Baked to a Crisp

Our time at Caprock Canyon is over too soon.  Even with it being miserable hot it was still great being here.  But we are due in Palo Duro 93 miles to the north and we need to get on our way so we can hopefully get camp set up and the A/Cs running before the temperature breaks the century mark.

Our leg west would have been really easy were it not for a southern, 40 mph cross-wind for about the first 50 miles.  Once we turned north on our journey the wind became a friend instead of foe.  We were getting a nice little push and Big Gulp was practically coasting.  Cyndee and I are in really familiar territory now.  We are in the vicinity of West Texas A&M University, Go Buffs!  This is where we both went to school in the little town of Canyon, Tx and did our senior year as married students.

The entrance of Palo Duro Canyon is just a few miles due east of town and we eased into the check-in station near the edge of the plateau.  You have to pay attention to the Texas State Park System camping costs.  Their posted campsite rates appear very attractive, in the low twenties or even teens per night.  But then they go and charge you a per-person, per-day use fee.  Palo Duro has a rate of $5, so our attractive $24/day campground fee suddenly jumped to $34/day.

But that is soon forgotten once we break over the edge of the plateau and begin our descent.  Yikes!  It is steep and narrow with hairpin turns one associates with switch-back mountain roads that jeeps use.  At 60' long and 29,000 lbs I am getting a little anxious.  Now is the time that I fully appreciate the extra money I spent on getting a third axle so that I could have six-wheel disc brakes on the trailer.  They were used to their fullest capacity.  And so was the road, because when it came time to make the turns I used every inch of the width of the road.  The right front tire of the truck was practically scraping the canyon wall and the left rear tire of the trailer was tracking well into the oncoming traffic lane.  But it was slow-as-she-goes and all went well.  I found myself loosening my death-grip on the steering wheel about half way down.  But I also started thinking about what the climb out was going to be like.  I sure hope Big Gulp's got what it takes to get the job done.

There are several campgrounds along the single road that runs down the bottom of the canyon.  Ours was at the dead end of the road, eight miles in.  We puttered along enjoying the scenery and picking out things we wanted to go check out later.  It was noon and we could tell the heat was really starting rise.  We got into our spot in the Mesquite Campground and hooked into 50amp service and got those A/Cs going even before leveling or extending the slides.

We were set up in minutes and it was a quick decision that we would go back into the town of Canyon and visit some of our old haunts on campus get some lunch.  It was only one o'clock and the temperature was 102°.  Hiking and exploring in the canyon would have to come later.  The drive out of the canyon really got me to thinking about how I was going to pull that big 'ol trailer out of here.  The road looked just as steep and nasty going up as it did coming down.

 As we drove around town it became clear real fast that things had changed since 1978.  The university had been busy building new, large, impressive buildings and tearing down old ones and replacing with bigger and better.  The sleepy little college town had been busy too.  The business community seemed to be flourishing and the streets were more covered up with traffic in the middle of the summer than we remembered it being with school in session.

My old school of Industrial Arts was gone, in its place was a school of nursing and the agricultural school's meat lab.  Cyndee's school of fine arts (a dilapidated, old building) had been totally razed and replaced with a large, multi-storied, and opulent structure.  I think Cyndee wants to go back to school just so she can be in that building.

Whenever we are in town we try to get to the Panhandle Plains Historical Museum.  It is in a grand old building on campus, built in 1932.  Their exhibits walk you through the area's history from the time the first creatures swam in the shallow sea of what is now the high plains through the rise of humans a little more than 10,000 years ago and very nicely done sections on the development of farming, ranching and eventually the oil boom.

Sadly, we could not visit one of our old haunts, The Village Restaurant.  It was no more.  This was the place to come and get a good, home-cooked chicken fried steak with all the trimmings.  But now it is Peppito's.  That's okay, we had a good tex-mex lunch.  After lunch we headed back to campus and walked around, checked out the book store and oohhed and aahhed at all the new construction and remodeling of existing structures.

The drive back into the canyon was a piece of cake without 37' of trailer pushing on the truck.  But there were no people in sight.  The temperature had climbed to 106° and every creature large and small had retreated to any shade it could find to wait for sunset.  We were set to get in the camper and sit in air conditioned comfort and do some reading until things cooled off.  But instead of opening the door and feeling cool air rush out, we were greeted by a blast furnace.  The indoor thermometer read 108°, the A/C's had not run the entire time we were gone!

My power management system was flashing error codes and breakers had tripped.  I cleared everything and reset the breakers.  Things seemed to be working fine but in only five minutes the power management system cut power to everything, again flashing error codes.  I got the book out and read the code number to find that it was sensing a low voltage problem.  Sure enough, I read the voltages and on one leg, where I should have had at least 118 volts, there was only 111.  That's low but not low enough to cause a trip.  The other leg of the system was reading only 105 volts.  Uh-oh, that's a problem.  The low voltage cut-out is 104 volts.  And while I was looking at it, it dipped below the magic number and everything went down again.  

We spent the rest of the evening trying to keep both A/Cs running but it was a lost cause.  We finally shut down everything that was running on the leg that had the lowest voltage, which turned out to be everything in the living area.  The A/C over the bed would stay up and running so we shut ourselves in the bedroom by closing the sliding door between it and the living area.  It took a couple of hours, and the sun setting, but it finally cooled off.  We tripped the power a couple of times before the sun went down but once it got dark it never shut off again and we were able to get some sleep.  

But the decision was made.  There would be no staying another day.  There was no way we were going to fight the power problems for two more days.  At first light we are getting out of here.  And we did.  At 5am we were up and showering, by the time light was starting to show on the horizon I was outside disconnecting services.  But out of courtesy to the other campers I did not fire up Big Gulp until the sun broke over the top of the canyon and folks were getting in their cup of coffee.

 

Because of all the fussing with the power we did not get to do any hiking or picture taking.  I stopped my camp-breaking for a few minutes when it got light enough for the camera to not need a flash and took one shot from inside the campground.

 

 

Pretty dramatic view, it makes a big truck and trailer look down right diminutive.  The rig in the picture was a couple we met in Caprock Canyon.  They moved to Palo Duro the same day we did.  The spot he was in was the only one in the whole campground that had steady power.  They were staying for a week and other than the heat, loving it.

 

I was dreading it, but it was time to make the climb out of the canyon.  Years ago I had made a pull like this and it almost ended with my F-250 and Kountry Star getting burned to the ground.  I wrote about this in my 'Camping Stories' section.

 

This time I had a transmission temperature gauge, and with the diesel engine there was also an exhaust gas return (EGR) temperature gauge.  I was already planning on using the pull-outs on the road up to the rim to stop and let things cool down if the EGR temps exceeded 1,100 deg or if the transmission got above 225 deg.

After a quick stop at the dump station to be sure the tanks were as empty as possible we started making the ascent.  The grade quickly changed from 4% to 6% and finally topped out at 10%.  Big Gulp was growling loud, the auxiliary cooling fans were running full tilt and the fuel gauge was racing to the empty mark.  But I'll be dog-gone, both the EGR and the transmission temps were not going any higher than they do when running down the highway on a hot day.  Wooh-hoo!  It seemed like a long time but in just a few minutes we were at the top of the plateau and both taking a breath for the first time since starting up.

Cyndee loosened her death-grip on the grab handles long enough to snap a single picture of the climb out.
We had just completed a hairpin turn and entered the steepest part of the climb.
A two-dimensional photo just can't convey the whole feeling of a road this steep.

Next stop, Amarillo.