Outdoors
News about parks, out door activity of all kinds Running, cycling, hiking,climbing. To advertise please call 303-447-8531
How A 22-Year-Old Boulder Woman Learned How To Fix Cars By Driving A ‘72 VW Beetle Across The West
Sep 7th
At 22 years old, Morgan Johnson knows the ins and outs of a few things. She’s lived in Oregon and Colorado, and she managed a King Soopers grocery store for a few years.
But when she decided to quit her job and give the Great Western Road Trip a try, she didn’t know anything about cars other than that they get you places and cost money to fix. But when she decided to buy a 1972 Volkswagen Beetle for a trip that would cover thousands of miles, she faced a sink-or-swim learning curve that’s an inevitable part of old Volkswagen ownership.
Now, she chatters about valve adjustments and wheel bearing tightness like an old hand. More importantly, she has joined the ranks of auto enthusiasts. Before, cars were just something that carried her to and from work. Now, she’s approaching full-on gearhead status.
A Volkswagen Beetle wouldn’t be my first choice for an epic road trip car, but those old German workhorses have the kind of charisma that can entice a young lady like Morgan Johnson into the strange world of auto enthusiasm. Needless to say, the car — packed to the gills with three or four passengers and all of their crap at any given time — broke down a lot during the trip. But with a little help from friends and strangers and by asking a lot of questions, Morgan’s understanding of how cars work grew considerably. But so did her appreciation for cars; bugs in particular.
I met Morgan and two of her travel companions when we were all stopped in front of Utah’s Great Salt Lake one evening this summer. It was nearly 10 p.m., and the sun was finally sinking below the horizon, turning the lake’s surface into an iridescent orange sheen. The only way to get to that part of the lake, as far as I know, is from I-80, so I was surprised to see an olive drab green Beetle, Colorado tagged and topped with a bulky, tarpaulin covered bindle, come trundling down the offramp toward the beach parking lot. I had to find out who was bold enough to take a road trip in a car like that.
Morgan and her friends, Johnny and Cherri, live in Boulder. They all explained, with that sort of fresh faced excitement you seen in young people caught up in an adventure, that they planned to drive all the way out to San Francisco, then up the coast through Oregon to Seattle. They didn’t really have any plans other than that, just a chunk of free time, a little bit of money, and a knack for finding things cheap on Craigslist.
By then, only a couple of days into the trip, they’d already broken down once, and were making their way ever so slowly due to the car’s limited capacity to carry a ton of weight.
The Journey Begins
Morgan had quit her job as a grocery store manager in Boulder just before the trip. She’d been working there for three years, and had always wanted to take a long road trip around the American West. She didn’t know much about cars, but she did know enough to realize that her rusted-out Jeep wasn’t going to cut it. But one day, when she was buying a saxophone from some guy off of Craigslist, she noticed that he had a lot of old Volkswagens in his yard. One of them — the army green one — was for sale for $1,600.
A lot of people would say that going from a rusted out, inoperable Jeep to a Volkswagen that’s been sitting around since 1997 is leaping from the frying pan into the fire. But Morgan said she was enchanted by the car — which she always refers to as “she” — and bought it with some money she’d saved for the trip. Mike, the Volkswagen nut who sold her the car, unwittingly became her on call mechanic as soon as he handed over the keys.
“I told her when she got it to drive it around for a few days before leaving on her trip, but she just took off,” he told me at a Volkswagen rally we all attended together a month later. “I’d say I got 200 texts while she was out driving the thing.”
“I sent him a lot of pictures of my finger pointing at something and asking, ‘What’s this part? How do I fix it?'” she explained.
The trip lasted about a month, and the trio (they picked up another person in California, completely stuffing the little car) saw a lot of amazing scenery. But they also met people they wouldn’t have met if they weren’t driving an old car that broke and made them stop and smell the oil filter. Here’s a breakdown of their itinerary, by geography:
- Boulder, Colo.: Morgan, et al hit the road, headed north through Cheyenne before hanging a left on I-80 toward Utah.
- Evanston, Wy.: The car’s fanbelt broke. Johnny skateboarded five miles to the nearest town, but everything was closed. But he met a lady who had a bunch of random fanbelts laying around. None of them fit, so they tied a piece of rope around the pulleys and drove it to someone or other’s friend’s house. The guy had a bunch of old Volkswagens, and they found a fanbelt that worked until they could buy a new one.
