Zachte Prairie Frans, I choose YOU!!!!

Another update: we just downloaded Pokemon Blue, the popular gameboy-game from the 90's! So, we'll be fully content if the Hoff is going to be broken for another week!

Zachte Prairie Frans in de regen

Here's an update on our situation: the Hoff has, once again, broken down! The situation is in a great many ways similar to our last endeavor: the ignition is broken (back in Chilliwack, at least the engine would make some noise, which it now doesn't), the town we're in is competing with Chilliwack to the title 'ugliest town on Earth' and it's raining, as it was back in Chilliwack. Once again, we've skipped the first four sentiments and gone right to acceptance, so we're drinking free sprite refills in the McDonalds all day long while reading, browsing the internet and muttering to ourselves that things could have been much worse. Oh, and it's Sunday, so the shops where the Hoff may be cured from this illness aren't even open! We'll keep you updated!

Zachte Prairie Frans

Hi kids, and welcome back to ‘Crazy Dutch adventures in America’! Frans left you in the Boulder area with Nathan the Native with whom we spent an evening on the Walmart parking lot. On Wednesday, we headed back to the town of Nederland in the Indian Peaks Wilderness, where we hoped to hike a few days. From earlier observations, we expected trails below 10,000 feet to be accessible so we planned some five day hikes in the area. However, the month of May had been very snowy and none of the trails in the Indian Peaks Wilderness was free of snow as of yet, as I discovered during a hike to a lake at 10,500 feet while Sander and Frans were skyping (I never reached the lake, but stranded in 2 meters thick snow).

So, the next day we headed out to Rocky Mountain National Park with very small expectations; we had learned in the past couple of weeks from the National Park Service website that the park was still covered in at least 2 meters of snow. However, the NPS was wrong! The day after we arrived in RMNP, we climbed the 11,500 feet high (3485 m) Twin Sister Peaks from which we had an incredible view of Longs’ and Meeker Peak, the two highest mountains in the park with altitudes of over 4,000 meters. We stayed in the national forest nearby at a dispersed campground where i pitched my tent on a near vertical slope which caused me to slide down my air mattress every time I turned in my sleeping bag. The day after we climbed the Twin Sisters, we made it to the summit of another 3,300 m high peak (Estes Cone) and we decided to hire snowshoes for a few days.

With these, we hiked to Bear and Emerald Lakes which are the great summertime attractions of RMNP. Even while covered under a meter of snow, the trail was immensely popular and we were the only ones with snowshoes and, consequently, dry feet at the end of the day. The next day, we set off for a hike in the Wild Basin, a little-visited valley bordered by 4 km high mountains in the south-east of the park. We made our way to Ouzel Lake, a lake at some 3,200 meters altitude which hadn’t been reached by anyone this season. With our snowshoes, this proved to be a piece of cake and we were rewarded by great views of white mountains, frozen lakes and wildlife such as blue woodpeckers and running marmots.

Sanders knee hurt after this adventure, so Frans and I decided to try and hike up the 12,000 feet high pass below Longs’ Peak and from there climbing the 13,250 feet high Mount Lady Washington which would be an altitude record for the both of us. We started at 8 a.m. and in three hours we had reached the saddle point, where an incredibly powerful wind was blowing us off the mountain. We still tried to climb Mt Lady Washington, but after my peeing all over my pants and Frans getting his sunglasses blown off, we turned back with our tails between our legs (the wind was blowing from the front). Below the treeline we were finally able to peacefully eat our pasta salad. We only had to descend some 8 km from here to the point where Sander would be picking us up so we figured it’d take us another two hours. Wrong! We lost the trail and had to descend through a snow-covered forest with a slope of some 50 degrees before we hit upon the trial again. The snow had by now been heated enough to be unable to bear our weight, even with snowshoes, so every second step we sank up to our thighs in the wet snow before we were finally below the snowline, where we discovered we lost the trail again and had to follow a small creek down to the valley. All in all, it took us 4,5 hours to descend, after which we didn’t even have time to read our books (Frans is reading War and Peace which is disintegrating so he has the last 200 pages bound together with a peg and has to take out a page a time) before Sander turned up with the ever faithful Hoff.

We drove to Fort Collins, a large town in the north-east of Colorado where we spent the night at a Walmart parking lot. At least, Frans and Sander did: I demonstrated that even in urban areas, pitching a tent isn’t an impossibility if you’ve a mind to it and I slept next to the Walmart parking lot. On Wednesday, we drove all day to reach South Dakota where we’ll be spending some time in the Badlands before heading to Montana where and uncle and aunt of Sander live who we’ll be visiting. Today, we had a small hike in Windcave National Park, a small park with limestone caves underneath a landscape of rolling hills covered with grass, forest, grass, herds of buffalo and more grass. By the way, buffalo are the coolest animals ever! They weigh some 900 kg and they always seem to be chilling; we saw several of them crossing the road at a leisurely pace and just standing on a parking lot among the cars. Later on, we saw some prairie dogs, antelope-like animals and two eagles!

