The Great Western Loop: The Day That Should Not Be

The next day started out bright and clear and with only around 55 miles to go to the next campsite, it was supposed to be an easy day. Instead, it would turn out to be the most arduous day of the trip.

With the best weather we have had all week and the short travel day ahead of us, I thought it would be a great time to get some drone footage. After all, our campsite for the previous night had been in a really cool location.

And that is when the day took a drastic turn…

I spent the next two and a half hours scrambling up, down and through the very rugged terrain trying to locate my crashed drone. I had a pretty good idea of where it should be since I was orbiting that rock spire, but finding that spire when viewing the area from a totally different direction and perspective was a different story. To make matters worse, my controller/tablet had lost connection with the drone so I could not use the “Find My Drone” feature it has built in. This meant that I had to keep trying to reconnect to my drone as I picked my way though the rock formation.

I was eventually able to reconnect with it and turn on the location lights and sounds. I was barely able to to hear the drone beeping and worked my way to it. In the heat of the moment, I forgot to take a picture of it where it had come to rest before I picked it up to examine it. However, the photo below is of the crash site and the drone was resting right at the edge of that “path”. It does not look like it in the photo, but that is about a 20 foot drop down and it would have been next to impossible for me to reach it had it tumbled over that final ledge.

The drone was destroyed beyond my ability to repair it on the road. It had two broken flight arms, one motor’s electrical cables completely severed, a couple of broken rotor blades and the lower fuselage frame was cracked. Trying to still make the most out of the morning, I picked up my still camera and was treated to a Common Merganser hen and her six chicks swimming in the river next to camp.

With the morning’s ordeal out of the way, we made our way up and out of the river bottoms.

And like every trip I’ve ever taken, were met by cows. Whenever you get a good section of high speed dirt, it never seems to fail that they are standing in the middle of the road.

After navigating the minefields of cows we reached our first point of interest for the day, the resting place of Jean Baptiste Charbonneau. Jean was the son of Sacagawea and Toussaint Charbonneau and was born during the Lewis and Clark Expedition. It seemed fitting to pay our respects to a historical overlander on our overlanding trip.

Surprisingly there was only one Sacagawea coin placed on his monument, or maybe not so surprisingly with gas prices as high as they were.

With our respects paid, it was time to get remote again. We took a two track “road” that I had scouted out online to get us to the Jordan Craters lava flow. Along the way we were treated to a wonderful view of a meadow covered in yellow flowers.

We were also treated to a sliced sidewall in one of the truck’s tires. Remember how I said it was time for us to get remote just a little bit ago, well we were pretty remote when the tire went flat…

It took a lot of effort and even more time, but with a combination of constantly airing up the blown tire and digging out a spot to put the jack, we were able to get the spare tire mounted. To add injury to insult, when we put the spare wheel on and tightened everything down, the locking lug nut that came on the truck decided to brake and strip out. While it did not effect us driving on the spare at the moment, it was going to be a huge pain when we found a replacement tire.

I back tracked a little ways on foot to see if I could find what had sliced the sidewall, but could not find nothing. With over eight miles left to to reach our planned campsite, down to no spare, and unable to determine what caused the flat, we had a decision to make.

It did not make a lot of sense to go deeper into the wilderness when we would just have to back track all the way out and to the nearest town that might have a tire that would fit, so in the end we decided that it would be safer to turn around and pick up the main road to Cow Lakes Recreation Area and stay there for the night.