- Utah: They met me at the Great Salt Lake. We parted ways (because an old VW is the only car that my car can drive faster than) until later that night. They caught up with me and we camped next to the Bonneville Salt Flats.
- The Nevada Desert: Nevada in summer is hell on Earth. With all that weight piled into the little car, it began to overheat and lost power. So they parked under a bridge and slept there until it was dark and cool outside. Once they got up into Tahoe, the weather was cooler and the car worked OK.
- Sacramento/San Francisco: They went to Pride, crashing with some guy they’d found on Craigslist in the Castro. Morgan found out that one of the reasons the car had been overheating was because of the bag strapped directly to the roof. It blocked airflow to the engine, which is cooled by air. So Morgan bought one of those cool metal and wood roof racks on eBay and poor Johnny, who had been crammed in the back with all that crap for a little while, got a reprieve. They also got an oil change (I’d told them that because VWs don’t have oil filters, it’s a good idea to change it every 2,000 miles).
- Humboldt County/The Lost Coast: Three days of backpacking on the Lost Coast and a day spent tripping balls on mushrooms in a redwood forest were car-free, thus devoid of mechanical problems.
- Portland, Ore.: The car smelled like gas, and they found not one, not two, but three fuel leaks. The big filler hose and some of the fuel line were dry rotted. The filler hose was a specialty part, and Morgan ended up skating 10+ miles on a hot summer day trying to find the right one. Morgan noted that “Portland isn’t a good place to skate — the roads are shitty.” She also replaced the fuel filter and the distributor cap and rotor.
- Washington State: A friend wanted to take a different, more reliable car to Seattle, but Morgan said, “You haven’t experienced the bug yet. You gotta feel what it’s all about.”John Muir couldn’t have said it better himself, but the rest of the group voted to take the more reliable car.
- Oregon to Idaho: The car, of course, broke down again. This time, the battery cable was loose (for those of you who know bugs, good thing the damned thing didn’t catch on fire!) and there was another fuel leak from another dry rotted line. They used someone’s brother’s AAA card for a free tow to nearby Boise, Idaho. Morgan also had to fix some frayed wires in the dash when the lights stopped working. By this time, Johnny had strep throat, and Cherri had really bad poison oak from their redwood frolic.
- Evanston, Wy.: The car died and wouldn’t start again. The carburetor was leaking gas and the engine was running too hot. The tips in the pea shooter exhaust had completely melted. They took the Greyhound the rest of the way home, and Morgan and Cherri came back later to get the car with a Uhaul.
Although they’d had to tuck their tails between their legs and take a bus the rest of the way home (and Greyhounds in the West aren’t like those sleek new D.C.-to-N.Y.C. jobs, they’re bleak, Morgan wasn’t ready to give up on her bug. She talked Mike, the guy who’d sold her the car, into taking a look at it. The valves were way too tight, and she’d missed spotting a spark plug wire that had come loose. The thing had been running on three cylinders (one or two, if you count the cylinders with valves that were stuck open) for hundreds of miles.
But when Morgan, Cherri, Mike and I went to a bug rally a few weeks later, the car was purring (well, a clattery Volkswagen purr). Better yet, Mike had taught a man to fish, so to speak, and Morgan had a more thorough understanding of what those valves do, why they need to be adjusted, and how the car’s ignition and carburetion systems work.
“I learned a lot about engines and how they work and how to fix things,” she told me as we watched souped up bugs scream down the drag strip. “I was told owning one of these cars would make you learn how to have a lot of patience, and it really has.”
If you live in Colorado or Wyoming, don’t be surprised if you see a little army green bug chug up a gnarly hill near a trailhead in the middle of nowhere. Morgan isn’t afraid to drive her car and now, she knows its limits and how to fix it.
Of course, she only knows how to tinker with Volkswagens (and by today’s standards, a VW Type I scarcely qualifies as a car), but it’s a start.
Photo credit: Benjamin Preston; Morgan Johnson
CU study: Global warming increasing heavy metals in streams
Sep 7th
in Rocky Mountain watershed
tied to warming temperatures
Warmer air temperatures since the 1980s may explain significant increases in zinc and other metal concentrations of ecological concern in a Rocky Mountain watershed, reports a new study led by the U.S. Geological Survey and the University of Colorado Boulder.
Rising concentrations of zinc and other metals in the upper Snake River just west of the Continental Divide near Keystone, Colo., may be the result of falling water tables, melting permafrost and accelerating mineral weathering rates, all driven by warmer air temperatures in the watershed. Researchers observed a fourfold increase in dissolved zinc over the last 30 years during the month of September.
