danleeth – Page 25

Pedaling on

The longer I linger in Grand Junction, the more I long to live here. Within a short drive, Grand Junction residents can visit their choice of cliffs, canyons and crags. It has minor league skiing (1,600 skiable acres at Powderhorn) and minor league baseball (Grand Junction Rockies). Hiking trails begin practically right out one’s door.

Today we explored another Grand Junction treasure – its bike paths. We drove to the other Robb State Park unit that has camping, this one in the town of Fruita at Grand Junction’s western end. From there, we bicycled five miles west to the start of the Kokopelli Trail, a grueling, 142-mile mountain bike route to Moab. We started the trail but didn’t make it all the way to that famed Utah hot spot before turning around and heading back to Fruita.

From there, we bicycled the Riverfront Trail along the Colorado River to the Walter Walker Wildlife Area, a place we learned that the resting fowl are active. Like the trail to Kokopelli’s Trailhead, the bicycling surface was wide, nicely paved in concrete and dotted with benches along the way for those in need of a rest.

Skiing. Hiking. Biking. The only thing missing in Grand Junction is a Mazda dealership. For now, we’ll use that as our excuse to stay planted in our domicile on the sunrise side of Denver.

Back home

We’re just back from our first Covid camping trip to the Grand Junction area of Colorado. It proved to be something of a Jekyll and Hyde sort of trip.

On the plus side, over our seven full days in camp, we were able to get out and hike 20+ miles on trails in Colorado canyon country. When not stomping down trails, we covered over 60+ miles on bikes, pedaling through parks and wildlife refuges along the Colorado Riverfront Trail.

On the downside, our campsite left much to be desired. It sat a few dozen yards from Interstate 70, treating us to a constant din of passing truck noise. There was little shade available to shelter us from the 90+ degree sun, but at least with full hookups, we could run the vent fans and/or air conditioner when we needed to cool off. To top it off, the pesky no-see-ums were beginning to come out, which made sitting outside a skin-swatting experience.

In the pre-Covid days, I always looked forward to stopping at Dos Hombres Mexican Restaurant in nearby Clifton for their spicy, green-chile smothered burritos. Dianne, on the other hand, maintained a burning desire to go to Enstrom’s Candies for one of their toffee and fudge ice cream sundaes. Taking advantage of curbside pickup, we were able to get burrito dinners to go. With takeout service and outside tables at Enstrom’s, my lovely wife was able to satisfy her craving for ice cream. (She even got one for me.)

We’re already looking forward t the next trip in two weeks. We’ll be heading to a Colorado State Park campground tucked in the cool conifers and miles from the nearest highway.

Unfortunately, we’ll have to do without burritos and sundaes.

Sometimes it’s good to revert back to the old ways. For us, that meant going tent camping, something we hadn’t done since 2016.

We bought our first trailer, a Rockwood A-Frame in 2013. We replaced it with a real trailer, a 22-foot Flagstaff Micro Lite, in 2019. Over the last eight seasons, we’ve spent 544 nights trailer camping, ensconced every night in a fiberglass and steel enclosure complete with microwave, refrigerator, air conditioner, furnace and nice soft mattress. We may call it “camping,” it’s really mobile motel travel in a cabin on wheels.

For our return-to-the-past adventure, we left the trailer at home and did things the old-fashioned way. We car camped in a Forest Service campground at 9,800+ feet in the nearby mountains.

We pitched our tent between spruce trees and cooked our meals on a white-gas Coleman stove. We slept on the ground in sleeping bags placed atop Therm-a-Rest pads left over from our backpacking days. Our bathroom was the communal pit toilet (outhouse) a hundred yards around the loop. It was just like camping “back in the day.”

The trailer is great for long stays in a single campsite, or for traveling for longer periods over a greater distance. Over the years, we’ve pulled our trailers from Colorado to California, Texas, the Northern Rockies and the Great Lakes. In 2017, we spent 3½ months trailer camping through every province of Canada. I wouldn’t want to do any of that bunking in a tent.

But we live in Colorado for a reason. We like to lace up our hiking boots in the morning and take off down (or up) a trail. We can do that from the trailer, but there are a lot of great places to camp into which our trailer can’t fit. Plus, prepping, hitching and towing the trailer to a nearby spot and then having to flush tanks, tow it home and shoehorn it back into our driveway is a hassle. For short one- or two-night stays, tent camping is so much simpler.

