How Ludwig got his groove back

We've had a request for the tale of Ludwig's re-animation after the woes wreaked upon him in Death Valley, to wit, his getting stuck in second. A previous post shows our removal of his engine and transmission, and What I Found There.
Unfortunately, from an aesthetic point-of-view, this post describing the reinstallation of these components might be lacking. It is difficult to take pictures when you are as mad and frustrated as we were when we tried to put Ludwig's motive components back in. "Installation is the reverse of removal" indeed.

We did some other stuff while Ludwig was laid up waiting for his trans-mission to be rebuilt. This is a picture of the cockpit as it comes stock. (Well, the floor mat is wrong; a Westfalia from the factory has carpeting, not the black rubber mat seen here. The old orange mat was completely destroyed by mouse urine during Ludwig's comatose years. We found a good used rubber one in Ventura for cheap and put it in. I think that the "incorrect" rubber mat is more conducive to the use of a camper anyway. Plus the extension on the shifter ("chick stick") wouldn't've been a factory accessory. But I digress.)

Here you can see the result of installing the package tray from the Bus Depot (good people). Quite a useful addition, we think, and much more practical--and in keeping with Ludwig's overall mid-1970s aesthetic--than the bamboo package trays that are also available. Drilling is required, but like I've mentioned before: Ludwig is for driving, he isn't a museum piece.

Another thing we did was replace the x-year old shock absorbers with cringingly expensive Koni's (also from the Bus Depot). Koni is a Danish company that makes a range of high-performance shocks. Example: Konis are standard equipment the Lamborghini Gallardo, a $180,000 car. They hadn't made shocks for the second-generation Type 2 in years, but a dedicated bus lover ("Ratwell"--see link at right) convinced them to make a limited run for busses like Ludwig. (Thank you, Richard.) This is Melissa putting in the fronts; there was much easier access to the rears with the engine out.
It might just be the hype, but on my first drive with the Konis in, I was nearly moved to tears. With these shocks and the right tires, Ludwig drives like a dream.

When Rancho was done with the transmission, we took Fang Fang to Anaheim to pick it up. Rancho are also good people. The guy I talked to, I think his name was "Luis", said that this particular tranny is very desired on the sand rail circuit because of its gearing and strength. I guess Ludwig's had just had enough. I suspect it had 200,000miles on it at least when it gave out.

We took the 405 (that's how you refer to highways in SoCal--"the 405", "the 5", "the 217") part of the way back. This is the highway made famous by a certain former USC running back when in 1995 he had his buddy drive him down it nice and slow. Maybe he wanted to enjoy the beautiful Los Angeles views--click on the picture and try to see the San Gabriel mountains through the smog.

This is where the pain started. I've helped take engines out and put them back in several air-cooled VWs in my life, probably a dozen different times, including Ludwig's. But the operative word is "helped". I'd only done it with (01)Melcher or (02)McDonald or Groaner, or some combination of these guys. This time it was just me and Melissa (I'm not dogging on her ability, she was great. But she lacked the crucial experience), and I just couldn't (can't?) muster what it takes to get that bear back in. Maybe I shouldn't've listened to an ACVW mechanic in Santa Barbara who told me it was "crazy" to put the engine and transmission back in as a unit. Instead, we put the transmission in seperately, and tried to mate the engine to it. After all, that's all I'd ever done before anyway; I'd never had a transmission out before. "Too many things to balance on the jack and try to line up all at once," he said. BS. Next time they come out together and they go in together. (Probably.)

In the end, we didn't have time to tow the whole schmear to a mechanic--with a lift, what I want is a lift--to have him put it back in. We put the engine in the back of Fang Fang with the cats (why don't more people love station wagons?) and pushed Ludwig onto a trailer, hooked it up to the moving van, and undignifiedly towed him to Missoula. He'd've been towed in any case, but it still seemed undignified somehow. We dropped him off at Mountain Imports and had him back a few weeks later, with all four gears and no more slop in the shifter. His engine now has about 5000miles on it, and the tranny has fewer than a thousand, making Ludwig an almost new vehicle, mechanically at least.

Thanks to Craig, who helped us during this trial, and to Ian, Luke, and Kevin who helped push Ludwig onto the trailer.

nota bene: Here and elsewhere I've referred to the thing that transfers engine power to the wheels as the "transmission". Well, technically this is incorrect. All manual ACVWs have transaxles, not transmissions. The reason for this discrepancy is available upon request.

