The drive from Maine to Colorado becomes a nightmare right around Topeka, Kansas. There aren’t hills after New York or turns after Ohio. Eyes focus and refocus, but the view never looks right. Sleep is always a moment away, but giving in to the urge would result in a sticky red smear on I-70. I’ve made the trip four times, and this is always where things start to get surreal.
Road trips and climbing are intricately linked, but they aren’t what most people think of as a road trip. They are what climbers look forward to, like children dreaming about Christmas. Trips can be short or long, across a state or across the country, but they are about the destination, not the ride.
Climbers follow a road trip circuit, a seasonal migration of sorts: the Gunks in April and May, Acadia in June, summer in North Conway with the occasional trip to the Dacks. October in Yosemite, November at Indian Creek, Winter at Joshua Tree.
It takes time to learn the skills for going on a climbing trip. My introduction occurred when a plane carried me to Georgia, and I had to walk home; not exactly a road trip but it’s a similar concept. In just under four months, I was back in Maine, standing atop Katahdin. The Appalachian Trail is prime training for the world for road tripping. It teaches the art of dirtbagging: how to eat, sleep, and live for next to nothing. The lesson was key for future road trip survival.
There are certain skills that make life on the road much easier. How to shit in the woods is just the beginning. How to cook dinner every night on the MSR Whisperlite, for example, and to still enjoy eating, is an essential skill. The Whisperlite is a camp stove with two settings: blast furnace, and off. It boils water and it lasts forever, but durability doesn’t make cooking lasagna any easier. I’ve learned little tricks like depressurizing the fuel bottle to get it to simmer, but it took four months and 2000 miles to get the hang of it.
There are a million other little skills to pick up. Most have to do with saving money: how to get toilet paper without paying for it (be sure to store it in a plastic bag: it might rain), how to get eight people into a hotel room for two (choosing the right hotel is key: it has to have multiple entrances), how to get a roof over your head for the night when it’s raining (usually this results in sleeping in a bathroom of some sort).
Eating cold oatmeal packets for breakfast is one trick that always gets me funny looks. The little prepackaged packets are watertight, so why dirty a dish? And stoves are for dinner, not for breakfast. It tastes the same but it takes half the time. A similar trick is eating uncooked ramen noodles. Just crush the noodles up in the package and eat them like chips. The flavoring can be added, but be forewarned: salt in such high doses can be lethal.
With these new skills, I was ready for rock climbing road tripping.
My friend Ben isn’t a big climber, but he called and suggested we go for a trip. He wanted a climbing road trip, and it was my job to plan it. Colorado is famous as the outdoor adventure state of the union. I’ve spent a little time out there, and it isn’t my favorite, but it does have great rock climbing a mere 2,100 miles from Maine.
We left two days after Ben got out of school and drove to my brother’s house in Ohio; it was 1 a.m. when we arrived. Those were the last beds we would see until we got back.
The next day, we got up at 7 a.m. After stealing everything that was boxed or canned or didn’t need refrigeration (as I said, trips have to be cheap), we headed for Rocky Mountain National Park. We took turns driving, stopping only for gas and bathroom breaks. Twenty-seven hours later we arrived at the park.
We climbed for two weeks. The weather was marginal: thunderstorms usually roll in every afternoon in Colorado; they kept showing up at 10:30 in the morning. We got chased off the top of one route by hail and lightning. Another time we had to rappel back down to the ground. The climbing was hard. Two weeks wasn’t long enough to get the hang of it. I wasn’t used to the round-edged flaring cracks and the lack of footholds, but we had a great time. We slept on back roads, dodged park rangers, and cooked baked beans in on the tailgate of the truck like we were outside Gillette Stadium. The last day, we did a climb on a 1000-foot rock formation in beautiful weather. The route was stellar, with one section actually going through a hole in the rock about the size of a car window. We topped out at 1 p.m., hiked off, loaded up the truck and headed east.
In the high plains of eastern Colorado, my truck started acting a little weird. Whenever we pulled into a gas station, the engine would rev like I was about to take off drag racing. But the truck was a 1988, so I was used to erratic behavior. I just kissed the steering wheel and asked her to get us home.
Back at my brother’s house, he tried to extort $50 for the food we borrowed. Not like that was possible; gas expenditures already had bled us dry. After eating another $50 worth of his food, we set out for the last leg of the trip.
Thirty miles from home, we got rear-ended. The nice thing about owning a 1988 Toyota POS truck is that another dent is just another dent. No big deal. The bad thing about owning a 2002 Saab is that when it hits the rear bumper of a 1988 Toyota, the hood folds into the dashboard. We pulled over. Everyone was fine, but the woman driving the Saab kept shaking her head and muttering under her breath. I just figured she was upset, and it was easy to see why: she could reach the front grill from in the driver’s seat. I looked at the back of my Truck: not a scratch.
We exchanged insurance info and phone numbers. Looking forward to a real lunch and a shower, Ben and I hopped back into the truck to tackle the last thirty miles before home. Piece of cake, we’d each driven this stretch a thousand times.
Twenty-one miles later, the engine died. We rolled to a stop at an intersection as steam poured out from under the hood. I got out and popped it open. The engine was spurting coolant all over itself and onto the ground. The bad thing about a 1988 Toyota is that none of the gauges work, so when your engine is overheating and blowing your head gasket, you don’t know until the vehicle glides to a halt at a stop sign nine miles from your house.
Ben got out and joined me in staring blankly as green water streamed onto the engine. We looked at each other, laughed, and started dancing. We were so excited: two weeks of climbing; a cross-country adventure; a car accident; and now my truck dies. What a great trip. We couldn’t ask for better luck.
It may seem strange that I would be excited about $1200 worth of damage to my truck, but it’s all about context. Two days earlier, I had been driving across Kansas. The speed limit was 70 mph, cars passed occasionally at best, and exits were often 40 miles apart. I was bleary-eyed and high on Poptarts. A breakdown there would have been disaster.
But it happened nine miles from home. Ben called a tow truck; they would take my truck to my garage, the same one they always brought it to (it broke down a lot). I continued dancing around the crippled vehicle. Cars streamed past; drivers glanced sideways, thinking of reasons not to stop. No wonder road trips are so addictive.