The last few days, we’ve been hearing a weird sound coming from our brakes. We figured that they needed new rubber so we went to our friends of Midas (the same company which took three days to replace our ignition in Chilliwack). After just over an hour, we were summoned back to the office where we heard the good news that our brakes were fine. And the nice lady behind the counter didn’t even want money for it, even though the mechanic had been working on the Hoff for at least half an hour! It’s great that we’re living in a 33 years old van with more rust than paint; this, in combination with our unshaven faces and unwashed bodies (we haven’t taken a shower in 27 days now, though we wash in creeks and rivers every day) causes every US citizen to take pity on us and treat us like three orphaned puppies. Awesome!

Nathan

It is time for some new adventures from the Hoff and crew!

As Jasper told us already last time, Monday 30^th of May we reached the back country of Crawford, where I could just avoid a pillow thrown at me while I slept on a brick that night. The following day we woke up early for a long day hike along a cone-shaped mountain. Finally mountains again after a month of canyons. In the idyllic morning sun we witnessed some deer and elk bouncing through just awoken alpine meadows with snow-white mountain peaks in the background.

This perfect image couldn’t last long of course. The first river we had to cross was so wild and grown in size due to melted snow we first cried for a while before setting on a search for a crossable tree trunk. After Sander had found one, we managed to get to the other site and continue our journey. A couple of miles further up a second, smaller but still quite wild creek met up with us. After taking the shoes of again, walk over some trunks, dry our feet and put our shoes back on we continued through the muddy trail. Eventually we met our Waterloo in, yes, the good old snow again. After having lunch, building dams in a small stream and drying of Sanders foot (he almost fell in a creek) we hiked a bit around at lower elevation before heading back. After Jasper threw his shoe in one of the fast streaming creeks, the shoe was saved some hectometers further downstream, we finally reached the Hoff again, battered and bruised and full of images of bouncing deers in morning meadows.

Wednesday Paonia was our target, where we managed to get a hike from the Forest Service. A hike, they said, which was do-able and not very snowy. We planned this hike for Thursday and did some groceries, wifi-ed at the public library and I got a involuntary shower during the refilling of our water tank. We tried to camp near the trailhead, which was reachable by a four wheel drive road. The Hoff got through it but for the second time in a week he moaned about not being build for that kinda stuff. The following day we started to hike to the peak of a mountain with the intention of camping up there. But again, after finding the real trailhead at noon and struggling with over enthusiastic creeks, we found snow blocking our way. So the only option was head back to the Hoff again.

Finally the conclusion came to us; hiking in the higher mountain regions of Colorado was impossible. A roadtrip through these beautiful mountains was the only alternative. Friday we drove to Glenwood springs for skyping and asking for more trails at the forest service (which failed because the ranger was lazy and gave us rubbish). Saturday we drove to Aspen, over a pass of 3687 meters high (Go Hoff!) through walls of snow and a bunch of skieers and further through the mountains to Nederland, a small mountain village / hippie town near Boulder (which is near Denver). People there were flabbergasted by the fact that three young dudes in a van didnt some weed!

The piece de la resistance came near Boulder, where we parked at a Walmart for the night. After walking to a nice mall for a Subway (the area of Boulder is very Yupping) we came back at the Hoff. Next to us was another van with a guy who wanted a nice chat with us. Though the guy was already a bit drunk. He came from Oklahoma and was a guy of the 'fast money', hedgefunds and stuff. Though now he lived in a van. After 30 minutes, his speech about the world economic situation and banking system was finished, after which he started to orate about capitalism and how the States should be managed. 15 minutes later we managed to get the first words in, we were still entertained at that moment, and drank a beer together on the Walmart parking lot. After more gibberish about oil, economics and politics he came up with a conspiracy by the big bank dudes who are trying to destroy the middle class worldwide. This was accompanied by a strong historical background lecture of the monetary history of the dollar and British pound. In between all these lectures and theories we tried to get the subject changed into climbing mountains, cause that is what the guy (Nathan was his name) did when he made enough money. But immediately the subject changed again and his monolog continued. At this moment we were getting a bit tired, so we decided one of us listened and the other two just continued with our van-bound life, switching roles. A couple of interesting (uhm...) subjects and theories came from this drunken man. He could have been 10 million dollars worth but now he wasn’t, he had to get his life back on track. Even more hilarious was when he started to preach like a American Native (cause apparently he was also partially Native..), talking about all what was build and it didnt matter as it would be gone in 100 years, talking about how to change the world and stuff.

