My Trails

I camped for a few days in the Stanislaus National Forest about twenty miles north of Yosemite. It is a nice area of tall pines and secluded campsites with the shallow, cooling waters of the Middle Fork of the Tuolumne River only a few yards away. I never found any gold there but it was nice to sit in the stream on hot afternoons.

On Monday, I decided to start south back to Phoenix. I wanted to explore the Gold Rush area north of Sacramento but that is going to have to wait for another time. Daryl and I have a lot of planning, packing, mailings, and logistics with the Troverts to iron out, and I also need to register my van, check the brakes, and get the oil changed. With all of this pressing on my mind, I packed up and drove the Tioga Pass through the High Sierra to a campsite I found in the Inyo National Forest.

The next morning I stopped at Mammoth Mountain on the Eastern Sierra Range to investigate the area where we may leave a vehicle during our JMT hike. The Devils Postpile is only a few miles from Mammoth Mt. and I was most interested in checking out this phenomenon of nature. Now, I’m not sure if this was the beginning of my streak of bad luck, but the ranger at the entrance booth told me the park was closed for road repair and I would have to hike 5 miles to see it. I told her I was not up for that this morning, pulled a U-turn, and drove about ten miles when the van suddenly died.

I coasted to the side of the road and noticed from my gages that I had lost all electrical power. This is almost always the fault of a bad alternator. Normally, the loss of an alternator and all battery charge will leave a motorist stranded and waiting for a tow, but I have a separate battery that powers my house and is charged by solar. All I had to do is hook the jumper I provisioned for just such a catastrophe and I had power to run the van.

I called Richard to ask him if he could see any problems running the van with solar charging the battery instead of the alternator. He seemed to think it would work OK as long as I had enough power from the solar panel. We both had to laugh that I now had a solar power vehicle. So I will try to make it to Phoenix and get it fixed there. First tire trouble, now the alternator, don’t these things always happen in threes? What’s next?

I’m at a motel in Barstow, CA for the night; it is too hot to camp here. I wanted to stop early before the sun got too low and failed to give me enough charge. It was getting kind of overcast, too, and every time the sun went behind a cloud I held my breath until it came out again. I kept thinking how my van is the complete opposite of a vampire – if I get out of the sun it dies.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 11th, 2013 at 8:25 pm and is filed under Adventure. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.