Wind Rivers Fail

We’d gone to Salt Lake for some interviews and had a window of free time so we headed to the Wind Rivers to go into Deep Lake.

We headed in the long dirt road to the Big Sandy Trailhead.  On the last 4 miles of rough dirt road I heard a clunking sound and it had also out of character had the GEN light flicker.  I crawled under the car and the front passenger wheel was moving around.  I couldn’t see anything broken but our trip was clearly over as I had an interview on Monday and it was Thursday night.

Friday morning the van drove just fine out to Rock Spring.  We luckily found a mechanic to look at it and he told us the van just had a loose bolt and if we took it to an alignment shop they would take care of it.  They pulled the van out and parked it and left it running when I jumped in the van was dead and would not restart.  I screwed around with the van but nothing worked and we turned it over to the pros.  The biggest indicator I should have seen was the engine code reader I had wouldn’t register.

The van computer was fired and would take a week to get.  We found a SUV rental one way to Salt Lake and headed down to SLC.  We didn’t have the van to crash in so we called up our friends George and Denise to see if they had a room we could rent and we crashed with them.  A week later I walked down to catch the SLC TRAX to downtown and caught greyhound to Rock Springs and then walked to the mechanic.  The van ran fine back and everything was back rolling.