No plan, No problem, One will present itself

[Recce01]

A few quick things about us:
Me= Scott
My Wife= Bris
We have familiarized ourselves with all things off-road over the years. If it happens in the dirt, generally speaking, we are enthusiasts. We are currently very interested in adventure. We are learning more and more every time we hit the road, last weekend we learned a lot and had a ton of fun.

Oh, and I have a long way to go to provide you guys with images like I have seen on this forum. There is some incredible photography on this site, I hope to do a better job in the future

Day 1
I am no stranger to adventure; my employment has taken me to the depths of the Baja peninsula, well into South America, and even on this little rally called the Dakar. These were all adventures out of necessity, it was my job. More importantly than that, it was always done in a large group with other people’s equipment and resources. I have recently left the wild world of sleepless nights and 23 hour work days, blowing the proverbial kiss “bye bye” to motorsports. That does not mean that I won’t entertain the opportunity to participate again, however I have shifted my focus to more of a family oriented lifestyle. I recently married and have started to look at things a little differently, perhaps actually growing up a little. (I will keep this forum a secret from my wife so she can’t get in here and rebut my statements.) With this shift in perspective I found myself reflecting upon my past experiences, where I had been, what I had seen. Ironically, I have been all over the planet and can barely remember a damn thing. The Motorsport life does not allow for that few extra minutes of time to stop and smell the roses, enjoy that amazing view, or pull off on that turn out for the ultimate photo op. Instead I have some video floating around of me doing 45mph through the Sahara desert passed out behind the wheel of a Hummer H1. My team mates thought it was funny so they let me sleep for about 45 minutes while driving… it’s not like you can hit anything, right? Well that got me thinking quite a bit. I want to get out and see the world, on my watch with my game plan. Sure, it would be awesome to hit the road on a different continent again, and see all the things I missed while on someone else’s watch, but hell, there is a never ending amount of beauty right here in my Southern California backyard. Because I lived the motorsport dream, I have a ton of random skill and zero money. I managed to scrape up the resources for a vehicle to help me on my new found mission. A fairly clean 1998 Jeep Grand Cherokee with a ridiculous number of miles on the odometer presented itself, and we scooped it up.



I had to rip these running boards off straight away...



I have some experience with Jeep ZJ’s as I had one some 15 years ago….wait, yeah, that means I am getting old . Oh well, back to the point. My ZJ was used for a tech article in JP Magazine back when Rick Pewe was editor.





I guess you could say we were pioneering the soccer mom rigs out on the trail. I can remember guys in their FJ40s and CJs just giving me hell when we would turn up to local events. That all came to a screeching halt when they saw my open diff rig climb stuff their locked up rigs struggled to d . Truth be told, I wanted a Land Rover Disco, D90, or D110, but they were just too damn expensive. I settled for the ZJ because it shared the same style suspension, coils all the way around. It did the job just fine and taught me a lot. At the time I worked with Safari Gard and had to see those Rovers coming in and out of the shop all day long. I even had the pleasure of pulling one out of a ditch; made me smile. Anyways, the Jeep we recently scored seemed like it could serve the purpose and get us to where we wanted to go. I am done with the hard core crawling style and am just looking for a little adventure.

[Recce01]

My wife came home the Wednesday before President’s Day weekend and said, “Let’s go out of town this weekend; let’s load the Jeep and just hit the road”. I, of course asked her where she wanted to go, and she said the ultimate words, “It doesn’t matter”. This is my favorite kind of road trip. I have come to learn that the best plan is no plan. When you don’t have a plan, one presents itself. So I decided to rummage through my archives of crap in the garage and see if I could resurrect some of my old goodies. I located my old Lowrance Eagle Accutrail GPS, my old President HR2600 converted CB Radio, and some off-road lights I came up on a few years ago. So Thursday I set out to outfit“ish” our Jeep for our little trip to who knows where? I didn’t want to mount anything too permanent as the equipment we were sporting was old and would certainly be replaced as we got more into this “overlanding” game. I whipped up a suction cup mount system for the GPS using some old back up camera parts, and fashioned a mount for the antenna and double side taped it to the roof.

