The 395 and Owens Valley-Eastern Sierra Region

Just back to pavement.

"That was a fucking shit show." --mk5

Man, this is going to be a good story. Hopefully he got lots of pics.

 

Surprisingly few pictures, sorry. I was mostly focused on making it home. And now that I'm finally home, I am pretty damn exhausted. Two absolutely brutal hikes, plus a day of improvised self-recovery. I am destroyed. And super late for work.


FOOL ME ONCE...

In short... well, my axles were too short. The passenger axle slipped out of the tripod joint the other weekend at Laurel Lakes, leaving me stranded until I could figure out how to disassemble the birfield with a hammer. (Side note: I reassembled that axle and confirmed that yes, it was too short. The rebuilding shop told me that they had received a mix of overseas-market cores -- apparently those have slightly shorter axle shafts, and based on my measurements of the failed axle I had received a too-short overseas axle.) I replaced it with a different type of axle last week. But I didn't have time to replace the driver's side axle. (Actually, I was waiting for new hubs to arrive, plus for a removal tool I had designed to be machined so I could pull the remaining oem-rebuild axle intact... these suckers need tons of force to pop out, I snapped a steel cable trying to sledgehammer the last one out and eventually had to tap threads to attach a puller.)

Surely, even if my driver's side axle was of the too-short variety, it could hold up just one more trip, right? It had gotten me through a lot over the past year.



NOPE. This is where my axle broke. This is not axle-breaking terrain. And it didn't really break, I guess. It just fell apart, in a completely stupid way.

Knowing this was a risk, I had at least brought the new driver's-side axle along on this trip, plus the bluetooth axle stub from the last one. If I could pull the broken stub out, I could swap in a new not-too-short axle, and if not, I could at least clamp the hub together with the old stub and cruise out on 3 locked axles. Smart, right?



NOPE AGAIN. This time when the tripod overrode and bound, it shattered the diff mount too. I was stuck with 2WD for the drive out.

Unfortunately this was near the end of a definitely-not-2WD road. Alone, miles from cell service, 98 degrees with no shade in sight. Took me several hours to get the truck driveable, then several more to get myself turned around and out of the canyon, stacking rocks and winching. Breathed a sigh of relief when I got out to the alluvial fan, but that wasn't even the end of it.

This will only make sense to people who have tried to find their way out of an alluvial fan. You can drive around for an hour just trying to find the stupid road, even with a GPS topo map, and even in broad daylight. And it was dusk. A flying camera is the perfect solution for this situation, but by the time I gave up looking for its stupid remote, it was completely dark. Kept driving around, tracking and backtracking, where was the stupid road? At one point I thought I saw it veering right, so I instinctively tapped the brakes. Absolutely anchored myself in the sand. (And no, that wasn't the road, either.) Aired down to almost-flat to power out, only to soon become hi-centered on a rock. Air up, air down, winch here, curse there... And yes I had a GPS topo map that literally shows the road and where I am. But I didn't record the actual track on the way in.

Started wishing the jack had slipped so I could have died with honor at the back of a rugged canyon, crushed to death under a pickup truck like a real man. Not lost in a sandy wash clutching my little cellphone map like a fucking tourist.

Then, when I finally found my way back to the road... PFSSSssssss I pinched a sidewall on a rock.



Underway on the actual road at last, I finally got the camera out. The moon was about to rise. So many satellite flares in the twilight skies these days. The irony was, I had come up here to scout out a night photo shoot. I'll soon be back.

Just a quick detour on the way home, I told myself.

I should be to work by 4 or 5, I'll meet you then, I told a coworker.

What a fucking disaster.



Could have been worse though, I guess.

Edit: $500 alone, just to wholesale replace all the diff mount components. I don't even know for sure the diff is okay. Will also need to replace the hubs. And, possibly re-do all the bushings and balljoints, which I just did three weeks ago. Hope my spindles aren't bent too. A huge waste of money for needless carnage.

 

Yesterday I was going to snarkily reply that if he couldn’t afford to buy a vowel, he probably didn’t spend the money for a good axle. I guess that would’ve have been somewhat on target…

 

You were out in Cosos? I thought most of it was "wilderness". That's one area I'd like to explore more.

 

@mk5, well done. The results are what mattered. I have somehow managed to avoid grenaded drivetrain components myself, but have helped a friend with a gen2 with a thoroughly rapidly disassembled rear diff and another with a gen1 front likewise. Shit happened, we got them home.

Love the starlight photo. As a pilot, the aluminum wreckage photo makes me nervous.

 

I actually visited the grove for a different, extremely urgent reason this trip...



I've wandered for hours here with a camera before, so I didn't take many pictures this time. Even though the lighting was far nicer.



