Eric & Allison’s Vantastic Voyage

Some superlatives are easy to identify, some are downright impossible to even narrow to a “short list.” This time of year, all magazines and morning shows seem to feel the need to identify a “best of” list, so here’s ours. If you’re reading this and want us to name a favorite in a category we forgot, give us a shout out!

Best Hike: Sulfur Ridge, Jasper, Alberta

Best Mountain Bike Trail: Fisher Creek, north of Ketchum, ID

Worst Mountain Bike Trail: Mt Molly Porter, Capitol State Forest, Washington

State with worst roads: New Mexico

State with best roads: Nevada

Worst drivers: British Columbia

Weirdest Biodiesel station: Canby, OR

Best Biodiesel station: Sequential BioFuels, Eugene, OR

Most boring drive: Craig, CO to Baggs, WY

Best Campsite in a campground: Juniper Campsite on Sand Flat Road, Moab

Best Campsite not in a campground: Sam’s spot on the Big Lost River, near Ketchum, ID

Worst Campsite in a campground: Johnston Canyon, Banff, Alberta

Best fishing: River O

Worst fishing: Banff

Best Chicken Enchiladas: Charrito’s, Hoboken, NJ

Most interesting drive: Icefields Parkway, Jasper/Banff, AB

Most interesting town: Boring, OR

Weirdest town name: Gobernador, NM

Best mountain town: Ouray, CO

Best campfire wood: Juniper

Best local salsa: Desperado’s, Ketchum, ID

Weirdest National Park: Bryce National Park, UT

Most Vanagons per capita: Sun Valley, ID

Most Sportsmobiles per capita: Hood River, OR

Well we’ve done it.  I am writing this last and final post of the E&A’s Vantastic Voyage from seat 8B on Continental flight #685 on our way to our new home.  Ten feet below my feet in the cargo hold sleeps our esteemed canine traveling companion Parker.  Thirty two thousand feet below her paws, drifting away at 600 miles per hour, lays the great American West that we have spent the past five months discovering one mile at a time

 When we began the trip back in July, we both felt an encumbering sense of guilt for the selfishness and hedonism our trip represented.  By the time we reached the Yukon Territory, our guilt was largely replaced with wonderment at the vastness and beauty of the continent, but we never completely shook the feeling that perhaps we should be doing something more productive with our lives. 

 
As with a camera lens, often the only way to gain clarity and focus is to back away from the subject just a little bit.  So it is only now that we have spent a few weeks with family, enjoying the creature comforts of a home that doesn’t have a steel-belted radial foundation have I finally shaken any guilt about quitting jobs and leaving our friends, family and dog behind to drift like hippies in the wind. 

 
When we were married, we promised each other a bunch of things–spontaneity, adventure, living in the present, friendship with each other, and the importance of family.  Though we have known each other for nearly yen years, we didn’t know the depth with which we are capable of these things until our van adventure. In fact, our trip epitomized everything that we felt important enough promise each other just before we slipped metal bands each other’s fingers.
 

Spontaneity IS waking up in the middle of a desert in the middle of nowhere and driving to another desert also located in the middle of nowhere because somebody said it was kinda neat.  Adventure?  Nothing says adventure like camping at a leech, loon, beaver, mosquito and biting-fly invested lake and nearly getting eaten by a bear while mountain biking now does it?  Nothing tests a friendship like living together in 40 square feet for five months.  And, we have been fortunate for the chance to spend more time with both of our sets of parents in the last few months than we have in many years through frequent visits to our Oregon base camp and a couple lengthy trips to eastward including the one-way itinerary we are on right now.

So while we may have sold the van, trading up for a larger house in New Jersey like a hermit crab who has left his shell for one that offers a bit more leg room, it doesn’t mean that the show is over.  The show, the E&A Roadshow that is, must go on.  To quote Belle & Sebastian (sort of), our wandering days may be over, but it doesn’t mean that we’re getting boring.  We will keep on writing as long as we keep life interesting and we vowed to each other that we always will.  

EBO

Even though we’ve been without Shrek for two weeks, we’ve still tried to make the last of our vagabond days.

