poplar road

Our annual trip to Marrowstone Island to celebrate Canada Day and July 4th with the Lunds and friends was absolutely gorgeous this year. The weather was perfect, there was more than enough fresh crab in the pots for the July 4th seafood boil, and we were joined by several friends we’d met there over the years but hadn’t seen in a while. On the usual outing to Port Townsend, Richard and I found some bright shiny things in the local cookware shop, I found a great gardening book at the used bookstore, and I picked up another expansion for my favourite board game, Carcassonne. The rest of the time, like every other year, was devoted to the leisurely enjoyment of food, sunlight, sea air, games, campfires, fireworks, and great friends. Saranda, Alston, Brooke and I went on a long beach walk, and they found all sorts of things in the intertidal sand for me to photograph. I don’t think I took the camera out once after that first morning – as usual, too busy relaxing to take pictures! But I’m rather pleased with these, partly because it was reassuring to find so much sea life thriving.

Ooh, I'm playing catch-up, sorry for these being so late: the highlights of our afternoon wheeling the extreme trail at Rockin' the Crib 2009 on Missezula Lake back in June. Richard got one last great trail run out of Mechano and now the Mog is getting all the attention. But that's next weekend's project, I'm getting ahead of myself.

This past weekend Richard and I joined our friends and about 80 other people for a rock-crawling event at Missezula Lake, off of Highway 5A between Merritt and Princeton. We arrived Friday evening and set up camp, and our day of wheeling started early Saturday. Really early for me – I got up for a call of nature and grabbed the camera when I heard a loon out on the lake.

This serene, wild landscape epitomizes what I love about rock-crawling: we get away to some of the most beautiful wilderness locations in North America, from desert canyons to wooded hills to glacier-carved mountain gullies like the ones at Missezula. Scrambling up and down the trails, camera in hand, I get to see stunning plants, wildlife and rock formations, and most importantly, my man with a huge happy grin on his face...

At this event, called Rockin’ the Crib, a short drive down forestry roads from the lakeside campground brought us to many different trails, one of them – newly christened Manana – with enough challenges to make even Richard drool. Below are the Olsons in their rigs, and Richard being spotted by Chris on the Manana trail later in the afternoon, after a massive but short thundershower drove us back to camp for lunch and a siesta. After the late run Richard served up pulled pork and coleslaw for dinner and we got to know our hosts, Rich and Kelly from crawlinbc.com, and caught up with old friends. It was a great day.

This is just a preview, with a small selection from my 90 best of the day to follow soon. Dagny has pics of our camping setup (we fed the entire group breakfast using our mobile outdoor kitchen equipment on Sunday morning, it went great), and Rick G has alternate camera angles with his pro camera that I’m dying to see and hope he’ll let me post here. So I really do need to pick just the top ten or so. Sigh. It’s so hard to choose! I didn’t do any driving this time – much as I wanted to run Manana with Richard spotting, Mechano currently has no driver’s side door, which is less security than I’m comfortable with – so I went crazy with the camera instead, and Richard and Ben’s runs gave me lots to work with. Ben and Chris, if you want any of the shots in the upcoming posts, let me know and I can send you the full size files. Some great shots if I do say so myself. Stay tuned!

Whenever Richard and I travel, two small bottles come with us: ground cumin and tequila. The cumin is for my favourite snack, guacamole, which I make using ripe avocadoes mashed with cumin, salt, garlic powder, and lemon or lime juice (I prefer lemon). Neither of us drink tequila, but a bottle of the cheapest kind we can get has to be in the camper whenever we go on a road trip because it's the secret ingredient in Richard's famous salsa. The rest of the ingredients come from the local produce market wherever we're going. Oddly, neither of us are huge fans of salsa, but when we're on vacation Richard makes this for our friends. (And we load up on the guacamole.) In Moab, Richard made a gallon of salsa one night and the group ate half of it on the spot. Lisa took the last of it home, and has requested the recipe, so here you are...