We had to hurry to find a camp spot -- I figured the open gate day would make camping a zoo, and it probably was at the campground to the south. Plus there's no dispersed camping allowed within the Ancient Bristlecone Forest boundary. But we had instant luck finding dispersed camping outside the boundaries closer to the gate, just by driving down a sketchy shelf road that said "extreme difficulty" or something like that at the top. It was actually one of the best camp spots I've ever found, perched right on the side of the mountain. There is an astoundingly beautiful valley below, with green meadows, stunning rock formations, and even an old mine. We later took the truck the rest of the way down the shelf road to check it out.


Camp Awesome


Dawn the next morning


30 mins later...

The lot at the gate was indeed a zoo, we carpooled from camp and arrived just as the gate was being opened. It appeared that dozens of cars had camped there overnight. But there was plenty of parking at the research center, and everybody was super nice.



There was a nice little information booth, too, with free cookies! Unfortunately, I spent the first few hours of my visit to White Mountain Research Center intermittently visiting a different, smaller booth:



Rivian was there doing sort of a promo/high-elevation-research thing, with a handful of their vehicles offering free shuttle service for hikers from the lower lot up to the research center, which helped with parking too. (No, they weren't giving rides to the peak. They did however send one up to the summit at the end of the day to ferry some people back. There were a handful of hikers that were seriously struggling, having fought all day to reach the peak.) I wound up carrying someone's extremely heavy radio setup up to the peak and back to make his trek a bit easier. (Well, my friend carried it down, he's a faster hiker and had been up there for several hours waiting for me.) The guy wound up riding back so we didn't have to wait long at the bottom to return it to him.



This isn't the radio I had carried up, this is someone else's radio that someone else had hiked up. Apparently this is a super-cool spot for radio stuff. He let me use it to contact people in, like, Kansas or maybe France... using some sort of... frequency? My little Baofeng could barely contact people in Bishop, then its battery died. Once I had contacted ... um, I think four people, that meant I had 'activated' the peak. I was seriously struggling with cognition up there, and managed to mess up the camera settings too. Most of the shots were garbage.



God, I wish we could drive this road. The Rescue Rivian got to, at least.

The day before, we ran into the annual meeting of the Eriogonum Society. We hung out with them for a good hour talking about plants and mountains and stuff. Super fun group. Wikipedia says that "Eriogonum is a genus of flowering plants in the family Polygonaceae." Also known as wild buckwheat. I think it's different than the pancake type of buckwheat. Anyway, there are lots of them in the White Mountains, and I have a newfound appreciation for them. They have little red pfloofs... see?:



I also drove down the east side for the first time, through something my map calls the "royal gorge" on Wyman cyn. This is more of a streambed than a road, but the cascades are fun. Note: Not Subaru-friendly.



There appears to be some geology down there:



Also: Beef.



We had come up via Silver Cyn and returned to the overlook after the hike and dinner. Nice view of Bishop. But we decided to take the highway back down instead.



By Independence we were both too tired to keep driving. But it was 90 degrees on the valley floor, ugh. I proposed camping somewhere nearby that would be a little cooler:



But we couldn't get the Subaru up the road, so we just camped out in the heat after a visit in the truck. Parted ways the next morning for my 'quick hike,' expecting to see him back at work by late afternoon lol.

Oh, and if you're reading this Dave, sorry we missed you Friday. Hope you got some good photos!

4the recrd,Ipaid more4 these bustd CVJs than OEMs cost.New rplcmnts r dffrnt type,cost <half as mch!

So, uh... keep your phone close -- you're next on my SOS list.

I think most of it is China Lake, then most of the rest is wilderness. But there's a road that goes across the flat and up into a canyon, just across the highway from the turnoff to Santa Rosa Flat. Wilderness spans only from that canyon westward. I think you can follow it all the way to the China Lake perimeter -- but only if your axle doesn't fucking break. There are a couple other canyons with labeled routes nearby, and a general road network going east to Darwin. Pay attention to the gigantic wilderness sign when you arrive at the wash... might help you find your way back to the road. Maybe I'm just dumb, but damn I couldn't find that stupid road last night.

 

Then perhaps you will enjoy what is apparently a new hobby for me... taking pictures of plane wrecks at night! Only done that once at this point, but I've pinned down a few more to visit on moonless nights hopefully sometime soon. Have to find them by day though... at night I can't even find a damn road, apparently.

From just outside Groom Lake last month:

 

Awesome photo. Did you do Tikaboo? I'd really like to go up there sometime.

 

Been on my to-do list ever since... well a month or two ago, honestly, but it looks like a super fun hike. Not sure I'm in shape enough to overnight up there but I'd definitely tackle it as a day-trip. I think you can get all the way to the trailhead... if you have front axles.