Up & Down Yosemite

Getting greener too as we go north!!

This is a tale of following your desire to see things that you have not previously had opportunity to see. When we left Las Vegas we wanted to get as far as Mina, Nevada before leaving US-95 and turning west. It was last year when we passed through Mina and spotted the large-ish motor yacht that seemed to be a restaurant. At the time we had just had lunch in Tonopah so simply took a couple of pictures and moved on down the road. Much later we learned some of the story behind the boat on dirt and wanted to make that stop this year. Well, mission accomplished. It turned out to be less than our anticipation but we can now check it off the list of stops we wanted to make. More about this later, perhaps.

Lake & Mountain

We made it to Hawthorne, Nevada where we found a great RV park for the night and readied for our assault on Yosemite. Now it has to be noted that our truck and trailer are a fairly heavy duo. I mean, we are carrying a lot of stuff north with us. The road leaving Hawthorne rises very quickly toward the pass through the mountains that make up Yosemite. Tioga Pass is said to be 9945 feet above sea level. There was road construction that halted our progress temporarily but did not deter us from continuing up and up and up! We even got through the forest services' fee station without payment since we now have a park pass good for life that we picked up when we were in Sedona going through Oak Creek Canyon (the best $10 we have spent thus far in our travels).

The problem with going up is you have to, eventually, go down. There are a lot of those 6% grade signs along that route and our gears did not handle keeping us slow enough to be in complete control and by half way down our brakes were smoking… oh yeah, really smoking!!! We stopped a few times to let things cool off and pulled off where possible to let others go around our slow progress. Eventually we made it to a lower elevation; ending up in Lodi, California at another great RV park.

It was here that I used the next morning to go off and find out how much damage we had inflicted on the brakes. I found a shop and they popped the truck up on the lift, took off the wheels to peer at the brakes. Sure enough where there is smoke there can be fire. The rotor on one front brake was pretty much toast and even the rear brake pads were in bad shape. Okay, replaced the critical stuff and we got on the road again just after 11:00 that morning. It cost us some to see Yosemite but, I have to say, it was worth it. Yosemite is not a place for towing anything and it was hard to find spots to pull over and take a few pictures. To do this trip over again we would find a place at the lower end of the road to leave the travel trailer and explore with just the truck. All in all it was a great but long day!!