While we have a trio of multi-week, trailer camping trips penciled in on the calendar, we’re also planning to be doing more tent camping trips in the Colorado mountains and Utah canyons next year. Our next Covid stimulus check may be spent on replacing the decades-old, Korean-made tent given to us by Dianne’s parents.

And if Dianne allows me to buy a larger Yeti cooler to tote more beer, I may yield her desire and invest in softer sleeping pads to cushion our AARP-aged bodies. The ground, we’ve found, is definitely getting harder as the earth ages.

Two Weeks with Nary a Hookup

Back when Corona was a beer, not a virus, we had planned to head out on a three-week camping trip in the Black Hills of South Dakota where we would hook up with some of our old A-frame trailer buddies. When that trip got Covid-cancelled, we quickly booked space in a state park in southwestern Colorado.

The park sits beside a small, wake-free reservoir surrounded by scrub oak and ponderosa pine. Pit toilets serve as restrooms. We have no electrical hookup, no sewer hookup and there are only three water spigots shared by the entire campground, none of which are accessible by car.

Most of our fellow campers are in tents or small trailers like ours with nary a big rig in sight. Quiet and rustic, it reminds me of the campgrounds I frequented back in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

We’re here for 14 nights, the maximum allowed by park rules. In seven years of trailer camping, this is only the fourth time we will be spending a full two weeks in one campground. In the previous three, we’ve had a 30-amp electrical hookup and in two we had our own private water spigot.

Here, we will be recharging our batteries with a trio of 100-watt solar panels and filling our freshwater tank with water hauled in a jerry can, five gallons at a time. Used water will be carted to the dump station in our 25-gallon Barker-brand sewer tote, which we’ve named “Bob.”

After spending eight nights camped in a full-hookup site next to Interstate 70 a few weeks back, the remote quietness of this park is a refreshing change.

Hold Still, Mr. Sun

I love camping in the woods. Unfortunately, bunking amongst the trees creates a little problem when trying to recharge the trailer batteries with solar. It seems the sun keeps moving.

[Note to my seventh-grade science teacher: Yes, I know it’s the earth that moves, not the sun. But from the perspective of our campsite, it’s the sun that’s arcing overhead. My X-chocked trailer hasn’t budged an inch.]

We’re spending two weeks in a state park campground without hookups. Normally, keeping the trailer batteries charged with solar is easy. Find a clear spot with a southern exposure. Put one solar panel facing the 10:00 a.m. sun, another at the noon position and the third facing the 2:00 p.m. sun. The batteries, which can be down 20+ amp-hours in the morning, will be fully charged well before happy hour.

That doesn’t work in the woods. I place the panels in a spot where fresh sunlight bathes the ground. Faster than cops racing to a doughnut truck accident, the sun moves, and shade soon smothers my solar output.

There are two solutions to our predicament. We could just fire up the generator to recharge the batteries. But in the week we’ve been camped here, I’ve not heard any of our fellow campers running a generator. I don’t want to be the first.

The other solution is to go out every second day with a pot of fresh coffee and a good book. We just sit back, relax and move the panels as the sun migrates across the sky. After lunch, we merely substitute a different sort of brew and continue the charging task.

Heading Home

Heading home at the end of our two-week escape to southwestern Colorado. We hiked about 38 miles through incredible Colorado scenery. I read at least three books, we photographed several sunsets over the reservoir and we finally got to visit the Rio Grande Southern Railroad Galloping Goose Museum in Dolores.

We loved the Mancos State Park campground. Shady, quiet and rustic – just the way campgrounds used to be back in “the day.” Shady, however, presented a problem. We never got enough sun to fully solar charge our trailer batteries. After 13 nights of camping and despite all our panel-moving efforts, the batteries’ state of charge was down over 20 percent.

Lesson learned. We will soon be replacing our anemic lead-acid batteries with top-of-the-line lithium batteries with far more reserve capacity. I used a lot of data bytes researching options on our “move the solar panels back into the sun” days in camp. Orders will be placed Monday.

In addition to experimenting the with using solar panels in shady campsites, we also did a refrigerator experiment on the way home.

One of the big controversies among trailer owners is whether to run the refrigerator on propane when traveling down the road. One school of thought says to turn the propane and refrigerator off. It will stay cool, they say. The other school says if it wasn’t safe to run them on propane while traveling, manufacturers wouldn’t make that the automatic option.

With Dianne packing the freezer full of ice cream and meat, we’ve always left the fridge on, running on propane while traveling. We have an automatic emergency cutoff installed on the gas line if something were to sever the propane hose, so we feel relatively safe doing that.

