The Story Of A Cummins Suburban (Lots Of Pics)

[monte0185]

Originally Posted by mosesburb

So I had some vacation time that I had to use before my service anniversary, so I plotted an idea that if sold, could be quite fun.

It worked. We loosely planned a camping/wandering trip and with that, set to loading the truck. Now, my boy has not been camping before and as a side note, he still sleeps with his light on in his room (I am opposed to this, but with my horrid work schedule for the past nine months or so, it left me on the phone at bedtime instead of there in person). Now, when I say sleeps with his light on, I don't mean a little bit, I mean we have planes circling asking for permission to land kind of light. So with that, we knew that we had some work cut out for us.

I got the truck loaded up on the Tuesday before the 4th of July weekend. We got out of town at about 0900 and we were on our way. We headed up to Poland Junction and took that across to where it meets up with FR261. A funny thing happened on the way to FR261 though. When you get past Poland the road gets rough and is basically one lane at that point. About 1/4mi in, we come around an uphill corner and are nose-to-nose with a Caterpillar D6R. Uh, this is not good. Where we sat, it was around 1/8mi worth of backing up to get to a point to turn around. I do not really like the sound of that, so I park it and walk up to talk with the operator. He says the road is open and give him a few to clear the area and we'll be able to pass. Sure enough, a few minutes pass and he runs it almost vertically up the side of the hill so we can pass. We finish Poland Road with no further excitement and meet up with FR261.



We take FR261 over to Seantor Highway and head North toward Prescott. Somewhere along the way, nature called and I found a nice scenic spot to take care of business:



We get into Prescott and find a place to eat lunch. We get out and find a museum that has a bunch of old mining equipment outside, so we wander around it and I explain to my boy what each piece is and how it worked and was used. We wander back to the truck and find some fuel then head north to AZ89A and take it toward Mingus Mountain/Jerome.

We turn off AZ89A about ten miles before Jerome and take FR104 over to FR413. Heading northeast on FR413 we start looking for a spot to camp. Not too far down the trail I saw a little two-track off the left side. We back up and head down the two-track. We get in a ways and find a tree fallen across the trail. It had been there awhile and a route around the tree was already present. I managed to get the Sub around it and we continued heading back into the sticks on this two-track. We got back in a ways and found a nice spot.



We started setting up our gear, but with burn restrictions there was no possibility of a campfire.



We stayed up for awhile then decided to retire to the truck. I put up the window coverings that I engineered and had my Mom manufacture. She used two layers of canvas (almost like denim in weight) and stitched magnets along the hems to make some really cool window coverings. This, and the fact we were in the middle of nowhere, made the inside of the truck very dark. We watched a John Deere show on the DVD player, then he laid down and I read him a couple stories. After those were done he got a little whiney when he realized the lights were going out. I told him a non-fiction story about an orange Suburban and how it came to be. He liked the story and was about out. When he woke up in the morning, I pointed out the fact that he slept with the light off and woke up alive!! (side note: he only uses a dim night light at home now--a positive effect of camping!!)

So I packed up the truck and we head out. We continue down FR413 in the same direction (toward Jerome) that we were headed when we found the two-track. Now I had run the road about ten years ago in another truck so I had an idea of what was coming, but I was in for a rude awakening once we got well into the switchbacks. It appears as though the road has not been maintained in many years. It was quite overgrown and very rough--mind you not too difficult, just rougher than hell, so no speed could be attained. We ran fourteen miles of this road in low range for speed control and several of those miles never saw the speedometer needle move off zero. It is a VERY NARROW shelf road. These pics do not do justice to the roughness or narrowness of the road.



In this one you can kind of see where the edge of the road is in relation to the center of the hood. (This is an extremely smooth part of the road, extremely smooth...)



The road just grates on and on and on and on. I have to put the left side of the truck into the bushes/trees/manzanita/genereal vegetation to keep the right side tires (the wife's side BTW) on the trail. There were points where I was scraping the left side, right side and top simultaneously. It got to a point where we were taking on so much vegetation through the open windows on the left side that we rolled up the windows and cruised in A/C comfort for the rest of the trail. This is a long, painful trail, but it has some spectacular scenery. There is a point where you can see sixty miles in a 180* radius from one point. My favorite view of Jerome is also had from this trail:



The trail ends in Jerome, so at this point relief is felt because the end is near. Well, not quite. There is still over an hour of this lovely road to run yet. Somewhere along after this view, I am putting the left side of the truck into a bush and all of a sudden the steering wheel spins left and the truck stops. Uh, that can't be good. I back up, move right ever so slightly and head on down the trail looking for somewhere I can get out and inspect the damage. I find a spot and check it out. The chrome ring on the locking hub hit a rock. It appears as though there was no harm done. Driving down this trail is a constant sawing at the wheel, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.... Well, somewhere along that run I get the feeling that something with the steering is not right. It still works and we FINALLY get off that trail. It took so long that it is past lunch time so we head down the hill toward Cottonwood. Now that we are on pavement, I realize what is up. The steering wheel is at 11:00/5:00--not good. We stop to get some grub and when we get out, my boy looks at the excessively pinstriped/scratched truck and exclaims "The truck looks cool!! It looks like it has flames on it!!" I call a buddy of mine that we visited in January and he is around so we decide to head that way. We stop to pick up some food and I stay with the truck and start working on the drag link. I get it re-centered and we head up the hill.

We get to the forest road that my buddy lives on and I tell my boy to come up front. I have him sit on my lap and let him steer us along the FR to my friends place. He loved it!! We hang out there for the night and the next day we go out wandering around. We stop off at Blue Ridge Reservoir.



We head down by the dam and check out it and the spillway. We brought a fishing pole and tackle box for my boy, but the walls surrounding the lake are so steep that we couldn't find a trail down to the water.



We decide to spend another night up there. I brought a rifle with so I could teach my boy how to shoot. He did pretty good and actually put a few rounds into what he was aiming at. Not bad for a first time. We roasted some marshmallows over a grille and sacked out. We got up the next morning and putzed around trying to delay the inevitable departure. While we were doing that my buddy's wife said we need to stop at the Baker Butte fire lookout station. Sounds good. So we load up and head out. We stop off and check out the tower.



It is very neat up there. The map for spotting fires is extrememly cool in its simplicity. The lady has a very cool labrador and she answers all kinds of strange questions that I/we have. I have some pics off of the tower is anybody is interested in seeing them. We climb down from the tower and unfortuantely are on our way home. We get home without issue and unload the essential goods leaving the others for later when it cools off.

All in all it was a great trip. We had a load of fun. My boy got his first camping trip, first rifle use, first opeartion of a UTV, first roasted marshmallows and first driving of the Suburban. The truck ran great and other than the adjusting of the draglink had no issues at all.

This was the intended use of the Suburban from the time I bought it. It took a bunch of years, but it can finally be used for what it was built for--back country travel. Yay!!

I have ridden that trail from prescott over to jerome on 4-wheelers. It was alot of fun. We took an entire week and road all over the place there a few years back when my grandfather got remarried. It was alot of fun. Put about 500 miles on my 4-wheeler.