Is it true that brass tire valves last the life of the vehicle?

Those are plenty of those but I was thinking of the difficulties created by the canyons.

The choices still are limited.

I'd love to go through Escalante National Monument on a motorcycle. Driving through to Capitol Reef on the main dirt road wasn't enough. I wish I could remember what/where that truly pitiful slot canyon on the east side of ENP was.

not have a photo of ourself or a friend under the mushroom-shaped rock?

There are tons of slot canyons, most of which are too far for ME to walk, but the photos are spectacular. Fortunately the Navajos give easy tours to one or two out of Page. Book ahead.

Best road trips ever were in Utah. It's really not fair that they got so much pretty stuff. Makes me feel sorry for the poor people east of the Rockies. Trees are nice, but after a while you get tired of green :-)

I was born and grew up in Box Elder County Utah ... and I moved to the Midsouth because I wanted to see green instead of shades of brown and sagebrush green . We live in north central Arkansas now (Memphis for

A friend lived right on the edge of Ozark NF and took us on a jeep ride up into the mountains. Fine with hubby and me, we were dirtriders, but it was scary for my mom. We bought a monsterhome just to take our moms across the country to see stuff. Worth every penny (not a lot of them, it was used!) right there, but we took a few more trips in it.

I started down the trail from the North Rim. Things were going well until, in my mind's eye, the trail became 1 foot wide with a vertical wall to the right and a vertical drop to the left. Not my thing. I'd have to be tied on a mule and heavily sedated for that trip.

I hiked down one of the slot canyons in the Grand Staircase before it became a national monument. Most of my hiking is up mountains and I'm careful about going down canyons where I'm going to have to haul my tired butt back up.

Then there are the pour offs. I think it was Ed Abbey who wrote about going down a canyon until he got to a pour off with a long long drop. On his way backup he came to one he'd slid down but couldn't get traction on the smooth rock. He realizes that his bare feet will stick better than the boots. The boots are cumbersome and he figures the best best is to throw them up first. Then he thinks 'What if I can't get up to retrieve my boots?' Then reality sinks in -- if he can't get up he is going to die.

I did the barefoot thing at Echo Park (CO). However I'd hiked down on a good trail so if I couldn't get up the pour off it wasn't the end of the world.

I've spent time in southern AZ but sooner or later I want to see real trees. I've lived close to the Canadian border most of my life and while I bitch about winter I'm used to it.

The Ozarks certainly are scenic. I went up Petit Jean Mountain with a 53' trailer. No fun. Went around one hairpin and the truck stopped moving. The drivers were off the ground and it was trying to roll over but couldn't because of the angle between the tractor and the trailer.

Every damn goat trail in Arkansas is marked as a truck route in the truckers atlas. Couldn't turn around by the time I realized I was screwed. The guy in the wrecker told me not to feel bad. A couple of weeks before he had to rescue a wide load that the state had routed over the mountain.

Last time through the are I was in the Missouri Ozarks. Snore. Ain't the same.

There are trees all over, you just have to look for them!

'The Long Long Trailer', a Lucille Ball movie from the 50s. They haul a trailer over Tioga Pass (Yosemite) back when it was a narrow 1-way dirt road with steep dropoffs. My parents and I did it in an ordinary car, and it was plenty scary.

There are marked snowmobile-only trails in Brian Head, UT. Every once in a while a "Hold my beer" guy (frequently from Kalifornia) will use one in his expensive 4WD vehicle and get hopelessly stuck. The local wrecker apparently makes a nice living from these guys. (AAA won't touch you if you're off road.)

Nothing ever is.

The jury is out on whether mesquite and ironwood classify as 'real trees'. I mean when you're shorter than a damn cactus...

My parents and I drove to Seattle from upstate NY to visit my brother in '52. The vehicle was a '51 Chevy. It was paved but US 14 over the Big Horn Mountains was interesting. Narrow road, no guard rails, and tandem log trucks coming down. I went over it again a few years ago but it was so foggy I couldn't see much. I always remember being able to look up the mountain and see the vehicles on the next traverse.

It's interesting what a little kid remembers. I was fascinated by the paint pots in Yellowstone. I got back there in '88 and they weren't as impressive as I remembered. I asked a ranger and he said the '59 earthquake that created Quake Lake had indeed affected the paint pots. '88 was memorable in its own way. Yellowstone was on fire and after years of aggressive suppression they decided to let it burn.