[Recce01]

I ended up breaking out the tig welder to mount the lights and burned the light bar to the unibody in effort to save time. I hate drilling holes. I figured I could cut it off as fast as I welded it on so what the hell, right?








The CB was a different story, we had no place to mount it, no antenna, no microphone and no power cord, so we threw it in and figured we could find the parts on the road.

We started out on the 15 fwy heading north from Temecula. Our first stop was at a truck stop off of the 10 fwy where there were a few CB shops. We went in and secured a power cord and a microphone. He had to wire the mic because the damn HR2600 was not your typical CB. We paid him. He didn’t have the antenna, so he sent us elsewhere to pick one up. We drove about ¼ mile away to another shop where he sold us a Wilson 5000 magnet mount antenna and matched it up to our vehicle. We were on the road again!



This about the time my wife broke out the map and got on the phone with Lowrance to see about having an email sent to us with a PDF of instructions for our GPS. I forgot how to operate the damn thing. We find out the model is so old they don’t have a manual archived for it, so we got one that was similar and started to figure it out. The only request I had for my wife was that I didn’t want to go to any tourist traps. I wanted to get out there and experience nature. She said let’s go to Death Valley then, and we were off.

[Recce01]

We decided to head up HWY 395 to about Ridgecrest and head over from there. We took the Searles Station cutoff and headed up to Trona on the 178. We stopped in Trona and fueled the Jeep. While at the station, my wife (while looking at the map) mentioned a town called Darwin, and a place called Darwin Falls. She is a big fan of the fact of evolution, so this caught her eye. Later we found out this place has nothing to do with Charles Darwin, but it was still fun to speculate about. We were relating the idea that the place must be very remote, rugged and how “only the strong survive”. It made for good conversation anyways. So we blasted up the 178 until we reached Panamint Valley Road. We headed left there and took it all the way to the 190. We went left on the 190 and passed through a place called Panamint Springs where they had one gas station, we saw the $4.36 a gallon and kept on driving.



. Just out of town there was a small dirt road on the left called Old Toll Road, or the road to Darwin Falls. It was evening by now and the sun was just crashing.







We knew we had to find a camping spot before it got too late and get settled in for the night. We bumped into an older gentleman with his dog who had a 4x4 truck with a camper. He’d set up his camp on the side of the road. According to what he said, it was illegal to camp within the Death Valley park unless in a dedicated place (i.e. tourist trap). He also said according to his map he was just outside of the park and intended to stay the night. That meant that by his reasoning anything further up the road was fair game. We found a spot about a ¼ mile up the road from him where there was a wash we could drive up and be hidden from the main road.



There is nothing worse than a ranger waking you up and telling you that you need to move after settling in for the night. As insurance we found a “hiding spot” that seemed as though it would work and would be fairly safe should the rain come in as projected. I was hoping we wouldn’t have any rain and kept telling myself “It’s Death Valley, it doesn’t rain here”. Ignorance WAS bliss. We got all set up, broke out the generator, grill, and fired up some dinner. Yea, I know… generator? Well, we like to embrace technology even though we are visiting the most barren parts of earth.

