colorado with Mike at Stanceworks and a few other buddies, hours of going over maps and routes and finally it was time to get on the road! I was meeting Mike in his LS swapped FJ60 at a gas station in Victorville where we planned on heading up to the water falls in Utah that I stay at a lot. I get a text from Mike saying he's gonna be a little late and his truck is running hot then a few minutes later I get another saying it overheated and is pouring coolant all over the place from the water pump! So I wait for him to get a tow to where I'm at and we find a water pump at an autozone down the street (yay for having a chevy motor!) and we get it swapped over in rather good time and hit the road towards Utah. After a few little hiccups we are cruising towards Vegas when he comes over the radio and says it's getting warm again, at this point it's almost 11pm and there is no way we're making it to the falls that night so we pull into Afton Canyon to re-evaluate the situation and camp for a night. After getting to camp his truck was running hot, we had hooked up my Scangauge II up to his truck so he could monitor temps exactly and ultimately he had to call it despite not wanting to. It was a hard thing for him to do as we all had been scrambling to get ready and were really looking forward to the trip we had planned, anyway at that point I decided I wasn't gonna be able to make the trip as it was just too far and running a day behind kind of made it even worse.

So this is where I decided to hit up my friend Jon and see what he was up to cause he had mentioned he was going up North with some friends so the next day I hopped onto the 395 and headed north! I stopped in Rhandsburg, CA cause I've always wanted to go and it was right on the way, I highly recommend it if you're into mining history.

From there I headed north and went to one of my favorite swimming holes which is where I told Jon to meet me, he was a few hours behind me so I spent the day cooling off swimming and taking photos as I had brought along a water housing for my 5DMK3.

Jon showed up early in the evening and we set up, made dinner and watched a storm roll through on the mountain range to the west of us which made for quite the sunset!

The next day we headed north of Tahoe to meet up with [USER=149471]@jAndyMendo[/USER] and crew as they were going to be heading even further north on a 10 day excursion and I unfortunately got called back to work and was not able to attend the full trip.

And so I had to head back south on the 395 towards Mammoth where I was gonna meet my GF and stay at the Mammoth house for a night and then the next day she went home and I headed back out on trail. In an effort to test out where if anywhere I was still rubbing before getting to the difficult section of the trail I found a good rock to mall crawl on and get out and look underneath the truck and luckily I'm clearing pretty much every where front and rear!

Now I didn't take many photos on the trail because I was experimenting filming (see video at the top of post) while also trying to drive so I would run up the trail and set up cameras and run back down but after a while I got tired of doing that (I was at over 10,000ft of elevation so it was a little difficult) and decided to just run the trail and not worry about photos or video. Luckily the trail was free of any snow which last time I tried to run it a couple of summers ago it was blocked even in June!

A storm came through just as I got down to the lower trail.

I then headed south to do some high desert camping, key to desert camping in the summer is arrive at camp late and leave early, I don't really ever bother cooking breakfast in the morning so I usually just get up, pack up the camper and hit the trail. Passed through Alabama Hills to take some photos of the sunset which was epic!

The next morning I was up early to beat the heat and hit the trail out of Alabama Hills to do some exploring elsewhere. Stopped at one of my favorite swimming/soaking spots out in the desert, that snow melt water is ice cold but refreshing during the summer heat!

I went down this really overgrown trail that hadn't had a truck as big as mine down it in years which resulted in a broken support rod on my flippac but luckily I was able to find it and already have the parts to fix it.

And that's about that, as bummed as I was to have not gotten to Colorado I'm glad I was still able to get out and have some fun, see friends and see some both old and new places!