A Little Rock ~ Fat Bastard Endeavors

A Little Rock

It's funny how small things can sometimes have a big impact. Today a small rock changed my vacation plan in a big way.

I drove 680 miles to Bishop, California, on Sunday. Bishop is the town closest to the Boundary Peak (Nevada) trailhead, so I spent the night in an old, rundown motel. I'm like, I just need a bed and a shower; whatever. I slept pretty well and got up at 4:30 AM feeling mostly refreshed and ready for a difficult day. At 5-ish I was the first customer at the town's only Starbucks, and then I started north on Highway 6 for the 50-mile drive to the trailhead. I hoped to get there right around dawn so I'd have some light to get my pack together, and then head up the treeless, exposed trail in the cool of the morning. The forecast was nearly perfect for today's attempt.

Two miles into Nevada, I turned south onto the long, climbing dirt/gravel road that leads to the trailhead. It wasn't a great road, but dirt/gravel roads almost always suck. I've been on a million of them and I thought nothing of it. I got a mile up the road, still 5 miles from the trailhead, when my car beeped at me and my "Check Tire Pressure" light came on. I thought, well, the car is driving just fine... it's probably just the altitude and the cold that's thrown the pressure sensor out of whack. I was initially inclined to ignore it, but then I thought I should at least stop and take a look.

I stopped, and as soon as I opened my door, I heard the unmistakable "PPSSSSHHHHHHHH" noise of escaping air from the rear driver's side tire. Uh oh.

I got out and looked, and sure enough, there was a rock sticking out of a good sized hole in the tire--it was a really good puncture. Damn.

Now I needed to find a flat piece of ground quickly, before the tire went completely flat, so I'd be able to jack up the car. I jockeyed the car around to a faint side track and got it on relatively flat ground. By the time that was done, the tire was fully flat.

As I pondered what impact this was going to have on my day and my plans going forward, I started unpacking the back of the car so I could get to the spare tire. I got the jack and spare out, and then pulled out the owner's manual because you should really RTFM to make sure you're jacking at the correct jack point. This was my first flat tire since owning this car.

I was lucky that the dirt was firm enough to support the car on the jack, and I got the tire changed and everything reloaded in the car in about 30 minutes.

My spare is one of those little donut, emergency-only spares. So now I had decisions to make. If I pressed on up the road and had another tire issue (the spare is not a sturdy-looking thing at all), I would be completely screwed. I would be miles from any people, and I would have to hike all the way back to the highway and then hope for a ride from a benevolent stranger 50 miles back to Bishop where there was a cell signal, and then pay for a tow truck to go 50 miles out to get my car. Not good.

If I pressed on and had no troubles, I would still be in a pickle as my next destination and hotel reservation was in Ely on the eastern edge of Nevada, 250 across mostly barren desert. There is almost nothing between Boundary Peak and Ely except Tonopah, a town of 2,500 people, and I didn't really want to take my chances on getting a new tire there.

I felt I had no choice but to turn around and return to Bishop, and the smart thing to do was to cut my losses and go now, abandoning the climb for today. I don't always do the smart thing, but on this day I did.

I gently nursed the car back to Bishop, greatly irritated with all my prep for Wheeler Peak going down the drain, and also with dollar signs dancing in my head. I was pretty sure that it was too late to cancel my Ely hotel room, so at a minimum there's a hundred and some bucks down the crapper. I knew the hole in my tire was too big to patch, so I'd need a new one. But my car has all wheel drive, so if I needed to replace all 4 tires to satisfy the tight tread-difference tolerances of my car, that was going to be $1,200 or so. This could be a really expensive day.

I rolled up to a tire shop right as they opened for the day, and they attended to me right away. Sure enough, the tire couldn't be patched, but I was very fortunate that they had a used tire in my size and the tread wear was nearly the same as my other three, so I would be good to go with just this one replacement. Within 30 minutes (while I gave Cinnamon, the shop kitty, some scritches) I shelled out all of $35 and I was on the road again. Whew!

Well, now it was too late to go re-try the climb. And if I stayed here in Bishop I'd have to chill for about 8 hours before I could check into a motel. I could start heading east for other peaks in Colorado or New Mexico, but I wanted to take advantage of being relatively close to visit my mom in SoCal, so this seemed like the time to do it. Then I could evaluate my options and head out again on Tuesday with a new plan, and with luck, good weather forecasts for Boundary, or other peaks on my to-do list in Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado or Utah.

So here I am in Whittier, California, visiting Mom for a bit. Boundary Peak has bad weather forecast for Wednesday, so I can't just go back to Bishop and try to pick up where I left off--that's out for now. Humphreys Peak in Arizona also had not-great weather forecasted. So I think I'm heading for Flagstaff on Tuesday, and then Taos, New Mexico, on Wednesday. I should be able to try New Mexico's highest mountain, Wheeler Peak, on Thursday if the good forecast for that area holds.