After signing the adoption papers and sending Shrek on his way (not without a few tears,) we didn’t waste any time to head out for our next installment of fun, this time returning to Chez Rogers in Vail, CO, for some skiing and fun. Day one we warmed up our legs enjoying champagne powder at Vail, day two we did a couple blissful laps of backcountry atop Vail Pass.

On my “bucket list” for a few years, has been a trip to Silverton Mountain. Being so close, and with time to spare and snow on the ground, we made a last minute run to Silverton, to ski for a day. I’m not sure I can accurately describe Silverton without sounding like a total gaper, but Silverton really is the grungy, hard-core soul of skiing. One lift and lots of hiking services tons of ridiculous terrain, where in December they only allow maximum 550 folks on the mountain (January through March they only allow 80 skiers per day). The terrain is steep; steeper than anything you’ve seen at any other ski resort, and the powder is abundant. After you’re finished with your run, you and your fellow skiers will be picked up by a 1970s UPS delivery truck, and delivered back to the base area. At the base area, you can choose to take another run, or relax in the main lodge, which is really a tent with couches and several beers on tap, but no running water. Needless to say, we had a great day of skiing.

The rest of our time in Colorado was spent relaxing, skiing, sledding and catching up with old friends.

The past 14 days have been busy ones for us… we bought a house (to close on 1/11) and sold the van. The house is in Glen Ridge, NJ, a cute colonial on a quiet street, way more house than we could ever imagine affording in California. As of this afternoon, Shrek is embarking on new adventures with an artist in South Lake Tahoe who plans to journey with Shrek to paint desert landscapes and mountainscapes.

The fact that these two events happened in the same week make us feel a little like hermit crabs, trading one (mobile and green) home for another (stationary and shuttered) house.

We leave tomorrow for Vail, CO, where we will ski for a week and wrap up our journey on the road.

After leaving Sedona, we turned the van to Las Vegas, where Eric had a date to meet up with the folks from his future employer for phase 1 of his training: Drinking from a firehose. Eric met many suppliers and customers, and picked up nuggets of wisdom like the difference between Calcium Carbonate and Magnesium Oxide. While Eric was being a booth babe, I did yoga, wandered Vegas, and ate. By the time Thursday night rolled around, we were all excited to hit the open road, headed for the red rocks of Zion.

Day 1 in Zion, we were lucky to have low water flows in the Virgin river, so we took my parents to do the legendary Narrows hike, which Eric and I had done before but were happy to do again. The scenery was just as other-worldly as we remembered it, and a good time was had by all.

Saturday was spent visiting the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, which some of us had seen from a plane, and some of us had never seen. Sunday we enjoyed hiking the Northgate Peaks trail, which offered great views of a more remote part of Zion National Park. After mom and dad hit the road, Eric and I hopped on our bikes to ride the JEM trail, near Virgin, Utah. After the last few rides where I emerged bruised, scraped, and with cactus thorns in my rear, the JEM trail was just what I needed! Mild fireroad climb, fast and rolling singletrack down. If you’re around Zion and looking to ride, it’s definitely a fun ride, if not the most technically challenging. The trail could also be ridden as an out and back along the singletrack.

The next morning, we made a beeline to Bryce, to see these hoodoos for ourselves. The dusting of snow and heavy fog made our first views of the hoodoos spellbinding. Once the fog lifted, we hit the Navajo Trail, which offered views of the hoodoos from within. As cool as the photos are, we are still kind of disappointed, as they don’t really do justice to the Bryce landscape.

Even though we are still having fun on our voyage, van living has begun to wear on us. Days are now pretty short, and the nights are cold (in the 20s) everywhere we go. So it’s with a bit of sadness that we turned Shrek back to the closest thing we have to a home: 1200 miles in 28 hours back to Eric’s parent’s house in Lake Oswego. The van journey is being put on hold for a few weeks, while we celebrate Thanksgiving with family, and work on settling in to our new lives in New Jersey. We’ll be back on the road in early December, to a ski destination still To-Be-Determined. In the meantime, we’ll have a few updates to the blog, like a “best of the voyage” list, and possibly some other fun polls.