Finally, after listening (or better, pretending to listen) for 2 hours he stopped and went to the bar to get himself hammered (even more hammered?, we thought) but not before he slammed his door shut for 5 times as it wouldn't close, meanwhile busying the already legendary words of: “Close, you stupid American product!”. Too bad this process of handling his van took place 3 times that night, the first around sunrise when he came back from the bar. This guy made a real deep impact on us so many quotes of Oklahoma Nathan will be busied by us during this trip and the years to come.

Sunday was a hot day in Boulder. As Boulder is a Yup-town, thus rich, Boulder has a very large area of the front range turned into a hiking park. Though it was extremely busy at the parking lot, in the park itself it wasn’t so bad and we climbed to Bear Peak, a very nice hike! Only at the top thousand of small flies came and sit on every visitor, which made the view a bit less nice and we quickly descended from the mountain. Totally cooked we arrived at the Hoff, went to McDonalds for some sprite and bathed in a nice cold mountain river near our new camp spot (no Nathan-like people around) in between Boulder and Nederland.  

Arches, Canyonlands and Colorado

First of all: here is a link to our picasa account on which we posted a lot of pictures from the start of our trip until now: https://picasaweb.google.com/116931182011734845806

The last blogpost Sander wrote was in the town of Moab, which lies in between Canyonlands and Arches National Parks. The 25th we went hiking in Canyonlands. This is a national park which consists of a very large plateau which is surrounded by 700 meter deep canyons and is created by the confluence of the Colorado and Green rivers. Here, we went hiking on the Northwestern tip of the plateau; the trail went around a very large dome which was destroyed by a meteorite. The weather was brutal: no clouds and no wind and there was virtually no shade along the trail. Happy day J Luckily, we had 1.5 litres of chocolate ice waiting for us in the Hoff, which went a long way to restoring our joy in life. Afterward, we rode to the southern tip of the mesa and had dinner while watching a gorgeous sunset over the amazing network of canyons which lay beneath us.

The day after, we went to Arches. The presence of thick layers of salt in the subsurface has caused some parts of the sandstone layers above to rise and rain in combination with frost-thaw cycles has created some 2,000 natural arches, some of which span tens of meters. This park can only be enjoyed by car while hiking for short distances to the arches themselves so we spent a lot of time in the Hoff. That night, we parked at a rest area where the constant coming and going of trucks and a temperature of 25 degrees did a very good job of keeping us out of our sleep. Then it was on to Colorado, where we spent a day talking to people on skype, baking pancakes, washing our clothes and visiting the local outdoor store. We’re going to spend nearly a month in Colorado climbing mountains but as it is only late May and Colorado has received a record amount of 520 inches of snow (13 m!) the higher reaches of the mountains are still impassable. We wanted to know exactly how high the snow line was and hoped to get some information from the store people, but sadly, they couldn’t tell us much.. We ended up by buying a book which describes a hundred hikes in the whole state of Colorado; with some luck, we’ll be able to hike some of these trails.

After our restful day in Grand Junction, we decided to give the book a try and hike Mount Garfield, a mesa-like mountain which lies above Grand Junction. From there, we had a great view of a landscape of eroded shales at the base of the cliff, the Grand Mesa (a 3000 meter high plateau where we hoped to hike the day after) and some snow-capped mountains towards the south and east. We were so filthy when we arrived back at the Hoff (we hadn’t taken a shower in over a week) that we decided to wash ourselves in an irrigation channel in the middle of the village. Then, we rode up the Grand Mesa where we came to the conclusion that the trail we were going to hike was still too much covered in snow so we rode on for another 1.5 hours to Montrose, a town near the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park. There, we spent another miserable night at the Walmart before going on a hike which went into a valley of the Gunnison. The hike was fun and hot and the most notable thing was that we drove our ’78 Ford (meaning the Hoff) for 4 km over a 4-wheel-drive road, thereby reducing its value for when we’re going to sell it by at least 200 euros.

Today, we went to the Black Canyon of the Gunnison; a 700 meters deep canyon which is only 400 meters wide at some points. Afterwards, we drove for 2,5 hours trying to find Forest Road 721 in the little town of Crawford which is the location of the trailhead for the hike we’re going to do tomorrow. And now Frans is singing ‘listen to your heart’ by Roxette so I’m going to try and muffle him with a pillow or a brick.