Road Trip Salsa

2-3 bunches of fresh cilantro

6 medium tomatoes

1 small yellow or sweet onion

6 limes

2-3 anaheim peppers (mild)

2-4 jalapeno peppers (medium)

2-4 serrano peppers (hot)

6 cloves of garlic, crushed and minced

less than 1 oz. of tequila

1 tsp. of sea salt

Chop and mix together the cilantro, tomatoes, and onion. Roll the limes beneath the palm of your hand to get the juice flowing, then squeeze over the mixture. NOTE: Wearing gloves, remove and discard the peppers' seeds and membranes. How many you use of each depends on how hot you like your salsa. (Serranos are twice as hot as jalapenos.) You MUST wear gloves or you'll burn your skin! Finely chop the peppers and add to the salsa along with the garlic, tequila, and salt. Stir to combine and let it sit for at least an hour, the longer, the better, so the flavours blend and intensify. Serve with corn tortilla chips, sour cream and guacamole, or on top of quesadillas.

Aside from Lisa, the biggest fan of Richard's salsa I ever saw was a wonderful gentleman by the name of Crazy Joe. He introduced himself to me in Johnson Valley last May, after he watched me drive Mechano up a trail called Clawhammer. He was impressed, and "not because you're a girl", he said. Richard invited him to drop by our campsite that evening, and he arrived just as we were finishing dinner. You know how much Richard and I enjoy feeding people, so as you might expect, we cooked him up a steak and in lieu of vegetables, offered him salsa on the side. What was left of it was watery, in the bottom of a large bowl. He dipped in a chip to taste it and smiled, the same smile with which he'd explained why they call him Crazy Joe. "I love salsa", he said, and lifted the bowl in both hands. He drank it. He downed a whole cupful of it, licking the last bits of cilantro off his dripping whiskers. He regaled us with a few more stories of past and current exploits as a military weapons expert and movie effects consultant, but the image that sticks with me is the gleeful satisfaction on his face as he drained that bowl of salsa the way other people toss back a beer. I remember him every time we make it.

Summer is here: at 30+ degrees all week, it's truly salsa weather. We're having a bit of rain just in time for our long weekend visit with Sharon, Pat, Olivia, and baby Andrew, but the sun came out long enough today to enjoy salsa with lunch (and ice cream for dessert!). Tomorrow I'm looking forward to some guacamole and llamavision in the sunny back yard in addition to salsa. Enjoy!

This year's four-wheeling vacation had its ups and downs (pun intended), but without the Interstate catastrophes that added a surreal edge to our road trips in the past. Last year was a nightmare of expense, delays, and exhaustion that I dreaded might happen again. Instead, we had only minor delays on the road – a highway closure due to an exploding tanker truck on our southbound trip, and a massive prairie storm including high winds and fork lightning on the return – and most of the drama occurred on the trails. But where road trip dramas are usually best forgotten, like the point four hours in when Richard threatened to turn around and take me to my parents for the week if I couldn't stop coughing up a lung, wheelers look forward to those moments on the trail enthusiastically referred to as "carnage". On a scale of one to five, I'd say this Moab trip rates a carnage level 3.

This image Richard captured on day one is on a trail unimaginatively named "Hell's Revenge". Hell it might be on a sunny afternoon in August if you're caught on the mesa without enough water, but as 4x4 obstacles go, Richard didn't consider this trail all that tough for our capable group of trucks. It was a good trail to start the Moab "virgins" (Matt, Gary and Greg) on, with all the spectacular rock formations Moab is famous for but a lower likelihood that the Toyotas and Mog would experience damage this early on in the week. (No sense starting on the hardest trails and risking losing a day to repairs before they'd covered any ground.) I was sleeping off the worst of my bronchial infection back at camp, unhappy to miss a day but knowing the "best" trails were still to come and I needed to rest up.

