I had been driving a Ford Expedition for a year. I had lost my beloved Jeep® in a tragic accident in Denver - briefly mentioned here - and my neighbor had her old Expedition for sale. Now, the Expedition is a nice rig, but it’s BIG. So big that I couldn’t tow it behind the motorhome. So for a year, it always took two trips, and someone to give me a ride (see here), any time I wanted to move the motorhome.
During my three Going to Moab trips, I had gotten word that my mother had passed away. It was not unexpected. I was glad I had gone to Oregon to see her when I did.
She was a frugal woman, having grown up in Kansas during the Great Depression and dust bowl. She had little pots of money stashed here & there in various investments. One of them came to me, enough to buy another Jeep.
It took a while. I had looked at some horrible junk around town, but finally an ad showed up where the John Deere dealer in town was selling a Jeep he’d bought for elk hunting. Then he discovered that you can’t get an elk carcass into a Jeep…
He wanted waaay more money than I was willing to pay. Basically the entire amount that my mother had left me. But this Jeep had everything I wanted: a winch, a lifted suspension, oversized tires, and locking axles. It even had the exact brand and style of tires that I wanted! Everything I had ever meant to do to my first Jeep, was already done to this one. And I knew there wouldn’t be any nasty surprises: I knew this guy was honest, because he was a John Deere dealer.
Allow me to explain. When you do business with farmers, you have to be honest, or you will go out of business very soon. As in, by the end of next week. Because farmers talk to each other. There’s an old joke about three forms of communication: telegraph, television, and tell a farmer. The farmer is the fastest of the three.
So I knew the seller wasn’t hiding anything.
I did the deal. The day I bought it, I took my new baby out to the badlands north of town, and took a phone shot of it, in it’s “natural habitat:” on dirt.
A couple of days later, I took it on a real 4WD adventure: up into the Piceance1 Basin, which lies north of Grand Junction up on top of those Book Cliffs you see in the back of this photo. It’s a no-man’s-land wasteland that is desolate, dry and not at all scenic. But it reportedly contains more oil - in a form that is hard to extract - than all of Saudi Arabia. There is nothing up there but experimental oil wells and a herd of wild horses.
I had endeavored to go Jeeping in the Little Book Cliffs Wild Horse Area, but somehow I overshot that freeway exit and ended up on an ugly, desolate road north of it. I saw lots of horse manure, but no horses.
I was in the Wasatch Formation, which lies well above all the ones I’ve mentioned so far, and is only about 50 million years old. It’s made of some really strange stuff:
Most formations are made of one type of rock. Not so the Wasatch. It’s a conglomeration of various kinds of icky muds, clays and other nasty stuff. Here’s a closer view of the drier, deeper-red stone on top of the messy stuff that looks like a pan of lasagna that went wrong:
Eventually, a side road came out to the top edge of the Book Cliffs, allowing a view down into the Grand Valley:
As it turns out, this was almost directly above the home of the guy I’d bought the Jeep from. I later told him about this, and he told me a funny story.
Said when he was a teenager, he’d decided to climb up the Book Cliffs to the top, expecting nothing but wildland once he reached to top. To his surprise and disgust, a couple of dirt bikers approached him as he was resting on the edge after a day-long arduous climb! He didn’t know that there were roads up there.
Yeah, there are lots of roads (if you can call them “roads” but I was in a Jeep) up there, and I took a different one home than the one I’d come in on. And encountered a deposit of clay that had been eroded into very strange, other-worldly shapes:
This stuff was nothing short of bizarre.
I am still driving that Jeep today. Finally, I could go roaming again, towing it behind the motorhome anywhere I wanted. Only one thing remained to be done before I could take off: Pookie’s fur had gotten out of control and was matted and clumping. She needed a fur trim. I made an appointment with a local groomer, who was booked more than a month out.
I made plans to hit the road for the summer as soon as Pookie got what she needed.
Pronounced “PEE-ahns” I presume that it’s French or something.
My co-worker has pointed out to me how ironic it is that the same day this post dropped on Substack, the beloved Jeep which is featured here...
Died.
It's sitting at a mechanic's shop now. It needs a new engine.
Great story and spectacular photography, Ken.