Leaving Taos, we headed for sunny Sedona, where we hoped to get a few more days on our bikes. First ride out, we weren’t more than 15 minutes into the ride when I spaced and fell into a cactus, butt-first, which pretty much ended the ride right there. Eric lovingly pulled me out of the cactus and spent the most of the rest of the day picking thorns out of my rear. What a guy!

After getting the thorn infestation down to a manageable level, we pointed the van up the canyon on a 4wd road, hoping to find a remote campsite and escape the ubiquitous tourists of Sedona. Four miles up the canyon, we started hearing popping noises coming from Shreks front end, which Eric quickly identified as coming from the front right shock, which had become dismounted. I think it’s all those hours of CarTalk that make him so smaaaaaht (said with a Baaaston accent). I’m really truly sorry I didn’t get a picture of this, but Eric spent the next hour literally IN the wheel well, trying to get the shock re-mounted. Probably about 20 Pink Jeep tours filled with gaping tourists would pass us, some stopping to see if we needed help, others just wondering what my husband was doing in the wheelwell.

Eric’s intimate time with Shrek was well-spent, as he got the shock re-mounted enough to get us down the hill, but we knew we couldn’t be in the boonies overnight and we needed to deal with the issue in the morning.

Between thorns in my butt and Eric’s hour in Shrek’s private parts, we were spent. Not to mention the sleepless night we had spent the night before in a noisy, crowded campground outside Sedona. We had officially hit our limit, and started calling hotels trying to negotiate a good rate for a room for the night. Since we haven’t spent a single night in a hotel on the whole trip, we decided to aim high and stay in a place we’d enjoy.

Earlier in the day we had been propositioned by people at not one but two different “tourist information” booths, which are essentially fronts for high pressure time share salespeople to snare unsuspecting tourists into taking no-obligation property tours with too-good-to-be-true offers. Think Glegarry Glen Ross. The guy in the first booth was Steve Buscemi spooky with a pinch of Kevin Spacey shadiness. Later in the day we were offered two nights in a condo at the relatively new Hayatt Vacation Club in Sedona for almost no money in exchange for our audience at a “low pressure” information session. After many a “I can’t believe we are falling for this scam” we folded. In the end, Hyatt got what they wanted from us and we got a plush place to stay for two nights. The next morning Desert Auto & 4×4 put on a new upper shock mount busing for less than 40 bucks and Shrek was his old self again.  And no, we didn’t buy a timeshare in Sedona.  

Picking up where Eric left off… we arrived into Taos really knowing very little about the town, but were pleasantly surprised receive a full run-down of our recreational options from the owner of the local outdoor store, who was not content to just sell us a map but he seemed to want to ensure we enjoyed his beloved town. We didn’t have enough time to do all the things he suggested, but the campsite he suggested (although cold) was a gem we probably wouldn’t have otherwise found.

Our first full day in Taos, we headed to Taos Pueblo, which is the historic town situated inside of the Taos Indian Reservation. We grimaced through the $10 fee to walk around town and even agreed to pay the $5 camera permit, knowing that the official visitor’s fees fund schools and other good things for the Indian reservation. We did the official walk, and were truly impressed by the adobe structures in the town, one of which is rumored to be the longest continuously-occupied-dwelling in the US (since the 1400s).

Besides the old Taos Pueblo dwellings, we had a much more cursory tour of the Earthship development Northwest of Taos on NM 64. Driving by at 65mph, we spotted the zany sci-fi looking structures and couldn’t NOT stop. We didn’t sit through the full tour, but the Earthship idea is a lot less zany than the architecture leads you to believe. These houses are all made fully from recycled materials and are entirely off-the-grid. While their choices in building materials (used tires, aluminum cans, glass bottles, and mud) are a bit out-there for the tastes of the average American, I’m sure that in a few years, some of the principles Earthships (grey-water recycling, solar panels) will be integrated into more new homes in the US. I don’t think our photos really do justice to how wacky the homes look, if you have a few minutes, check out the Earthship website.

Native American Pueblos, off-the-grid Earthships – we felt like we saw it all in Taos, but we never did figure out where all the McMansions are in that town. Every resort town that we’ve been to/through has had unapologetic, tacky and sometimes gargantuan vacation homes for wealthy city people. We never did find those houses in Taos… I couldn’t tell if it’s because they don’t exist, or they are just very well hidden. Either way, we happened to wander into the perfect store to furnish your Taos McPueblo, wherever you hid it. In stock they had practically anything you could imagine (even electrical-outlet covers) decorated in a tasteless southwestern motif.