My spot in Mechano was taken by Cody, Gary and Lisa's 12-year-old son. Given Richard's experience on Moab trails and Mechano's stability, I don't think Gary or Lisa had a second's qualm about letting Cody ride with Richard. He was strapped into the 5-point harness and shown how to cross his arms over his chest in case of a rollover, and off they went. When they reached the obstacle known as Hell's Gate, they crawled down the V-shaped slickrock gully and watched Matt descend after them in his blue Toyota (shown here). Richard tightened Cody's harness and reminded him about crossing his arms, and then they headed upward for the return trip, Matt's Toy close behind them. It's a basic obstacle, after all. Damn, I wish I'd been there!

Here's what everyone else saw: Half way up to the Gate, Richard took Mechano up a line along the steep sides of the gully which caused one of the marshmallowy 44" tires to lift off the ground a little. And then a little more. And suddenly that front driver's side tire was doing a can-can in the air 25 feet above the slickrock and Cody crossed his arms over his chest under his floppy white hat. Richard leaned over to hold Cody in the seat as Mechano flipped backward over the opposite corner and then pirouetted on its lid to land flag side down just inches in front of Matt's Toyota. Close one.

But remarkably, the damage to Mechano was minor, at least until after Richard and Cody climbed out. It lay there, wheels in the air like a ladybug struggling on its back, and Matt attached a winch cable. Sadly, try as they might, they couldn't get Mechano to flip upright. Hell's Gate is almost 100 feet long and Mechano was dragged upside-down almost to the bottom before they finally got it on its wheels again. Greg's video, which I got to see at camp the next night, shows Richard doing the Charlie Brown "good grief!" with his hand to his head as the truck scrapes and scrunches down the hill. My poor man.

Meanwhile, young Cody was gleefully requesting a copy of the video for show and tell when he gets back to school. And when Mechano was upright again, Gary and Lisa let him get back in the truck. If it had been me… well, let's just say I was sorry to miss seeing it, but thank god I wasn't the one in the passenger seat! Otherwise I never would have driven Golden Spike on Thursday. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Here are two more shots from Hell's Revenge, day one.

Kermit D Mog, here.

Kira, Stubby Toy, Big Bird, and the Mog.

The next few hours on Hell's Revenge were spent playing in Mickey's Hot Tub. (The ladies were disappointed to find out that the Hot Tubs are deep, dusty pits in the slickrock that trucks usually have to winch out of. No water involved.) Gary was the first casualty with a blown burfield, which he later realized must have happened several days earlier when he and Rick drove the Hammers in Johnson Valley as a prelude to Moab. Then Matt's differential bound up and he feared another blown burf, but after taking things apart everything seemed fine. Rick also discovered some Hammers damage, sheared steering arm bolts. Everyone drove out but Big Bird needed work the next morning, which kept us in camp until noon. (Note: in Part II, I'll share some of the others' photos, which should include the Hot Tubs and hopefully Richard's rollover.)

Day two, Wednesday, began with lunch at Area BFE, a group of trails including Upper Helldorado, owned by a group of wheelers bent on preserving existing trails when those areas come up for sale. We made a donation to the fund and followed the signs to the boulder-lined sluice called Helldorado. Matt was first in line, at about 2pm. He candy-caned his rear drive shaft almost immediately, and left us to get back to town and find a good welder before closing time.

Matt dents his drive shaft.

Gary's Toyota makes it look easy.

Richard decides to try a different line.

Squeeeeeeeeezed through that one.

Danaeya sits still just for a second with Mom...

… to watch Daddy in Big Bird.

With Matt already out of the game, the guys consult (with some loud input from us girls) and decide not to risk the remaining two Toyotas on the rougher upper half of the trail when it's almost dinnertime. Richard gets ready to turn around and drive back down, but takes a flippant remark from Gary as an opportunity to get behind the video camera and let Gary do the driving, with Rick spotting. Rick, with a little help from Richard, gets Gary to pose Mechano on top of a boulder for photo ops, and then down the other side. He preferred the response of his Toy's steering, but the ride on the squishy tires brought a smile to his face.