Increases in metals were seen in other months as well, with lesser increases seen during the high-flow snowmelt period. During the study period, local mean annual and mean summer air temperatures increased at a rate of 0.5 to 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit per decade.
Generally, high concentrations of dissolved metals in the Snake River watershed are primarily the result of acid rock drainage, or ARD, formed by natural weathering of pyrite and other metal-rich sulfide minerals in the bedrock. Weathering of pyrite forms sulfuric acid through a series of chemical reactions, and pulls metals like zinc from minerals in the rock and carries these metals into streams.
Increased sulfate and calcium concentrations observed over the study period lend weight to the hypothesis that the increased zinc concentrations are due to acceleration of pyrite weathering. The potential for comparable increases in metals in similar Western watersheds is a concern because of impacts on water resources, fisheries and stream ecosystems. Trout populations in the lower Snake River, for example, appear to be limited by the metal concentrations in the water, said USGS research biologist Andrew Todd, lead researcher on the project.
“Acid rock drainage is a significant water quality problem facing much of the Western United States,” Todd said. “It is now clear that we need to better understand the relationship between climate and ARD as we consider the management of these watersheds moving forward.”
Warmer temperatures and earlier snowmelt runoff have been observed throughout mountainous areas of the western United States where ARD is common, but it is not known if these changes have triggered rising acidity and metal concentrations in other “mineralized” watersheds because of lack of comparable monitoring data, according to the research team.
CU-Boulder Professor Diane McKnight, a collaborator on the project, has generated much of the upper Snake River data through research projects conducted with her students since the mid-1990s. McKnight said students in her environmental engineering and environmental studies class like Caitlin Crouch — a study co-author who received her master’s degree under McKnight — are highly motivated to understand ARD problems.
“Student can see that their research will have direct applications to addressing a critical issue for Colorado,” said McKnight, professor in the civil, environmental and architectural engineering department and a fellow in CU’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research.
In cases where ARD is linked directly with past and present mining activities it is called acid mine drainage, or AMD. Another Snake River tributary, Peru Creek, is largely devoid of life due to AMD generated from the abandoned Pennsylvania Mine and smaller mines upstream and has become a target for potential remediation efforts.
The Colorado Division of Reclamation Mining and Safety, in conjunction with other local, state and federal partners, is conducting underground exploration work at the mine to investigate the sources of heavy metals-laden water draining from the mine entrance. The new study by Todd and colleagues has important implications in such mine cleanup efforts because it suggests that establishing attainable cleanup objectives could be difficult if natural background metal concentrations are a “moving target.”
A study on the subject was published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology. Other collaborators include Andrew Manning and Philip Verplanck of USGS. The data analyzed for the study came from INSTAAR, the USGS and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to speak at CU Boulder Sept. 13
Sep 7th
Salazar’s talk is part of a conference titled “The Nation Possessed: The Conflicting Claims on America’s Public Lands” being held at CU-Boulder Sept. 11-14. The conference is sponsored by the Center of the American West and the Public Lands Foundation.
“It is a great privilege to host the Secretary of the Interior, along with many other distinguished public servants and influential Western figures,” said Professor Patty Limerick, faculty director of the Center of the American West. “This is truly a ‘be there or be square’ kind of event; for instance, the session at 4:15 p.m. on Wednesday — ‘Burning Man Meets Managing Man,’ on the relationship between the Burning Man Festival and the Bureau of Land Management — cannot be missed.”
Salazar’s talk is open only to conference attendees, and people may register for the conference on site at the University Memorial Center’s Glenn Miller Ballroom on Sept. 12 starting at 10 a.m. But several other events are free and open to the public, including two evening events:
— On Sept. 12, from 7:30 to 9 p.m. in the UMC’s Glenn Miller Ballroom, a former director of the Bureau of Land Management, Bob Abbey, will be interviewed by Timothy Egan, an author and writer for The New York Times.
— On Sept. 13, from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. in the UMC’s Glenn Miller Ballroom, actors Clay Jenkinson and Bryce Townsend will present “The Public Domain and the Public Lands: 1812, 1912, 2112 Re-enactment/Pre-enactment Event with Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and a Visitor from the Future.”
A complete schedule of conference events is available at http://centerwest.org/events/the-nation-possessed/. For information on the CU-Boulder Center of the American West call 303-492-4879 or visit http://www.centerwest.org.