The Story Of A Cummins Suburban (Lots Of Pics)

[Dieselwrencher]

Originally Posted by ryanroo

its about time someone got some use out of those t3 flanges.

I've sent some dirty air through some of those said flanges.

[ERASER5]

I thought about you ,Mosesburb last Sunday. Leaving a TSC store, I natrually scan the parking lot for vehicles that might warrent a second look. Nothing popped. Then behind me I hear a diesel cough to life. "There are no diesels in the lot" flashed across my mind as my head swiveld like an owl. It was a lifted RANGER! I thought this must be what Mosesburb gets when he fires up his burb! Wrong sound from the wrong truck!

Pretty cool. There was no tell tail signs that the truck had been converted. If I can find him again, maybe I can get a look.

[dhaymaker]

Originally Posted by ERASER5

I thought about you ,Mosesburb last Sunday. Leaving a TSC store, I natrually scan the parking lot for vehicles that might warrent a second look. Nothing popped. Then behind me I hear a diesel cough to life. "There are no diesels in the lot" flashed across my mind as my head swiveld like an owl. It was a lifted RANGER! I thought this must be what Mosesburb gets when he fires up his burb! Wrong sound from the wrong truck!

Pretty cool. There was no tell tail signs that the truck had been converted. If I can find him again, maybe I can get a look.

A while back, I was leaving work on one of the last days before I was laid off and I'm headed across the parking lot to my truck. I hear a diesel start up and I look around, but the only other person I saw in the parking lot was in a Dodge Ramcharger, probably a late '80s model. I didn't get a chance to ask the driver about it, nor did I ever see the vehicle again in the parking lot in my remaining time with that company, but I had the same reaction as ERASER5!! LOL

[goldenburb]

Wish to know more on the parts need to install a 5.9L Cummins to my sub

[84chevyguyid]

My suggestion would be to go to page one and start reading, he has documented his build very thoroughly. He has made a heck of a nice rig out of it!

[FrankieD]

I love your post's I sent the link to my brother he just moved to Maricopa last July and is looking for places to explore. Him and his wife are into rock hunting, I am looking at Snow Birding there when I retire in July of 2015 Illinois is about as much of a no fun state as you can get. looking forward to your next trip.

[goldenburb]

Originally Posted by 84chevyguyid

My suggestion would be to go to page one and start reading, he has documented his build very thoroughly. He has made a heck of a nice rig out of it!

Just did and theirs no way in hell I could every be able to do this.. The man got skills. Better start looking for plain B..lol

[1leglance]

Goldenburb
Nick has a been a huge help in my build and you are absolutely right about him having serious skills.
Not only that he is a fountain of knowledge. As soon as I switched from doing a diesel swap to fuel injection he was already putting together a parts list, helping me pull parts at the salvage yard and thinking way ahead in the project.

Frankie, you should have your brother look at www.expeditionportal.com/forum as Nick and I are both on there and plenty of great info in the Four Corners section on where to travel out here....and I am sure some of us would be happy to show'em around.

[mosesburb]

Well, it looks like I have some unwanted free-time on my hands here so I guess it's time to catch up a little. Things have been going on and time has been tight so no updates have been given. After having to search out this thread and wondering where to start, I wandered through some picture files and found some stuff that had not been posted so I figured I'd start with those first and see where it goes from there (or how long it takes for my PB to meltdown).

This trip happened a couple years back. I took the usual few hundred, but somewhere along the way some setting on my camera got bumped and the pictures turned out with a horrible cyan color. I was able to correct a lot of it out, but it took forever, really didn't look right, and I actually never finished, so I bagged the trip report. It was actually the trip that illustrated the need for a more reliable method of heating for the cabin of the truck while parked. It was early October in 2012. We headed up to an area a little bit south of Williams AZ for a day of wilderness first aid. The pics of that portion are not too exciting, but a lot was learned. After that we retired up the hill a little to an old cinder pit and set up camp for the night. This was the night that I had so many different problems with the propane heating of the truck. So after a chilly night, we packed up and set out for a little town called Parks over near Flagstaff. I needed to pick up a winch from a member up there whose wife had picked it up for me in Flagstaff a while back.

One neat thing about that town is it is on a old alignment of Route 66. There is quite a bit of old 66 still in Northern Arizona. The longest remaining stretch runs between Seligman and Kingman (covered in a previous post), but with a little investigation, you can run most of the way from Flagstaff to the California border on the old road. It won't be the most direct, nor the quickest, but a lot of it is still there. Williams AZ was the last town to be bypassed by I-40 in late 1983. October I think.