At this point, Lisa and I have been taking photos a while and from behind the lens the lower half of Helldorado looks pretty flat in comparison. So Lisa agrees to Richard's suggestion she drive Mechano the rest of the way as Gary and Rick turn their Toyotas around in the bypass. To Richard's surprise I jumped in with Lisa, mostly because I get fed up navigating all those loose rocks on foot. Richard videotaped so again I have no photos, but I bet Gary has a few. When we got to that last large boulder, the one where Richard caught some air in the photo above, he made Lisa brake for a (long) minute, both of us hanging on and wondering how we'd forgotten the steep bit. Rick came around in Big Bird to attach a tow strap, just in case, but it remained slack as Lisa released the brake and we dropped to the ground. No problem. Little did I know, this was a light warm-up for me driving Golden Crack the next day. At least on Helldorado I could see the ground….

Day Three: Poison Spider Mesa and Golden Spike

These are some of the most popular trails in Moab for both rock-crawlers and mountain bikers. The views are spectacular, and at the top of the Golden Spike trail we could look back toward the river gorge and trace our path all the way across mesas and gulleys for the 9 hours we'd spent on the trail. I drove Mechano for most of the daylight hours, through obstacles like Wedgie, a rift through the rock that gave everyone a chance to twist their axles to the limit, and Launching Pad, whose steep slope terrified me until my sheer horror at descending the near-vertical Rim of the World drove all other fears from my head. Not long after that, Greg bent the tie-rod on his Unimog for the first time, and we halted for a while on the hillside where I took this image. The sun was disappearing behind the high rock faces surrounding us as we finally reached the first major obstacle on Golden Spike, called Golden Crack. (Then the sun set and it was another 4 hours before we made it back to camp, minus Greg and the Unimog.) Here are a few shots from Poison Spider, mostly on Wedgie.

The three obstacles I was looking forward to, remembering the last two trips, were Golden Crack, Double Whammy, and Golden Staircase. Had we taken the Rusty Nail trail to Golden Spike, barring any setbacks we would have come out right at Golden Crack, with time for Richard to play on Excalibur as well. But with the wide Unimog and fairly stock Jeep which Pam's friends Tammy and Rob were riding in for the day, Poison Spider Mesa was our best option to get to the head of Golden Spike. However, with a late start to our day at noon, delays when the group got split up for a while, and stops to repair both Big Bird and Kermit D Mog, it was sunset before we were all across the Crack, still a couple of hours from the end of the trail.

My drive across – no photos in the dark, alas – was exciting but over far too quickly. Rick, Gary and Matt were also across easily, and even the ill-equipped Jeep made it unscathed with some quick steering by Rob. Unfortunately, Greg's tie-rod bent again as the Mog crossed the Crack. Without an on-board welder there was no way to repair it enough to continue on in the pitch black of desert night. Not over Double Whammy and Golden Staircase, especially. It was a tough decision for Greg but he chose to stay the night in the Mog, tucked under the rock face at Golden Crack with our spare food and clothing to keep him and Kira safe until Richard and Matt could come back with a welder the next day.

The rest of us continued on the Spike, grateful that the Jamboree staff the previous weekend had re-painted the trail markings across the rock. But between the rock faces up which we all took the easiest lines, and took care to get every vehicle through without damage, there was sand. We lost the trail. Flashlights out and with Richard racking his brain to remember and recognize the route, we found new markings, for Gold Bar Rim trail. This, thankfully, led out, and was mostly dirt track rather than a lot of tough obstacles. It was a long, chilly, and dusty drive but we made it back to civilization, driving over the foot of the rock formation wheelers call the Gooney Bird in thanks for our good fortune. It was one in the morning when we reached the highway. Matt did a few exhuberant wheelies in the parking lot before we headed back to the campground, Richard and Matt to plan the rescue trip back to the Mog, and the others to prepare for the drive home.