West Fork Butte

Some friends invited us up to a lookout they'd rented in the Bitterroot Mountains, thirty miles or so outside of Missoula. There are several of these lookouts around here available to rent, equipped with bunks and stoves for cooking and heating. (The cooking stove was a real stove, while the cabin was heated by a wood burning stove.) They offer spectacular views. This one is the West Fork Butte Lookout, in extreme Southwestern Missoula County, nearly in Idaho.

Melissa is caught in front of the fire explaining to the group how we could never do something like this in California; either there'd be a gigantic waiting list to do it, or it'd be illegal somehow. (I said no such things.) The lookout is around 100sqft and that stove kept it so hot that we left some of the windows open, even though it was windy and snowing outside. It has four bunks, but we opted to sleep in Ludwig. There was actually one spare bunk, but since the bunks were twins I thought it would be silly to sleep in the cabin when we had a full sized bed in Ludwig waiting for us. I mean I like Mitch and all, but seriously...sleeping on a twin together? No thanks!

Ludwig nestled among the pines. The trees kept us out of the wind so we didn't get too cold. In fact, Ludwig stays pretty toasty even in colder weather. Sometimes we even have to sleep with one of the jalousie windows cracked just to keep him from getting too stuffy.







Me, blasting clay pigeons with Beau's (at right) shotgun. I think that in the People's Republic of California, harboring a desire to use firearms recreationally can earn you a court-ordered trip to an anger management counselor for re-education.

While we were out shooting (well, I threw the clays and opted out of shooting this time) we heard ALOT of gunfire. The deer and elk hunting season had recently opened up, so there were many many hunters sharing the mountain with us.

After all the clays were used, we headed back up to the cabin to relax. A snow storm rolled in, and it was the first time Mitch and I witnessed snow falling from the sky since the winter of 2003. It was a perfect way to see snow again; scenery in Montana is truly like a postcard.

2482 miles = 40 hours of driving

These aren't from a trip with Ludwig, but with Fang Fang (our Subaru). I thought they deserved a wider audience nonetheless.
We went to Ogallala (Nebr) for Thanksgiving, and went to Lincoln briefly on Saturday, thinking we could get up early Sunday and drive straight through to Missoula--1241miles, 20hours. Obviously a bit ambitious.
We didn't make it. In Sheridan (Wyoming) at 8pm, we checked the Montana Dept. of Roads website and it said the roads west of Big Timber were either snow-covered, ice-covered, or both. And there was fog. We spent the night in Billings and left the next morning. The pictures (click to enlarge) are of the roads we'd've faced at 330am had we pressed on.

These photos were all during heavy snow, which is why all the views look a bit foggy. The visibility was obviously pretty poor, but the views were incredibly impressive nonetheless.

Homestake Pass (6332ft)

The Boulder Batholith

Although we had both driven through the Rockies several times, neither of us remember driving through the Rockies during a snow storm. The travelling was relatively slow, but we were lucky enough to be about 3 cars back behind a snow plow while we were travelled the snowiest of the mountain roads.

I-90 over The Great Divide

During the "chain-up" areas along the I-90, we noticed all the 2 wheel drive cars and 18 wheelers pulled over to put chains on their vehicles. We didn't have chains (or studded snow tires) for Fang Fang, so we just kept driving. Even in these road conditions Fang Fang didn't have any problems negotiating it. In fact, I've been told by many Missoulians that chains and/or studded snow tires are completely unnecessary for Subarus, even during western Montana's long snowy winters.

More of the Boulder Batholith. In the last century or so, four square miles around this structure have yielded 20 billion pounds of copper. Efforts to discontinue minting pennies are fiercely opposed in and around the city of Butte.

West-Central Montana road trip

Last month we decided to take a two-day tour of Montana. Since moving here, we've pretty much been stuck in and around Missoula, but Montana is the fourth biggest state (AK, TX, and CA are bigger) and we wanted to see more of it. We'd heard from natives that Great Falls, the third-largest city, wasn't so great. What better reason to go see it, since if we lived here too long we might become biased and never go there at all. On the way back we'd see some things around Helena.

Garnet is a ghost town in the mountains east of Missoula, on the way to Great Falls. We took the side trip and saw the sights. It was pretty impressive. There were significant waves of gold mining in Garnet in the late 1890s and and again in the 1930s, and the last of the town's 1,000 residents left in the 1940s. It's pretty crazy how whole families would live in these tiny houses. Plus, there was never any running water. The biggest house in town (three rooms and two stories) belonged to the schoolteacher. I bet you'll not find that to be the case anymore, anywhere. We also looked around the abandoned gold mines just down the road. It looked like back-breaking work, moving and smashing all that rock for so little gold. Did you know that all the gold that has ever been mined would fit into a space about the size of an apartment building*?