Route 66 near Parks:



Right near here is a very old alignment of 66. Looking back at the truck you can see it off to the left as a void between the trees:



It looks pretty obvious as to where the road went and that it was a lot narrower then, but it is a little deceiving as shown in this pic:



The trees that look like they frame the road are actually growing on a concrete bridge from the original alignment. A shot of the original pavement:



So we picked up our winch and had to decide what to do. I asked my boy where he wanted to camp that night and he said Jerome. With that we decided to head back to Williams and head south from there running dirt instead of pavement. I decided it was a great day to run some 66 back to Williams as we are not on a time schedule. On our way we pass some neat old roadside history.

An old gas station/grocery store:



Along the way we pass an old "wayside". I haven't seen a wayside in probably 30 years. It wasn't fenced off or gated, so I swung in to take a look. It had the old vault/pit toilet house (still open and maintained) and some picnic benches here and there. Pretty neat slice of history of how the modern "super rest areas" began.

Gratuitous truck shot at the wayside:



A neat look down the narrow two lane back towards Parks:



This is a much lesser-used portion that was paved at one point, but probably fell into disrepair and was deemed less expensive to maintain as gravel than the cost of repaving it. Just a guess though. I do believe it to be an original alignment because of one of the tell-tale 66 identifiers--the telephone poles.



So we got down into Williams which is a really neat town to wander around--which we did, but the pics are really bad and the color correction really didn't turn out well, so I'll hold off on those for another trip. Just south of Williams is a neat stone masonry dam:



It doesn't take too long to get off of pavement going this way:



This is coming into the lowest elevation of the road. Nice looking scenery here:



This is not too far out of Jerome. A view across the valley:



We got into Jerome and grabbed some grub at a diner and then headed south out of Jerome to find a place to camp. We headed down a trail that I have wanted to check out for years. We ended up widening it for a while until we found a good spot to pull off of it. That night was significantly warmer than the previous night. We packed up the next morning , went back into Jerome and did some wandering. I can neither admit nor deny wandering through some neat areas outside of town. I took some great pics, but those turned out horrible too. We ended up heading back home mid-afternoon. Other than freezing our hinders off in the truck the first night, it was a great time.

[dieseldude4bt]

I always enjoy your posts, thanks.

[Dieselwrencher]

Another nice trip with beautiful scenery!

[mosesburb]

Originally Posted by dieseldude4bt

I always enjoy your posts, thanks.

Thanks!!

Originally Posted by Dieselwrencher

Another nice trip with beautiful scenery!

Yeah, that it was. The camera setting foul-up was frustrating. I have a ton of really cool pics that I couldn't fix for squat, so I can't share those out of frustration. Hopefully the next few updates will make up for that .

[hgs_notes]

Glad to see you back. That dam is really cool. Great scenery.

[mosesburb]

This was a trip we ran the day after Thanksgiving 2012. Our friend Bill from Colorado (the guy with the white Ramcharger from our UT/CO trip) was coming down (with is dad too) to bring a 6.2L to my buddy Lance for his Suburban. It was agreed that some sort of run needed to be made while he was here. Lance put together a route and got a few of us together. It was a rather odd group of vehicles--one that I'm sure has never been assembled before or since. We had my '72 Suburban, Lance's '70 Suburban, Bill's Dodge with a 24V Cummins, another friend of ours Waymon with his Lexus GX470 and another friend Rou with another Lexus GX470. Yep, two three door Suburbans, two Lexus GX470's and a reliable Dodge, all in one group.

So we set out Friday morning heading east out of town. Our first stop was they Boyce Thompson Arboretum. It is a really neat place with thousands of different types of vegetation to look at. I took a bunch of pictures of that, but figured if someone was interested, it would do them more good to just go to their website https://arboretum.ag.arizona.edu/ and take a virtual tour if they were interested. We spent some time there and then headed on toward Superior. Superior, Miami and Globe are mining towns from the way back. Massive amounts of copper have been pulled from the ground in and around these towns for well over a hundred years. Along the way, I recall that there is an overlook of an open pit operation south of Superior so I suggested it and it garnered enough interest that we decided to venture down and check it out. While passing through Superior, off in the distance, an old smelter site is visible (the tall smokestack and pile of black slag are good visual clues):



We turn south at Superior and head down 177 to a road that takes you into the viewing area. We stopped and had lunch here while watching the massive haul trucks go from point A to point B and back. Absolutely amazing how large this site is. One thing I failed to do was a series of pics to stitch together into a panoramic. This is about the best pic I have of what we saw:



It would take probably about ten to fifteen pictures just like this to encompass the entire site that is visible from the overlook. In that picture, if you look at the telephone pole in the middle of the pic, then look about halfway down the pole on the right side, there is a shovel and a massive haul truck in the pic. They look like dots from our vantage point.

