Our Arctic Adventure 2012

Dear Blog followers,

This is a link to my pictures with descriptions

It has been some time since I put one of these update blogs up.  Maybe I will update the last of 2011 and the first of 2012 completely when I get an opportunity. We have been busy and some of those months will go into the time slots that I entered and are void of any info.

Just a little recap... We returned from out 2011 Alaskan trip  with Brad and Beverly Cottingham Oct the 1st and then in November joined with about 15 others at Davis Mountain State Park for the 3rd annual Javelina roundup. 

We are still pulling our 2006 Bigfoot 25RQ travel trailer.  It seem to fit our style well and is up to the task. This will be our 5th summer to travel with it. I would guess we have put about 50K miles on it.

We are still using the 2003 white Chevy Suburban as a daily driver and also a  tow vehicle.  I did make a change to the Suburban, in December I changed the complete drive train (engine, trans and rear end) to a 2007 GM 6.6L Duramax diesel. I also converted it from a two wheel drive to a four wheel.  All of these changes will allow us to continue to do our thing when we are on the road.  There had been numerous times when a 4X4 was needed and we just couldn't handle it with the 4X2.  The Duramax conversion give more power and much better fuel mileage.

Then to start 2012 we spent about 6 weeks on the road to the western United States with our friends Brad and Beverly Cottingham along with Tony and Jean Boekman.  We spent time in Quartzite AZ  and then to the Presidential Libraries of Ronald Regan, Richard Nixon, and many other places in the west.

26 June 2012

We are back on the road again. This time the adventure will just be the two of us, but as in the past I hope all of the blog readers will join in and ride along with us. We are headed back to the far north in Alaska, British Columbia, Yukon Territory, and the Northwest Territory.  Of course, we will also travel a new route to us through the north part of Idaho into Canada.  

The adventure of the open road and places yet to be discovered is a strong pull for both Barbara and myself.  The few months we have traveled Alaska and the northwest in 2009, 2011 were just not enough, so here we go again.

We planned this early in the year and the leave date was to be the first week in June, but that got pushed to the 26th of June.  As is often the case, things work out for the best.  The northwest had an usually wet and rainy spring, so we missed some of that.

We drive to Brad and Bevs home in Eldorado near Santa Fe for the first night.  They took us down to the old square for a dinner at the historic hotel.  We have a lovely evening and the next day we are on the road again. We are heading west as quickly as we can because of the wild fires in Colorado.

Tonight we will stop in the far northwest town of  Farmington, New Mexico.

27 June 2012

We leave Farmington and head west toward Shiprock NM, then north into Utah toward Moab and the Arches National Park.  This is a spectacular area of southwest Utah. To the north of Moab near Helper CO we run through dense smoke from a lightening started wild fire not far off of the road .   We overnight on the forth of Salt Lake City.

I have included a few pictures that we took along the way.  One each blog I will try to embed a map and a link to the Piccsa site for additional pictures.  I am using a off line editor for gmail that is not very friendly.  We only have internet access via a few hotspots that we come across.  Some of these are really slow.

Stay tuned for more