[Recce01]

We were greeted by headlights just as we headed to the tent for some snooze. Then we heard the noise of a front wheel drive rental car begging for traction as it was being forced to negotiate our same sand wash. The noise of the rocks pounding on the inner fender wells and grazing the body were humorous, and only upstaged by the two German tourists that were trying to avoid BS camping fees and struggling to get to their own little getaway. Their banter back and forth regarding what I imagine to be two differing opinions regarding the optimum location to stop, was really funny. We could hear the lady (Inga) yelling at the guy (Peter) to stop as he was just burying the front of this poor rental. They finally compromised and gave up, leaving us to our own little paradise a ways up the wash. We did head down and introduce ourselves for some reason, still not sure why. I imagine it is because I didn’t want to be shot by some yahoos who potentially decided to bring their 50 Cal sniper rifle to the desert and decide this was the best canyon in which to shoot . Either way, it worked out, and we were off to bed. Before we crashed we shot a pic of the GPS, and here are the coordinates…... N36 19.336' W117 30.575'



http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&sour...4&ie=UTF8&z=16

Obviously his calculations were slightly off...... We were in the park

As we finally drifted off to sleep we heard small rain drops. I told my wife if it begins to rain we are packing up and sleeping in the Jeep. She convinced me everything would be ok and we tried to get some shut eye. It was a very long night to say the least. It was as if it rained all night with the wind blowing to 50 plus MPH. The strange thing was it never did both at the same time. The rain would stop, and a very loud noise would start barreling down on us, then the tent would jump up and shift as far as it could to one side then back the other way. I thought we were going to be a damn kite or have to use our air mattress as a floatation device in the case of a flash flood. I was genuinely scared out of my mind, with my wife in la-la land enjoying random dreams. I don’t know how she slept through that, but we survived. We woke up about 7:30 AM dry as a bone, with the top portion of our tent MIA. It had blown off and we didn’t even realize it.

Lessons Learned:
….. Find out if it is legal to camp, or hide damn good.
…..Don’t camp in rain….ever.
…..Do not camp in a wash, flash flood equals death. (Darwin relation earlier not so funny now.) We survived but at the expense of my sleep, scared poopless.
…..Tent stakes are a necessity even when the tent has a bunch of crap holding it down.

[GCRad1]

AWESOME START!!! Subscribed!

So Recce01, do you have some reason or fear of rain for some unknow reason?

Keep the story coming!

[Recce01]

AWESOME START!!! Subscribed!

So Recce01, do you have some reason or fear of rain for some unknow reason?

Keep the story coming!

Thanks man! Yes, rain scares me. It was 1998 while camping in the Mountains above Palmdale for the "Rim of the World Rally". we were eager spectators, and I selpt in 3" of water.....never again.

Coming.......

[Recce01]

Day 2


We decided to get up and make tracks. After a brief discussion we agreed that we would keep going on the same trail as it appeared to go all the way to a town called Darwin. We never did see the Darwin Falls, We didn’t even think about them again until hours later. Funny how one can easily forget the reason for going some place after arrival. It was more about the adventure and getting there than anything else. As we headed further up the trail we were greeted with some rough terrain. I think this is the first time I really thought about the tires (or lack there of) we had on the Jeep. They were “pizza cutters” as us off-road racers so affectionately refer to them. That means I need to pay attention, or get out the tools to change tires. I put the Jeep in 4-low and just crept through the rough spots. It seemed to be working fine. We had the pleasure of stopping at four or five different spots and see some very old mining equipment and mine shafts.

[GCRad1]

oh, forgot about that one... thought it was the WRC trip... hehehehe

Thanks man! Yes, rain scares me. It was 1998 while camping in the Mountains above Palmdale for the "Rim of the World Rally". we were eager spectators, and I selpt in 3" of water.....never again.

Coming.......

[Recce01]

It was cool and creepy at the same time to dare to walk into some of these caverns, but I figured what the heck, I had a flashlight, another person, and was dying of curiosity. There was a strange aroma in one of the caves, we headed out quicker than you can imagine. We have taken tours in the past where they have shown us mine shafts, and expressed the strange smelling gasses that can actually kill you if exposed for too long. Not in the mood for Death today, so we moved on. There were a few spots where I got to see what the Jeep was capable of in stock form. It seemed to do quite well, not that I was in the position to really find the limits of its ability. Stuff like that happens 5 minutes from the house, not a day’s drive away