The sign says it all. Taken just barely on the Pacific side of Rogers Pass (5610ft). Click this (or any) picture for larger image.

 Once we got on the Atlantic slope of the Great Divide the landscape changed completely. It's eerie how abruptly everything changed from one side to the other; it was like driving out of a giant pine forest and into the Nebraska panhandle. The picture is of Square Butte, West of Great Falls. Painting these landscapes made Charlie Russell famous.

Along the Missouri River on the outskirts of Great Falls is a fresh-water spring, reputed to be the largest in the world. Six and-a-half million gallons of water bubble to the surface an hour; that's 108,333 gallons a minute, or eighteen hundred gallons per second. The water is always 54 degrees Fahrenheit. It has its origin as rainwater and snowmelt on the Little Belt Mountains, forty miles to the south. After spending several thousand years of seeping downhill through the limestone bedrock, it shoots to the surface with great force (300 pounds of pressure per square inch) through 700ft of cracks in a matter of seconds.

Much of this water dumps directly into the Missouri (as seen in the picture above), but a bunch of it also shoots off to the side, forming its own river, the Roe River which lays claim to the title "shortest river in the world". The picture above encompasses the entire length of the Roe, all 201ft of it. Melissa is the blue patch at the mouth of the river, on the other side of the bridge.

Back in town, we visited a local must-see. The Sip n Dip is the hotel bar for the O'Haire Motor Inn in downtown Great Falls. In 2004, GQ magazine declared it the greatest lounge on Earth. It's a really small bar decorated in a tiki/Hawaiian style, seating maybe fifty people. What makes it so special is that the wall behind the bartender is a glass window looking into the deep end of the hotel pool. What's more, they have a mermaid swimming on weekend nights. Daryl Hannah even pulled mermaid duty while she was in town filming Northfork (horrible movie). We didn't see a mermaid while we were there, but they were hiring: "$10 an hour plus tips, must be a good swimmer".

After a night "camping" in the WalMart parking lot (so what? Clean restrooms, 24-hour security and no fees) we got up and headed South toward Helena ("HELL-uh-nuh"). A last, quick stop at a thrift store in GF opened our eyes to the existence of truly cheap secondhand clothes, something Missoula is somewhat lacking and of which Santa Barbara was completely bereft. Anyway, our next destination was Refrigerator Canyon, a slot canyon in the Gates of the Mountains (part of Helena National Forest), Northeast of the city. The road was winding, and by that I mean it was fun driving. Along the way we passed through the tiny town of Nelson, the self-proclaimed cribbage capital of the world. We came across several small groups of Rocky Mountain Goats, and even slowly herded one group across a bridge.

Rocky Mountain Goats (four of them, just below center)

Refrigerator Canyon was just barely too wide for me to touch both sides at once. It was probably about 100ft to the top from where we were standing. The canyon's extreme narrowness shields it from the most direct effects of the weather, mostly heat, so it's usually colder in the canyon than out of it-hence the name. We drove back out (more goats) of the Gates of the Mountains and on into Helena.

Helena sat on one of the richest gold deposits ever discovered. (Or should I say "sits"? In the 1970s they struck gold when repairing the basement of a downtown bank.) In the 1880s it was one of the, if not the, richest city in the world. We drove through the impressive mansion district and saw these palaces; very impressive, even if it appeared as though most of them have since been split up into apartments.
Less impressive, though still nice enough, was the state capitol. I think being familiar with Nebraska's state capitol (without a doubt the best one in the nation--sucks to you, Louisiana!) kind of spoils the others. What the capitol did have was deer roaming through the neighborhood. The picture above was taken from the Southeast corner of the building's block. Our downstairs neighbor, a Helena native, says deer are commonplace there. Recently, a buck killed someone's hundred-pound dog right in the middle of town.

It was too dark to take any photos of the trip back to Missoula. We powered over the Great Divide at MacDonald Pass (6325ft) early in the evening. The roadsides were rife with deer. Neither of us had ever seen so many in our lives. Either of us will state without exaggeration that we saw more deer on the road between Helena and Missoula than we had ever seen in either of our lives previously, combined. I'm glad we didn't hit any; luckily, they stayed off the road. The only problem we had with Ludwig was a cracked headlight ring which finally gave way, but were able to replace, after finding one nailed to a tree on another road trip just two weeks later. Weird.