There's a back road north from Zion that I took. I turned around when I hit the drifts. One early summer I went up to a little lake west of the Seeley-Swan valley. I came to the drifted area, parked the bike, and walked the rest of the way. Coming out I saw fresh tracks where someone had tried to bust through. It gets worse. It was a guy towing a camper. The road is very narrow with a steep dropoff to the canyon. and I had just enough room to carefully get past on the DR650. Even better, the sun was going down and he had about a half mile more to back down before there was a wide enough place to drop the trailer and get the mess turned around. I offered to help but there wasn't anything I could do.

There are several passes here that aren't snowmobile trails but they aren't maintained in the winter. The sport with the 4WD crowd is to see how far they can get in the spring but sometimes a tourist looks at a map, or maybe believes his GPS, and tries to take the shortcut. Most of them survive.

I think that to be classified as a tree it has to provide significant shade. Joshua "trees" don't cut it. Neither do those tall palm "trees" ith just a tuft of leaves at the top, although the fronds are good at falling off and damaging cars. They may be coconut palms, and some number of people are killed every year by falling coconuts. I guess there are worse ways to go. Utah junipers don't claim to be trees, but I think they'll stop most cars in their tracks.. And even though they might be even older than bristlecones, depending on how you define "old", creosote bushes are just shrubs.

I don't think I've ever seen an ironwood. We only went south to go to the Mexican dentists, a nasty 2-way drive.

Probably still lots of roads like that. The Moki-Dugway road between Mexican Hat and Utah 95 is almost like that, but wide enough for cars to pass and paved now. Spectacular views.

Just think-- some people get on a plane and spend 2 weeks lying on a beach somewhere. Hard to believe. I used to be able to back a trailer as long as I could see it, but there was no way I could back the MC trailer behind the 27-foot monsterhome. The idea of what that guy had to do is terrifying.

The natives probably strip the bodies after the spring thaw.

There were two dentists in town but only one had an x-ray machine. I you needed x-rays at the other place you walked down to the 'competition' and he took them. I think it's a statement on US practice where everybody has to have their own MRI and other expensive equipment.

Definitely spectacular. The Maze is a section of Canyonlands NP that is west of the river and doesn't get much attention. There are old roads created by uranium explorers and others. The ranger station before you go down has a scrapbook showing people negotiating the switchbacks. There isn't any requirement for vehicles to enter but after seeing the CJ-5s I decided my 2WD F150 wasn't up for the trip. I think there is one route where you have to back down alternate legs of the switchbacks.

He was lucky it was a pickup and a relatively short camp trailer. Even then. I drove OTR in the '90s and got fairly good at backing in 53' trailers; the short ones are even harder. I would sometimes pull doubles and I never could back those up more than 3'. I was happy when the company got rid of them. Carpet was a money maker and you could get 2 rows of 12' carpet rolls in a 27' trailer but you couldn't get 4 rows in a 48'. When they went to 53' trailers you could get 4 rows. In the '90s they started lifting the restrictions on 53s so that was the way to go.

No waste. There is a road that sort of follows the Rogue River from Medford to Gold Beach. Some guy believed the GPS about the shortcut and took it in the winter. When they got bogged down he went for help and died. His wife and kid stayed with the car and were rescued. I've been through that area in the summer. Scenic. There is a trail up Mt. Bolivar with great views. Still and all I was happy when I finally got back to civilization.

Of the 30 some cars I've owned over the years only ONE had any warranty. That was the ONE car I bought new - and believe me, it NEEDED the warranty!!!

I bet I'm one of the few people you "know" who'se been to Sonoita. My son, his friend, my husband and I drove to Mazatlan for the 1991 solar eclipse. Maybe 50 miles south of the border a wheel bearing started complaining, so we drove back to Sonoita to get the bearing. Son fixed it in the parking lot. Turns out that the friend had forgotten his passport, so he ducked down and I walked in with our passports to the border station. Not certain what we did when we came back finally. Maybe we just drove across because the border patrol had gone home.