You might now be wondering, did you do anything athletic in Taos? We did climb (at Questa boulders), but didn’t do much else during our short stay. It’s been cold and I’m still nursing a scrape to my shin which has slowed me down for the past few days.

-ABC

Hi Gang,

We decided to continue our half hearted search for the West’s best mountain town pizza in Telluride. Also, since I had never been to Telluride and it is rumored to be a unique mountain town we drove the van South for a couple hours from the Black Canyon of the Gunnison. Telluride is a great mountain town, probably due in large part to it being so difficult to reach (unless of course you hours to burn on the corporate GulfStream), but perhaps even morose because of the natural urban grown boundaries imposed by the mountains encircling the city. It’s a compact walk-able ski town with modestly sized, well-kept Victorian houses on tiny lots and has zero star appeal save for perhaps a few reclusive b-listers and of course TomKat.

From Telluride, we motored south looking for a campground for the night and found that Colorado had already snapped the gates shut on most of its National Forest campgrounds. After some difficulty, we finally found a place to plant Shrek for the night and motored out early in the morning bound for the San Juan River in New Mexico.

It has been a month since we last strung up the fly rods and I was itching to fish so we camped on the banks of the San Juan River in a surprisingly nice New Mexico state park. A stop at Abe’s Fly Shop/Gas Station/RV Park/Convenience Store/Firewood Dealer provided us with the tippet fodder in the form of the world’s smallest flies. Size #26 and #28 RS2 patterns as well as Size #26 parachute adams provided the action on this desert tailwater—big Browns downstream and Akula Class submarine-sized rainbows near the dam.

But anyway, enough chit chat. What I really want to talk about today is New Mexico roads. Worst. Roads. Ever. Nearly-impossible-to-keep-the-vehicle-on-the road type roads. Worse-than-a-many-unpaved-roads-we-have-driven type roads. We both had sore backs from the beating we took on the way to Taos the next day. Stranger yet, nearly every car driving around Northern New Mexico not so much a car but an unmarked white pickup truck flying a little orange flag attached to a long white stick…yeah, the kind of flag you used to have on your training wheel bicycle so you didn’t get run over by cars when you were a tot. Seriously strange stuff. My guess is that nearly everybody who lives in NM works on an oil or natual gas field which probably explains the trucks and the flags but it certainly is no excuse for the crappy roads. Anyway, we jostled our way into Taos by mid afternoon looking for some New Mexican cuisine and a place to plant the rig.

-EO

Hi gang,

 We rolled into Fruita mid-afternoon on Friday and had plans to meet the brothers Rogers at a campsite in the Colorado National Monument, which sits upon a massive sandstone cliff that looms ominously above the town of Fruita.  The road up the park to our campsite, which climbs almost 1500 feet in about three miles, was unlike anything we have seen yet—no doubt designed and built by European or at least non-American civil engineers.  It wasn’t so much the elevation gain that made the road so un-american, but the fact that there wasn’t a single guardrail to prevent cars or cyclists from plunging hundreds of feet straight down to the tarmac below.  Nonetheless, our campsite perched on the edge of the cliff provided excellent views of Fruita and the Colorado River below. 

 Anotoher odd thing about the roads in the Fruita area is their naming.  Most of the country roads around Fruita are named after very peculiar fractional numbers. For instance: “3/10 Rd.” and “7/8 Rd.”  Its as though very the same European engineers who built the roads up the canyon wanted to confirm their mathematical superiority by utterly confusing all future generations of Fruitans and visiting mountain bikers.  In their hasty retreat back to the continent, they didn’t even bother to reduce many of the fractional names (“8/32 Rd.” for example).