So we packed up and headed back up the road to Superior and then headed over toward Miami and through Globe. We continued on 60 until we started dropping into the Salt River Canyon:



This is a very scenic area that is very striking when first approaching it. After reaching the bottom we pulled off onto a trail that heads back west. Very shortly after that we were greeted with the river that is the namesake of the canyon; The Salt River:



We would loosely parallel the Salt for the first part of our journey. A view from a little further down the road:



And again:



As I understand it, the white bluffs in about the center of the picture, are the source of the salinity that gives the Salt River its characteristic name:



More nice scenery:



A neat little pool near a fording we had:



Getting toward the end of the day. The desert really comes alive with the contrast of light and shadow. A view off to the south near where we camped for the night:



So we set up camp near the river. Bill cooked us some of his insanely tasty fried chicken and we sat around and watched a video on a projection screen of some cats back in the 30's taking reliable Dodges across Africa (I think it was). Really neat video and it makes you think of what we "need" today to do what they did with cars back then. Stay tuned for the next installment!!

[1985-GMC]

Awesome pictures as always!

[Average Joe]

Cool Pics! Thanx again for sharing your journeys. This is living.

[Dean'smeanmachine]

love the pics

[justcuz]

Thanks for the continued postings of your trips. Had breakfast with a friend from Prescott this morning, we were talking about driving up to the Overland Expo and maybe doing a little of old 66, then back down that dirt road through Chino Valley to Prescott.
I still have vivid memories of the emerald colored pool on the Verde River you posted a couple years ago. Simply beautiful!

[mosesburb]

So we packed up the next morning and headed on down the trail. We continued west to Cherry Creek Road where we turned north. This is a narrow shelf road for almost its entire length. Along the way we spotted some cliff dwellings across the canyon:



This gigantic pebble conglomerate was literally hanging by the side of the road. Neat looking rock:



This trail was really neat in that the acute switchbacks were often formed by spring water flowing down the mountain eroding the mountain back over eons and creating a micro-climate/environment in each one. We would go from dry scrub brush to lush green leaves with trees and grass in these switchbacks. It was really cool to see how these micro climates form and survive in an otherwise inhospitable area.

As of now, this is my favorite picture of the truck:



We rolled up Cherry Creek Rd until it intersected the Young Highway. At this point we were turning south to find a place to explore/camp. Bill and his dad decided to head back to CO from here rather than head back south and make the trip back even longer. So we stopped for a while. Bill borrowed some air from my truck to air up in exchange for an ice cream bar. Excellent trade I thought.



We all turned south onto the Young Highway (some of it is actually paved now!!) and Bill and his dad set off for home. We traveled down to the trail that goes up past Workman's Creek. It is actually a nice thing that this trail is still open as there was a uranium mining operation in the area and some areas are still radioactive. There are signs in some areas saying day use only at this site (because of radioactivity). Uh, yeah, I think I'll pass, thanks. We went up past that area to the falls. I don't recall how tall this thing is but it is pretty impressive.



We checked that out and then headed up to a fire lookout tower at the top of the mountain. On our way up there I snapped this pic which shows how far we came today. In about the center of the pic is a horizontal white/light colored stripe. That is about where we camped the night before and we got to where we are by travelling way to the left of where the pic ends and coming several miles back in to where this pic was taken. We covered some distance that's for sure:



The Abbey fire tower:



By the base of the tower, there was a Flintstone's living room set up with these monoliths as chairs and tables:



So we went back down the hill a little ways and set up camp for the night. In the am everybody kind of split out on their own and took their own way home. We stopped along the way down to check out a little canyon off the side of the road:



A couple in a Honda car came out of the road we were going in on and said there was a guy up there whose truck wouldn't start. I get a bit nervous and my spidey senses kind of kick in in a situation like this, but I figured if he didn't kill and eat those two, he might be legit. We rolled down the trial toward where the guy should be and did find him. Young kid with an extraordinarily clean late squarebody Chevy. Very clean. Talked to the kid for a few minutes and determined he left his lights on after he shut off the truck and drained the battery so the truck wouldn't start. Threw the cables on it and had him running in no time (three batteries and a 130A alternator has that effect). I told him to just leave it run while he scouted for whatever he was going to hunt. Good deed for the day behind us, we continued on.

