I am standing in a cold mountain stream below Angel Lake in Wells, NV. The water rushes over my Keens washing out the dirt and stink from the day before. The water feels very refreshing. Before last night I had never heard of Angel Lake or the Ruby Mountains. It was all a stroke of terrible luck that brought us here. While chowing down on pizza at Rock City yesterday afternoon, we decided we would leave City of Rocks a day early to help break up the 12 to 13 hour drive to Yosemite. It was 3:30 p.m. when we pulled into camp site number four below the Twin Sisters to pack our things and leave. I parked the truck, opened my door, and my attention was immediately taken by a loud hissing noise coming from underneath the truck. I knew immediately that it was a flat tire. I hurried around the truck to identify which tire was hissing. It was the right rear tire. It was hissing loudly, but I had time to move the truck back down to the main dirt road, which was more level than the camp site. I did not waste any time getting out the equipment needed to change the flat. This was no problem I thought, just a minor delay. I had gone out before the road trip started and purchased all of the equipment I would need to change a flat. Or so I thought. I had a pop bottle hydraulic jack, a lug wrench, and a spare that was underneath the truck. As the tire continued to hiss its way flat I positioned the jack and broke the tension on the lug nuts. Then I went to the back of the truck to see about getting the spare tire out. Wait a second, exactly how does the spare tire come out. Oh yeah, you have to lower it to the ground by a mechanism underneath the truck. Hmm, what tool do I need exactly? So, I looked in the owner's manual. The manual showed two long narrow rods connected to a third rod with a hook at the end of it. You were supposed to put all three rods together then insert through a series of holes to reach the lowering mechanism. I knew I did not have anything long enough to reach from the back of the truck to the lowering mechanism, but I figured that I could find something long enough to reach if I crawled underneath the truck. Wrong again. I tried and failed. At this point I took Beth Ann's advice of asking for help from people in a neighboring campsite. I met Josh, a stocky construction foreman from Idaho that was more than happy to help beat on the spare tire in an attempt to get it lowered from underneath the truck. We continued working to no avail. Eventually, Josh and I decided we should drive down to the main camping area and search for another Tacoma and ask its owner if they had the toolkit we needed to lower the tire. At the second Tacoma we came to we met Dave from Salt Lake City who was happy to lend us the exact tools we needed. Our hopes were up as we returned to my haphazard truck. The spare tire lowered rather quickly and we soon had the flat jacked up, but the wheel would not come off. We tapped gently, pulled, tugged, pushed, tried. But the wheel would not come off. Laying on his side under the truck, Josh hammered at the wheel with a rock protecting the wheel with a folded up cloth. The wheel final popped off. With the spare on I thanked Josh and his family, gave them our left over firewood, and returned the toolkit to Dave from Salt Lake City. We were finally on our way. I had the next three and a half hours of driving down deserted two lane roads between City of Rocks, Idaho and Wells, Nevada to worry about whether or not the spare tire would survive thousands of miles of driving. I was not confident that it would. I thought it would be a terrible idea to push our luck driving on the spare tire for the rest of the road trip. I knew I needed a new pair of tires for the rear of the truck, but it was late on a Saturday and we were not near any big town. Then a few things fell into place to help us catch a lucky break. When we crossed into Nevada we went back one more time zone and suddenly it was an hour earlier. At the time it did not seem to matter, but when we pulled into Wells, NV at 8:00 p.m. it would make all the difference. We exited at Wells intending to fill up on gas a figure out where we would sleep for the night. As we pulled into a Shell gas station I noticed that a tire shop called All American Tire was situated on the same lot as the gas station. We parked and I went straight in to ask the attendant about the tire shop. The attendant's name was Juan. Juan said the tire shop would be open tomorrow, Sunday, at 6:00 a.m. I did not believe it. I had assumed that no stores would be open on a Sunday in a small town. After I filled Juan in on my situation and my concerns he did me a huge favor. He said that the head mechanic lived just a few minutes away and would call him to see if he could come down and work on the Tacoma right then. Even though I told him we could wait until the morning he called the mechanic, who I will call Larry for reference, anyway, minutes later Larry had arrived. The gash in the tire was too big to plug, so we were definitely looking at buying a new tire or a pair. Or four. After sitting down and thinking about it and talking to Larry and Juan, I decided to buy four new tires. The current tires had some life left in them, so it was a little early, but it was time to go. It only took 45 minutes and all four new tires were mounted, balanced, and back on the truck. The silver lining? Larry knew of a campground at the base of the Ruby Mountains by Angel Lake. It was eight miles from the tire shop. It was late, probably 10:30 p.m. and we were tired so we drove immediately to the campground. It was a long, winding, and steep climb to Angel Lake and it was dark so I could only imagine what the scenery was like. The next morning as I stood in the stream and looked at the Ruby Mountains I was kind of glad we got the flat tire.
The Ruby Mountains.Photograph by Chuck Bolte.
After the Ruby Mountains and Wells, the drive through Nevada did become somewhat boring. We sped our way across endless desert and scrub with not much civilization in sight. We turned south on I-95 west of Winnemucca and drove through even less humanity to get to Hawthorne, Nevada. From Hawthorne we were close to Yosemite, about an hour. Similar to our experience in approaching City of Rocks, I kept wondering, how is an hour of driving going to take us from barren desert to a pristine alpine environment? The change is immediate. We were driving up a long hill just at the Nevada/California border and as we crested the hill and crossed the state line we were presented with a magnificent view of the eastern Sierra Nevada and Mono Lake.
Mono Lake.Photograph by Chuck Bolte.
It was awesome. Tall peaks still blanketed with the late season snow rose from the valley floor. Green alpine forests thrived in the lower sectors of mountain. It was as awesome as we had hoped it would be. We rolled into the Mono Lake visitors center and established communication with Beth Ann's friend and our Yosemite tour guide, Matt. After eating some dinner we met up with Matt on "the 120" and made a climbing plan for the next week. After deciding that we would climb Cathedral Peak on Monday and Fairview Dome on Tuesday we made a journey to a secluded campsite somewhere outside Mammoth, California.
Our Yosemite tour guide.Photograph by Chuck Bolte.
In this particular primitive camping area, campers have access to a nearby natural hot spring. We dipped into the steaming pool under a gorgeous starry sky complete with shooting stars every few minutes. Refreshed we slid into our sleeping bags and slept happy to finally be at least near Yosemite.
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