The guys blaze through Rusty Nail in under an hour…

…in to get the part, out to weld it, and in again.

While the guys were rescuing the Mog, which required bringing the part out for welding and back again before the Mob could be moved, Greg's wife Barb and I spent the day sheltering from the wind. Rick and Gary loaded up in the morning and they were all on their way by noon, a little later than planned because the late night and the sand whipped up by the wind slowed them down. They missed visiting Arches National Park, which is one of Moab's other main attractions and has the most stunning rock formations in the area. Another Moab attraction is the shopping – one over-stuffed gift shop after another – but the wind, concern about the guys, and my cold were too much for me. Barb and I made a quick visit to town for lunch, then holed up in the campground for the rest of the day while the wind continued. The three vehicles took longer to drive out than Mechano and Stubby Toy alone, so the guys didn't get back until after dark. Understandably, packing up the next morning took longer than we'd have liked, though I didn't realize we were leaving right away, having missed Greg's decision at dinner not to wait for delivery of his replacement tie rod. True to the pattern of the previous few days, we weren't on the road until noon. Everyone was really, really tired.

Highway 6, open again after a nasty collision.

Rimrock Lake – another wheeling destination.

Our road trip home took us up Highway 6, past the site of the tanker explosion, and through Salt Lake traffic. After that we made good time, and were ready to stop for dinner as we neared Boise, when a storm hit. Strong winds, lashing rain, and stunning forked lightning. Tanking up soaked the guys to the skin, so we abandoned the BBQ at the rest area idea in favour of a nice dry restaurant. More delays. I think we spent the night in a rest area in eastern Oregon, but I don't really remember much other than it was 1am when we stopped and barely dawn when we got up. I don't know how Richard does it; I could barely keep my eyes open in daylight, and after dark I'm done.

Oregon flew by, and then north of Yakima Richard and I said goodbye to the others and turned off onto Highway 12, familiar from our wheeling trip to Wenatchee in 2004, and also home to Rimrock Lake, where another wheeling event is scheduled for this summer. Our side trip to visit Tim, Debbie and their family was short and sweet, and we were through Seattle and approaching the border in record time.

However, Moab seems an awful lot farther away now that we live four hours futher north. Crossing the border used to feel like home sweet home, but now it's just the start of another journey. We only made it as far as the rest area at the Coquihalla summit, but the beauty of a camper (old and ugly as ours is) is that tired travellers can stop, climb in and sleep in the comfort of a good duvet and feather pillows, just about anywhere. It was lightly snowing when we got up but we hardly noticed. We were home at 9:30 – and Richard was asleep at 9:35. We both still had the chest cold and he could have used another week off just to sleep, but he has Unimogs to sell, so he was back to work early the next morning.

I can't believe it's been over a week since we got back. I keep forgetting it's already halfway through May. Part II of the vacation highlights will have to wait another week or more, until we get copies of everyone else's photos and I can choose a few to post. Just a few – this has to be my longest post ever.

We're back from our road trip to Moab, Utah. Here is the view from the highest point on the Golden Spike trail, looking back at our path across the Poison Spider Mesa in the top left corner, just one spectacular scene out of the 181 photos that made the first cut yesterday. Then there's the video footage, and equally as many photos, I'm sure, from the others we travelled and wheeled with: Rick, Pam, Matt, Gary, Lisa, Greg, Barb, Mike, Cody, Tristan, and Danaeya.

It's going to take me a while to write up the trip and post the photo highlights, so I'm not promising anything until the weekend, all right? Just picking this one photo was tough! We had such an intense trip... It's hardly sunk in that we're home. And yes, we still have this cold bug. Resting has never been the primary focus of our vacations - it's all about the adventure!

Richard is out in the garage again this weekend, banging and grinding, not stopping to eat, and reeking of grease and welding dust. Mechano is getting an overhaul. It brings back memories.