Coming back from Mancos, we turned the fridge off. The freezer was -3 and the refrigerator about 35 degrees when we left. When we reached our final campsite eight hours later, the fridge was an acceptable 42 degrees, but the freezer had warmed to 35. The beer was still cold, but any ice cream in the freezer would have turned into a melted mess.

Lesson learned. Since we normally travel with lots of frozen food, we’ll be traveling on propane in the future. No need to risk melting our dessert when camping.

“Happy wife. Happy life.” My wife insists that I passionately believe that old adage.

To make my wife the happiest cook in the campground (or at least at our site in the campground), I modified the pantry in our Flagstaff 21DS. This four-beer project began with removing the factory shelves from the pantry.

In their place I screwed in a pair of Rev-A-Shelf heavy duty pull-out wire shelf stacks (model 5WB2-0922CR-1 fit our trailer), about $100 each from Amazon. These shelves fully extend and are rated for 100 pounds, which makes them perfect for a pantry. The lower unit bolted into the pantry floor. Remounting one of the factory wooden shelves halfway up provided a base for the upper shelf stack.

The shelves were mounted flush against the refrigerator side of the pantry, which allows space on the other side for cutting boards, griddle and other vertical objects. A pair of removable webbing straps keep the shelves from moving when we’re on the road.

Wife loves the new shelves. Husband loves them, too, especially when he discovers that someone has moved his flask of Cognac to the very back of the top shelf.

Next came the spices. We’ve seen many, many ideas about where to put a spice rack in the trailer. The person I need to make happy did not want anything mounted on an outside wall (too hot) or exposed to a window (no sunlight). My solution was to put the spices into the pantry.

I bought some six-by-nine-inch bamboo stackable drawer organizers from Lowe’s (about $6 each). Using my wife’s best one-inch-wide emery board nail file (she was gone), I sanded inch-wide notches in the sides for elastic straps to go across. The boxes were then carefully screwed into the fat part of the pantry door. With Amazon providing spice bottles and labels, my wife filled the racks with her spicy favorites.

The one downside to this arrangement was that the pantry door handle kept the door from fully opening. We couldn’t extend the sliding shelves past the spice boxes. After considering various options, I solved that problem by simply grinding a bit off the door handle bases. It’s a bit more difficult to grip, but the family cook says that’s a small price to pay for having everything so handy.

She’s happy, which means I’m happy. She even brought me another beer.

Over the years, we’ve spent a lot of time and money trying to figure out how to tote our bicycles on trailer trips. With our previous trailer, we ultimately decided the best way to carry the bikes was on the front of our tow vehicle. We mounted a Curt front receiver for our Xterra and slid on our Swagman bike rack. Worked fine.

Then we upgraded both the trailer and the tow vehicle. Neither Curt nor anybody else made front receivers for our new Nissan Titan.

At the dealer’s suggestion, we ordered our trailer with the optional Lippert Jack-It bike rack, which fits around the electric jack on the front frame. Unfortunately, to be able to open the truck tailgate with the trailer attached required mounting the jack sideways. That meant removing the Jack-It.

We considered and rejected a few other options such as carrying the bikes in the trailer or in/on the truck. The best option seemed to be a variation of what other folks have done and simply mounting a receiver on the trailer’s back bumper and sliding in the bike rack. Not only would this get our bikes to camp, but by then moving the rack to the back of the truck, I could take the bikes to nearby trailheads.

The bike rack conversion turned out to be a three-beer project. To beef up the bumper to carry the load, we installed a pair of Mount-N-Lock Safety Struts (around $85). These supposedly increase the weight capacity of the bumper to 400 pounds according to the folks at eTrailer. To our reinforced bumper we bolted on an Eaz Lift RV Bumper Hitch (around $48 from Amazon). The hitch, rack and bikes weighed 100.8 pounds.

Mounting the bikes close to the bumper required moving the spare tire to another location, removing 43.2 pounds from the bumper. To do that, we bought a BAL Retract-A-Spare (about $100 from Amazon), which allows the spare to be carried under the trailer. It works just like the spare tire carriers found on most trucks and SUVs. A cable fits through the spare and is raised and lowered with a turn of a removable crank.

For ground clearance purposes, I wanted to put the spare as close to the axles as possible. While I would have preferred a back-of-the-axles location, the sewer drain plumbing on one side and the grill’s propane orifice on the other necessitated a front-of-the-axles mount. Three beers later, the job was ready for testing.