 Matt picked a few trails in the “18 Road” area, which thankfully we were able to find because it was one of the few integer roads in the area. Also, thankfully it had some of the finest singletrack we have ridden to date.  18 Rd. is in the Book Cliffs area and unlike most of our recent riding was not primarily on sandstone.  I can’t really tell you why it is called the Bookcliffs area but perhaps somebody with a better grasp on Geology (Eliza??  Avery??) who has been here could tell us.  Anyway, the trails we rode (Prime Cut/Chutes & Ladders/Kessel’s/Zippety Do Dah) ranged from smooth and fast singletrack to rocky technical climbs and descents to extremely fast and exposed drops down narrow dirt mounds. 

 The following day we rode in an area with a completely non-numeric name.  We rode Mary’s loop (which includes part of the  Kokopelli trail)and Horsetheif Bench, both of which have stunning views of the Colorado river canyon.  The four of us were bruised and battered after two days of much riding and much crashing. Matt and I finished up the weekend on a trail called Moore Fun which is by far the gnarliest piece of singletrack I have ridden.  Moore Fun was much fun. 

 We said goodbye to Matt and Mike on Sunday evening who Saabaru-ed back up to Vail while we made tracks for the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, Telluride and points south!

On Monday we returned from Minnesota, where we said goodbye to Grandma Connolly and caught up with cousins, aunts, uncles, second cousins, and all sorts of Minnesota friends.  Before we departed from Salt Lake City on Friday, we had dropped off Shrek to get his brakes checked out.  Returning on Monday, the brakes were still pulling, so we didn’t get the whole thing settled until about 6pm, when we hit the road headed as far as we could get before setting up camp for the night.  Turns out we made to Moab around 12:30, where we set up camp close to our campsites from the previous week.

 In the morning in Moab, we had been planning to head to Telluride, but after a quick weather check and some phone calls, we discovered that Telluride is already under snow and the locals are skiing.  Since our original plans were derailed, we needed to make new ones, and we had some other internet-related stuff to take care of, so we set up camp in an internet café and got down to work.  Later in the afternoon, Eric had the urge to get on some rock, so we headed to a local bouldering site called Big Bend.  As expected, the rock was all sandstone in a nice spot next to the Colorado River.

You may have noticed that our travels on a small scale don’t follow any master plan, day to day.  We roughly know where we’ll be at any given time, but we don’t know specifically our exact location for any point in the future.  This has actually worked out quite well for the past month, as we seem to get run around by the weather a lot.  Avoiding snowy areas (we don’t have our skis yet) and trying to keep warm drive our decisions day to day. 

So being at Big Bend we were pretty close to the Manti-Lasal National Forest, where there was a ride we thought might be good to do in the morning (Fisher Mesa).  A nice descent on singletrack on top of a mesa, then what we expected would be straightforward climb on a 4×4 road.  After we made it through a ¼ mile of snow, the rugged singletrack descent had awesome views.  The climb back to the car was 5 miles of loose fist-sized rocks (AKA Death Cookies) which was less than fun and left me with bruised legs and butt cheeks after several falls. 

In need of a new plan, inspiration came from Matt Q, who recommended we go to Capitol Reef National Park, which for us fell into the category of “never heard of it, probably won’t have another chance to go.”

Our first morning in the park, at the visitor center, we were bombarded with questions from two guys who were considering buying a Sportsmobile, and who recommended us to do a 60 mile 4×4 drive called Cathedral Valley, which would take us through the north end of the park.  Capitol Reef National Park is roughly hourglass-shaped, and we were at the waist of the hourglass.  After a trail run along Grand Wash, we were both underwhelmed by the parts of the park we had seen so far – it seemed like a poor man’s Zion, just less red, less narrow, less tall.  So we decided to get off the beaten path and drive up to Cathedral Valley.

The drive began with Shrek’s first known river ford, and took us through some bizarre geological formations: Bentonite Hills, vertical walls (dikes) of black lava interspersed with towering red sandstone cliffs, a Gypsum sinkhole.  We only saw two other cars during the 24 hours we were on the drive, and the route seemed very minimally traveled.  Our geology friends would have enjoyed the drive.   We didn’t get to the south end of the park, but our final verdict on Capitol Reef: very cool, check it out if you’re in the area.

Next, we’re headed to Fruita, CO, where we are going to meet up with Matt Rogers and his brother to do some mountain biking.  We’ve figured out our plans for late November and December, so check out our “upcoming destinations” page for the details!