Where the trail comes out and hits 188, a choice must be made. Hang a left and go down to Globe/Miami or pull a right and go up past Roosevelt Lake and take the Apache Trail down into Apache Junction. The route through Globe is quicker. It is all paved and fast. It is longer though. The other route is much more scenic. It passes three lakes and some other nice scenery and is mostly dirt road. I asked my boy which way he wanted to go and of course he chose the scenic dirt direction.

Now, years ago (actually the last time I was out here), to follow the shore of Roosevelt Lake you would cross the top of the dam. When I was last here, they were building he bridge in the background:



In this picture, because the lake level is so low, you can see the top of the original dam:



In this pic, you can see the original road over the dam and see the blue line is where we traveled across the bridge:



The Apache Trail takes us along a canyon back down into civilization. About thirty miles I think. It used to be barely more than one lane wide and sketchy at best in places. Now it is wide and well graded. We actually made some time on the road. That was not really possible not that long ago. Along the way on one of the bridges I noticed this:



Sweet!! Just wait in the truck boy. Well, we never found it. That is probably a good thing as any locals would probably best be viewed when they are fully clothed.

We saw these vermillion cliffs on the way out. really neat looking. They didn't photograph too well, but looked neat in real time.



So that pretty much concludes our adventure here that ended up being 412 miles from door to door. It was a great time with some great friends albeit in an odd grouping of vehicles.

[mosesburb]

Originally Posted by Average Joe

Cool Pics! Thanx again for sharing your journeys. This is living.

Thanks!! We do enjoy it!!

Originally Posted by Dean'smeanmachine

love the pics

Thanks!!

Originally Posted by justcuz

Thanks for the continued postings of your trips. Had breakfast with a friend from Prescott this morning, we were talking about driving up to the Overland Expo and maybe doing a little of old 66, then back down that dirt road through Chino Valley to Prescott.
I still have vivid memories of the emerald colored pool on the Verde River you posted a couple years ago. Simply beautiful!

Thanks man!! If you make it to EXPO, stop by and say hey. I am usually the only person there in an orange Suburban .

[ERASER5]

"unwanted free-time"

Um, I'm not sure what that exactly means other than we get to see more pictures, but I hope all goes well.

[Dieselwrencher]

More great pics and some awesome sites for sure. That mine is crazy deep!

[mosesburb]

Originally Posted by ERASER5

"unwanted free-time"

Um, I'm not sure what that exactly means other than we get to see more pictures, but I hope all goes well.

Thanks!! You are definitely getting the better end of the deal

Originally Posted by Dieselwrencher

More great pics and some awesome sites for sure. That mine is crazy deep!

Thanks!! The bottom of the mine is not even close to being visible in that pic. In one pic (or several for that matter) it is completely impossible to convey how huge that thing really is. Huge, massive, et al, nothing seems "big enough" to accurately describe the size of that thing.

[mosesburb]

So at the end of 2012, I had a day or two of PTO that I had to use or lose. We set up a run to an area south of Payson to run an old trail. Unfortunately when we got there we found the trail was closed due to a fire earlier in the year or in the prior year. Drat. We quickly formulated another less spectacular plan.

On the way out of town we passed the old Beeline Dragway. It was a dragway from 1963 to 1974 or 1975. It sits on Pima/Maricopa Indian tribal land. The only visible clue to its existence is the old timing tower:



Further up the road we found Four Peaks to be socked in with weather:



We pulled off the highway to head down to the trail we were going to run and found it was closed due to aforementioned reasons. We decided to head up to a nearby peak and take a look around. Heading up the trail to the top:



The upper end of Roosevelt Lake is visible off to the east:



The view off to the west:



We got down into Payson and got some lunch and formulated another plan. Lanve had heard that Zane Grey's cabin had been rebuilt in town and was open for viewing. A little history on that. Zane Grey had a cabin out on the Mogollon Rim where he wrote some of his cowboy novels. In 1990, there was a massive fire in the area and it burned down. Some enterprising historians decided to replicate the cabin in town to "preserve" its history. We traveled down old main street until we came to the new cabin:





We did a little wandering around in the area and then decided to head for home. We didn't feel like retracing our tracks back the way we came in, so we decided to head north and cut across west on 260 instead. Not too far out of town it started snowing on us:



Getting a little accumulation further up the road:



Coming down the hill we witnessed a pretty neat cloud formation. The stripe through the middle was rather impressive:



So all in all, I guess it is a whole lot of not too much. It was a day spent out somewhere other than where we planned on being, but was a whole lot more fun than being at work. I'll call it a win.

[Dieselwrencher]

That's a nother nice trip. That's interesting about the cabin too. Thanks for sharing it.