Good and exhausting experience. Made it just in time. Nightbirds started singing and mosquitos started biting so we just watched for a few minutes and started back. We had bought actual eclipse glasses from the astronomy store and saw lots of kids looking directly at the son so we gave them our glasses. I don't think our "peligro mirar el sol" warnings carried much weight.

We had a lot of dental work done in Algodones (near Yuma) and Tijuana. Same high-tech equipment as in the states, but much cheaper. If for some reason you needed a specialist the dentist made a phone call and the specialist arrived in maybe half an hour. The electricity in the entire town went out for maybe half an hour, which was a truly miserable experience south of Yuma in the summer. If you were willing to sit in the chair for 4 hours they were happy to let you do it. Not a bad experience, but the traffic on the drive is a real killer.

As far as I can tell the work is of the same quality as in the US. There are one or two good dental schools in Mexico, but they hang course certificates from US dental schools on their walls instead of diplomas, so I suspect that it's mostly OTJ training, although the main dentist lived in the US and said he had a degree from UC San Diego.

Some places are just BETTER on a motorcycle. I'm glad we did Monument Valley on motorcycles long ago -- definitely more fun than the Yaris in

I'm amazed at what truckers do. I had to back the monsterhome down a narrow driveway and then swing a right angle to park it, which required

The neighbor put in a new fence, and I don't think we can get it out again. Maybe in pieces. Makes a nice storage room.

Last time we drove the road next to the Rogue pretty much every property next to the river was for sale. I think logging had moved to the south and there were no jobs.

I don't know how it is now but I went through Sonoyta a couple of times on the way to Puerto Penasco. That is as far as the road goes so they didn't worry about turista cards or other formalities. Nice place if you avoid spring break.

Of course back then the road out to Quitobaquito Springs paralleled the border and Mexico Route 2 was about 100 yards on the other side of a three strand barbed wire fence. For a while the road was closed and after that the park people ran you out in a van with armed guides. The last time I was there you could drive yourself and they'd built a welded steel fence that was even easier to climb through than the barbed wire.

Yeah, but the Yaris has some creature comforts. I took a ride-about around Halloween one year and took 191 from Three Way up to Show low. Nice ride but it was a bit of a surprise when I came around a curve north of Alpine and found myself in snow. I was happy it didn't last long. 4 wheels definitely better than 2 in snow.

The road I'm thinking of is deceptive. It follows the river from Merlin and is good paved road until you get to the launch point for the rafters. You cross the river there and don't get anywhere near it until you get close to Gold Beach. Lot of twisty little unmarked dirt roads. It's mostly NF/BLM. I'd been to Crater and was following the river.

The company I worked for hauled a lot of carpet and furniture. They're pretty good indicators of economic health and Medford wasn't getting much of either. There was a diner with a sign advertising spotted owl stew.

As I recall, we were driving a 1960 Ford station wagon with two S90 "adapted" dirtbikes crammed into the back standing up, so we had creature comforts too -- such as they were. 2 adults and 2 toddlers on a mattress. and an ice chest. Good times.

Good dirt riding at Kennedy Meadows. 9-Mile Canyon road is kind of like Moki-Dugway, but wider and much less scenic. Went up CA 99 on July 4 to the start and found it closed due to snow. WTF? THIS IS DESERT! We tried riding in snow once. 100 feet was plenty.

I've got a recipe for roast spotted owl with pupfish stuffing. Haven't tried it yet.

PNW roadberries. No idea how much caecinognic road dust was involved, we gobbled until we couldn't gobble any more. So far so good...

In the spring there are drifts where a 4WD has plowed though and I'll ride in the rut if I can see a dry spot ahead. The problem is the ruts are a foot or so deep and no way am I getting out of it.

The Sportster wasn't too bad in the Thanksgiving AZ snow. Low center of gravity is good. Shortly after I bought it I took a little trip. The Highwoods east of Great Falls are nice and the gravel road in isn't bad. There is another route out that I'd never been on. I wound up fording the same creek 5 times. A few years later I did the same trip with the DR650 and the Harley actually goes through creeks with a lot less drama. The street tires sort of slither through the rocks while the knobbies wanted to go off on a tangent. I'd put on a 5.2 gallon aftermarket tank so I had even more weight up high. With the stock tank there are places over the ID divide where you pass the point of no return and have to continue on to get gas.