In the spring of 2000, less than a year after I met Richard and was initiated into four-wheeling, we went on a cross-country trek to what may be the ultimate rock-crawler's pilgrimage: the high desert mesas of Moab, Utah. However, given that we would be driving the two to three day Vancouver to Moab road trip in our "rigs" (that's wheeler jargon for 4x4s, as opposed to a "daily driver" which could tow the rig on a trailer), we knew half our Moab adventure would be just getting there.

As it turned out, the single Saturday Richard, Chris, Ben, Greg, Elsmere and I actually wheeled with our friends on the trails was the easy part. We condensed a lost week's worth of wheeling into that Golden Crack run (Richard's red Toy is on the Crack, top left, with the Colorado River gorge in the background), not without some entertaining carnage (that's Rick's "Big Bird" at right showing off its undercarriage). The road trip, on the other hand, was doomed from the start.

Being the only woman and less than a novice next to these mechanical geniuses, I stood back and watched the casualties and chaos – days of delay in the shop and breakdowns on the interstate – with my sense of humour pretty much intact. Can't say the same for the guys. I wrote an article about our trip, "Moab Misadventures", for the Cruise Moab issue of Toyota Trails that summer, but when I would have included the nightmarish return half of that trip, the boys swore me to silence. They didn't want to remember, they just wanted to crawl into a hole and sleep it off.

And that's probably how, the following spring, Richard and I managed to set that trip behind us and do it all again. Except that by 2001, we had a tow vehicle to haul the Toyota on a trailer, and a camper so we weren't sleeping in (or under!) our truck. What I remember most about that trip was the photography expedition in Arches National Park with Maria and Chad. (I got some gorgeous photos of the stone arches and the cacti in bloom, and a serious case of sunstroke.) The weather went from scorching heat to a surprise snowfall, but the only real excitement on the trail came when Derrick and Shana tipped their Cruiser on a staircase and baby Gweneth cried bloody murder at being pulled out of the snug safety of her harness to land in the unfamiliar arms of a hairy Venezuelan.

After that, our working lives got so busy that long vacations like Moab and the Rubicon were out of the question. In the fall of 2002, Richard entered the Toyota in one last extreme rock-crawling competition, drove it into the ground, and parted it out so he could begin designing a new 4x4 built from scratch that didn't have to fill any "daily driver" duties (like having to run highway-size tires). He envisioned it as an easy-to-modify "Mechano set", and Stubby Mechano was born.

We've done a lot of wheeling in Mechano since its first competition in August 2004, most recently at the Hammers in Johnson Valley (above - thanks Steve for the pics), which rivalled the Moab 2000 road trip for nightmarish bad luck on the road, but with even better wheeling on the trails – which I try to remind myself of, rather than think about the road trip part. Because, we're about to do the pilgrimage again.

Yes, we're going back to Moab. It's been five years, and our wheeling buddies have even more responsibilities, some with work, some with kids, so it's a different group heading to Utah this time around. We wouldn't consider driving our rigs down anymore, and I know it's not just the ladies who relish the thought of ending a day on the trails at a campground that boasts shade trees, picnic tables, a swimming pool, and showers. Not to mention the town of Moab itself, which hopefully still has fantastic shopping. I tossed the rag formerly known as Richard's first Red Dirt Shirt last week, knowing he'll forgive me now that I can get him a new one (which I'll make sure stays red, not pink).

We're going down the week after the annual Jeep event, so hopefully will have the trails more to ourselves. I think there are a few Moab virgins among our caravan, so some of the awe and excitement from my first visit will be in the air. I'm hoping the desert has had a wet spring like in 2001, when the rock was stained the colour of rust and cacti bloomed in every imaginable shape and colour. Last time I had my conventional camera, the lenses ground with dust. This year we have the digital, and with luck, perhaps an internet connection in town, so I can post the photos as we go. Most importantly for me, I can spend some time behind the wheel as well as behind the camera. Mechano is a thrill to drive and I'm sure Richard will spot me through some hair-raising "easy" challenges between those extreme obstacles he's looking forward to playing on. And the road trip, well, it had better be good, because we really need a vacation.

