The Great OOTdoors
I've been meaning to start a thread like this for quite awhile now, and I figure since I've been cooped up in the house
headed to the Mescalero unless your cars bad
I’m dreading the hike out. It’s hot down here. Gonna jump in to cool off first.
beautiful
First overland trip was a success but had a few issues.
Tried to follow the path from Overland trail guides but it was all ****ed up. Road just ended at one point. Got a few scratches from driving through mesquite and cactus
Wrong neighborhood mother ****er
Ended up coming to a locked gate. Turned around and ended up camping outside Dell City.
Wednesday Morning drove from Dell City around the north part of Guadalupe through Big Dog Canyon.
Please don't tell mom we were playing in the street
One thing I love about west Texas/Southern NM is when the road goes to the horizon
Big dog canyon
Camped Wednesday night and drove around Lincoln National forest on the east side of Guadalupe.
Got up Thursday morning to this
Eastern most part of the park
and headed off to Odessa, but stopped to get some west Texas fine dining
Looks fun. The best trips happen when they don’t go according to plan.
Dang! You passed up some veal on the hoof just a little while back.
j/k. I would love that trip, but I'd have to be able to find a comfortable bed to sleep in every night and a halfway decent restaurant for one meal a day.
I'm spoiled. I admit it. I'm enjoying the pics though!
by all accounts the best pair of micro burros you ever had
They just hit harder when you’ve been camping for two days.
ab-so-lutely
years ago had my first taste of canadian a&w after being in the woods for a week and nearly lost my mind
On the Mogollon rim.
This, my friends is a blonde black bear. 30ish yards. Walking down hill and did not take any notice of the hiker. Gave a little whistle and he pops his head up to take notice and appears slightly bewildered.
Whether he noticed the pistol with the dangerous game load or not, he decided to trot off to go on about his day.
The photographer remained in place for a solid 15 minutes intensely aware of his surroundings to ensure the bear was not performing any flanking maneuvers.
Had it been a female or cubs would have been spotted, the bear would not have been alerted.
This was no time to be concerned about f-stops and shutter speeds so excuse the lack of quality.
A storm rolled through last night and cooled things off. Low 80’s this morning. Decided to jump in the truck and find an impromptu hike.
I ended up in big horn sheep country in the Superstition wilderness. I had hoped to catch a glimpse of a sheep or two but no such luck.
I picked this peak as my destination.
Spoiler alert, I did not make it. There’s no trail and the path I decided on ended in a dead end. Trapped. I think I may have been able to scramble up with some effort but the more I thought about it, I had no idea if I could get back down. I would not have been able to make it down the same way and would have been screwed if there wasn’t another way.
The Arizona desert is gorgeous.
I saw no wildlife beyond a few lizards. I did find this interesting long trail/line of rocks. My picture does not show how much it stood out. It went on for 150’ or so. I’m sure the real explanation is not anywhere near as interesting as to what my imagination conjured up.
Get outside people.
I am frequently near Yellowstone, mostly to the West and North (Ennis or Livingstone, for example). From the last time I was actually in the park, June 95 (note the snow):
Later in June from the same trip:
My trusty (hardly) 72 Westphalia VW. Miss it every day.
Did you replace a window with plywood?
It was a conversion camper. That is the wall of the closet next to the rear bench seat/fold out bed. Window was still in place.
Trying to justify one of these new camper vans but can't pull the trigger on ~$100k.
If you're up there again, not too far south on US 93 is Bandit Brewery in Darby.
It was a conversion camper. That is the wall of the closet next to the rear bench seat/fold out bed. Window was still in place.
Trying to justify one of these new camper vans but can't pull the trigger on ~$100k.
i've been "in the market" for a camper van for a while and ultimately quit searching because the converted vans and even vanilla vans good for conversions are all selling at a premium now due to the demand
ones that were especially pricy considering how little utility they gave you were the old westphalias where one of those with just a bed and some storage bins with 300k miles on it would sell for the same price as a new mercedes sprinter that had a kitchen and bathroom and looked nice enough to be featured on an instagram profile etc
so then i'm in the ozarks, and my buddy says "hey our friend from KC is coming into town, you should join us all for dinner" and so i join them - the friend is a guy who figured out there were certain necessary plumbing materials which are vital and due to covid shutting down production, were very hard to come by, what he'd do is contact the manufacturers directly, get exclusive purchasing rights for his region, pay a 2x price premium to do that, and then just hoard everything in warehouses
now, whenever anyone in the greater kansas city area needs to build anything, they eventually wind up calling him because he's the only contractor who access to the materials which are required - at which point he won't sell them the products but instead have his own guys install them
so as you can imagine, he's just been absolutely crushing it last few years
so what does that guy do with that money he makes? he goes out and buys 1970s westphalias and original parts - fixes them up and resells them - again, he's basically "cornered the market" as he's the guy who is responsible for several dozen of them which have been rescued from scrap yards and currently on the road and he has another 2-3 dozen currently being worked on
he alone has enough of the supply to drive up all westphalia prices - much like how Jose Mugrabi personally owns enough warhols where he gets to set a floor price because any warhol selling for what he considers to be too cheap he will bid on to either drive up the price or just acquire it and prevent others from getting one below his artificially created floor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jose_Mugra...
once that man dies (he's in his 80s) we're going to see warhols plummet in value unless his children decide to take up the mantle
the reason why he was down in the ozarks that weekend was he found an original seat for sale and was going down to buy it
Temp just crossed 100 and still have 5.1 miles to the truck. 1.5l of water left and that is the last bit of shade left. Gonna sit under that bush and have a snack. I don’t know why, but I love the desert.
It's been nice knowing you.
Sorry to disappoint. Had already made it home. I did enjoy that shade though.
A Hundred isn't bad if your used to it.
This is worse than the bear picture. I need to be more prepared. I used to never take pictures. I figured my memory was always better but I’ve learned I like sharing the wilderness.
Anywho, it’s not often you take javelina by surprise. The have keen noses. But I walked right into a group of at list six that were bedded down just minutes before sunset. That’s as many as I could count but it sounded like there were more. Barely got my phone out to catch the last one running and squealing through the bushes.