We hooked up the trailer, mounted our bikes to the back and did a 250-mile drive down the pothole-infested piece of pavement known as Colorado’s Interstate 70. Eying the bikes through the observation (backup) camera, they traveled solidly with no sway, and the spare tire came through still tightly mounted to the undercarriage of the trailer.

All that called for yet another brew or two.

Gone are our old pair of 65-amp lead-acid batteries. In their place sits a new LiFeBlue 200-amp, low temperature lithium iron phosphate battery.

After considering several options (including the popular Battle Born brand), we chose the LiFeBlue, which comes with Bluetooth battery monitoring. With my iPhone or iPad, I can look up the voltage, the state of charge, how many recharging cycles it’s gone through, the status of each cell bank inside and more. This is in addition to what I get from my battery monitor.

Then there is size. This 200-amp LiFeBlue battery fits in a battery box made for two group 24 or two GC2 golf cart batteries, which is what we already owned. Although Battle Born makes a 100-amp GC2-size battery, the group 27s that Battle Born and others sell would not have fit.

Another reason we chose LiFeBlue is that they offer an optional low temperature lithium battery. Most lithium RV batteries cannot be recharged in subfreezing weather. If the battery is located inside the RV/trailer, that may not be an issue. Ours, unfortunately, must be mounted outside. Our low-temperature battery has a built-in heating unit that allows it to be recharged in cold conditions. It’s not often we’ve been camping in subfreezing conditions, but it has happened.

To prevent theft of the batteries, we bought a battery shackle (about $150 from batteryshackle.com). Thick steel and three padlocks pretty much ensure that any thief is going to have to work his tail off to abscond with this battery.

Our Battery Shackle is mounted upside down with the padlocks on the bottom. This gives us a flat area to strap on an empty jerry can or two we can use in camp for hauling water when we’re boonie camping.

To fully charge a lithium battery, one must install a power converter specifically designed for lithium batteries. There are several replacement units available to transform our stock WFCO 8955 converter into a lithium-ready converter. We chose the WFCO WF-8950L2-MBA, which required little more than undoing a few screws and disconnecting/reconnecting five wires.

We now have 200 amp-hours of battery power available for boonie camping. With lead-acid batteries, one is warned to never go below 50% of the available amp-hours. Lithium does not have that limitation. Plus, lithium batteries with the proper power converter/solar controller will charge up many times faster than lead-acid batteries. We’ll test that out on our next camping trip.

One fringe benefit of lithium is weight. Our two lead-acid batteries that came with the trailer weighed 78.4 pounds in total. The lithium replacement only weighs 55.4 pounds. That’s a weight savings of 23 pounds…

…which means we can carry 30 more 12-ounce beers onboard without increasing the trailer load.

We’ve made two big improvements and a pair of smaller ones to our front door.

The first improvement was to install a Camco screen door bar, which cost about $15 from Amazon. The handle provides an easy means to close screen door when the outer door is open. It’s a very common fix that should have come as standard equipment.

The one-beer installation required drilling a few holes and screwing the bar into the door frame.

The second big improvement, a two-beer project, was to replace the stock door window with a Thin Shade window. We’ve been camped in places where the morning sun has come blasting through the front window, blinding us as we’re trying to eat breakfast or work on our computers.

The Thin Shade window has a built-in blind that can be raised to block out all light from entering through the window. When not in use, it folds up into the window frame, totally out of sight.

There are two brands of Thin Shade windows commonly available. We went with the Lippert unit (about $100 on Amazon), which is the same brand as the original. The package included everything needed, including the clips one needs to remove the original window.

The AP Products brand unit is a few dollars cheaper, but one must contact the company to get the clips needed to remove the old window. While the Lippert replacement goes back on without screws, the AP shade uses screws. I like the clean look of the Lippert.

The Thin Shade comes with see-through tinted glass, which most people prefer. We happen to like the frosted glass for its privacy factor. Instead of using the tinted glass provided, we just reused the frosted original.

Two other two minor modifications were attempts to provide a means of keeping the door open on a breezy day in camp. The first was to install a door-holder clip (about $10 from Amazon). We used one of these on our old A-frame trailer with so-so results. On this trailer, the clip proved far too anemic to hold in even light winds.

The latest thing we’ve tried to hold the door open is a bungee cord. I simply replaced one of the door-clip screws with a small, screw-in eyebolt and did the same with one of the trim screws on the side of the trailer. With an eight-inch bungee strung between the two, the door should stay open.

When not in use, the bungee clips on the wire rack, which we installed when we removed the TV.