Jason and I actually put a lot of thought into the preparations for this trip and, specifically, the high rock canyon trail.  I know in the realm of offroading, this isn’t really that extreme, however we have a midsize truck with a camper and the location is so remote that is deserves a little more respect. The camper was as light as we could make it, but probably still over 1000lbs loaded down.  We started off with a full tank of fuel, and enough water and food to keep us alive for a week or more.  We had a first aid kit, fire extinguisher, recovery tracks for the truck, etc.  Given our previous terrible luck with tires, we opted for a brand new set of burly BFgoodrich AT KO2’s with the upgraded sidewall protection.  They’re pretty much some of the most impact resistant tires you can buy! (along with some sweet new gold rims because why not?) Overall, we were pretty prepared for this thing!

So, obviously, given the title things didn’t go quite as planned for us.  The trail for the most part was only wide enough for a single truck to go through due to the sagebrush and rocks present.  We snaked our way through multiple extremely rocky sections with small drops and ledges and the truck was handling it all pretty well! We had to go slower than Jason would have liked, but like I said, it’s super remote out here. Overall it was going well and we had just made it through another rocky section and picked up speed again when the truck gets jostled sideways and we hear the distressing “whoooooosh!” of a tire that’s definitely not going to be patchable. Oh no….

Well shit! Turns out there was a sharp rock hiding in the weeds.  Jason missed it with the front tires but for some reason the rear tire just grazed it and pinched the tire between the rock and the rim and punctured two pretty large holes in it.  So our brand new, not-cheap, tire is now toast.  So not only that, but our location is wall to wall sagebrush and there’s no where to go so we have to swap to the spare tire right here or risk damaging our rim by running a fully loaded truck on it with essentially no tire. Awesome. :/ There was discussion before we left about whether to randomly bring a fullsize jack and we decided against it because we’re dumbasses. Really regret that decision right about now! Jason got started jacking up the truck to swap the tires while I started kicking all the damn sagebrush out of the way so we have a little more room to work.  On the plus side, I now know where the little bottle jack is hidden in the truck. :/

I was pretty concerned about the bottle jack not being strong enough for the weight of the truck and camper, but overall the tire change was relatively painless considering.  The problem now was that we’re literally halfway through this desolate canyon, it’s late afternoon, and it’s still rocky as hell out there only now we’re rolling on a “temporary use only” spare tire.  This this is adequate only for getting you to the next service station and here we are doing some fully loaded offroading on rocky trails with it. Awesomesauce. :/

I didn’t take too many pictures of the actual canyon from this point forward as I was a little preoccupied with our whole ordeal.  Without reliable tires, we really can’t continue our road trip as planned anyway because it was nothing but gravel roads and desolation so we made the decision that when we were done with the canyon, we were just going to run back down to Gerlach, NV to make sure the truck was ok and then haul ass down to Reno where there was a 4 Wheel Parts store and a bunch of other tire shops.

Now that the decision was made to head to Reno to fix our tire situation, all Jason and I had to do was safely make it out of the high rock canyon! 😮

In addition to the tire we also realized that the rough roads had caused the main connection between the camper battery and the rest of the system to pull apart.  Not a big deal except that our cooler had turned off and that’s where all the food was! Not cool! Jason jammed the connections back together and we got the cooler functioning again, however that just added to our list of things to worry about for the next few hours.