We've just come home from an extended long weekend at our friends' beachfront property near Port Townsend in Washington. This was our third time at the Lund's annual gathering to celebrate the Fourth of July, and as usual, it was a great mix of people, great food including a fresh seafood boil with local crab and clams, and lots of rest and relaxation. Just what we needed.

Richard and I started the weekend with a Canada Day quiz on Friday night, giving out packages of Canada-coloured Smarties as prizes. That spawned a funny conversation in which I sang the Smarties song - turns out they don't have chocolate covered Smarties in the States, their "smarties" are compressed sugar things. Our American friends get a lot of amusement out of Canadian jokes at our expense, so this was our way of educating them a little on this great land of ours. (Last year our response was to play the Song of 1812, which didn't go over well at all.) And we were very happy to see our friend Lisa, an ex-patriated Canadian who could translate for us. For example, as we were sharing the latest plans for our home reno, I got blank looks while explaining the changes to our "ensuite". Master bath, I was corrected. At one point I had enough of my badminton birdie landing "OOOT", and suggested we buy young Dallas a one-way ticket to backwoods Ontario so he could see how long he lasted teasing the Canadians who actually do talk like that. Hmph.

We all got sunburns in odd spots - tops of knees, noses, one foot - and spent equal amounts of time buried in sweatshirts and fleece blankets around the fire, but it was near-perfect weather for eating, gabbing, reading, badminton, sleeping, and eating some more. There's always great food at these weekends, since each couple is assigned a meal to orchestrate and each one lasts several hours it seems. We brought our chafing dishes and Richard's gigantic stock pots again this year and they were put to good use. I'm getting hungry just thinking about it. Ideas for next year include an Iron Chef weekend - all the guests supply the food and Richard and John, another capable and avid cook, will each do a dinner extravaganza. But they had so much fun making chowder together out of the leftover seafood boil that I think they'd rather cook together the whole weekend than make a competition out of it. And how could people so sleepily satiated from morning to night judge anything anyway? And it's hard to keep Richard out of a kitchen.

Many thanks to Tim and Debbie and family for hosting another great getaway - we're looking forward to next year, and to having you up for a visit here. Cheers.

Here at last are the vacation photos – the four-wheeling part, anyway. Unfortunately the pictures documenting our road trip to and from the annual rock-crawling trail run at the "Hammers", in the Mohave Desert in southeastern CA, involve more shots of malfunctioning brake components (ouch), and a damaged autobody shop sign (tragic) than they do touristy photos of our afternoon in San Francisco. We saw far too much of a certain parking lot in Fresno that I never want to see again.

Exhausting and expensive road trip in the Dodge aside, the portion of our trip from when Richard backed Mechano off the trailer until he loaded it up again was quite a ride. Given the trials I'm having with internet connectivity these last two months, I'm not posting a tonne of pictures, but for those interested, we can share and/or swap the high-res originals when we're next in Vancouver. I think these capture the day on Wrecking Ball… but I'd love to see the ones others took of me driving Clawhammer the day before… Just don't e-mail me any unless they've been reduced to 225 K or less and sent one at a time!

So, here are a few highlights of Richard in (red) Mechano, Matt in (blue) Stubby Toy, Pam driving (yellow) Big Bird (with baby Danaeya asleep in the back), and Gary breaking in his grey Toy early in the day before his impressive finale (which I hope somebody caught on video!)

And finally, the requisite cacti photo – Tristan found me this one in bloom as he was tracking lizards and scouting for snakeskins. This corner of the Mohave was very different than the high desert of Moab, but aside from the dusty, barren lakebed we camped on, it was just as full of life. I wish we'd had time to do a few more trails, because I don't think we'll be making another road trip to the Hammers any time soon. It's time to find rock-crawling like this closer to home!