Part the Last: Going Home

Just as it got dark we arrived at the paved road that led to camp. At the intersection, Melissa was trying to pull away from the stop sign when she told me something didn't feel right, like she couldn't get Ludwig into first gear. I checked it out myself and indeed, he was stuck in second--all the flailing about of the shifter we could muster did nothing. We had neutral by depressing the clutch, but that was it. I decided we should limp back to the campground and sleep on it. In the morning I crawled underneath to see what I could see.

After calls to a couple mechanics, I realized there was nothing I could do about it where we were. Luckily, there was general agreement that while the camper was stuck in second, that driving him was not harmful, nor was it likely to change, for better or worse. That is, he was likely to stay stuck in second. The worst part was we would have to start driving home immediately and cut our stay at Death Valley short by two days. After all, Ludwig's top speed in second gear is about 35mph, and his average speed is closer to 30mph. The best part was that while Mitch has several dramatic Volkswagen stories, I had none. I was finally becoming initiated into the small circle of die hard VW fanatics. 

At Stovepipe Wells (elevation 0: see sign in background) we put a sign in the rear window and set out.

The road we'd sailed down when we'd entered the valley now lay in front of us as a 4956ft climb. At least, I thought, we'd probably only have been able to get over the pass in second gear even if nothing was wrong with the bus. But there would certainly be no stopping. Stopping in the middle of a long ascent such as this with only second gear would mean we'd have to coast back to the base to try again. Luckily, we made it up the mountain and out of the valley with no problems.

We dove down the other side into the Panamint Valley and used the 3400-foot drop as an opportunity to go as fast as we'd be able. I hit the clutch and we entered the valley at about 65mph. The Valley is occupied by another dry lake, the Panamint. It's the sandy expanse in the photo above. The roads across and through the valley are built right on top of it.

We stopped for a break in Panamint Valley, at the intersection of highways 190 and 178. In the background is Telescope Peak, a 11,049ft snow-topped pinnacle in the park. It was pretty impressive from where we were at 1600ft, but I imagine it is all the more imposing as seen from the other side (the Death Valley side) as it rises, uninterrupted, from -282ft at Badwater Basin. Maybe next time.

There is a town in California named Trona. This charming hamlet of 1900 sits on the "shore" of Searles Lake (dry, of course) and, astonishingly, ninety-eight of the 104 natural elements can be mined around the town. Nowadays they mostly mine borax. "Twenty-Mule Team" borax comes from Trona. If you can imagine what a town that is continually bathed in a chemical stew and baked in the desert sun is like, that's Trona. Melissa was quite enamored with the place; ask her about it sometime. For some reason, we didn't take any pictures of the town. The picture above is of the Trona Pinnacles, which you might recognize from the newer Planet of the Apes movie, or from Lost in Space. The things you see when you can only go 25mph and have to stay off bigger highways. Charles Kuralt was probably right.

Late in the afternoon I called a friend of mine who had just been stationed at Edwards AFB to see if we could camp in his driveway overnight. He insisted we stay in the house and take showers. We couldn't resist. Jon and his family were very accomodating, giving us food, beer and hot water. California City, where they live, must be the largest city in California (pop: 8385) without a grocery store. The next morning Jon and I rode dirtbikes in the lot across the street.

This was the order of the day for the next two hundred miles: Melissa behind the wheel, me looking at the map trying to figure out where to go to stay off freeways. I was mostly successful, but on an unavoidable stretch of the 126, we had to drive in traffic. The appropriate word would be "harrowing". (Other appropriate words would be, "Melissa had to pull off the road onto the shoulder a couple of times because she saw idiot drivers about to ram us at 75+mph and she was sure we were going to die. Then she spent a few mintues yelling and shaking her fist before she returned to the road.") You'd think other drivers would notice a bright orange VW bus driving halfway on the shoulder with its hazards flashing. This was Southern California, so you'd be wrong. We went over our final mountain range, the San Rafael Mountains on a winding road just as it began to rain. The road was washed out the next week. At about 9:30pm we pulled into the driveway and shut Ludwig off. Final tally: ~375 miles of road took 18 hours of driving over two days.

The next week I told our story to another married philosophy graduate student and his first question was, "So when did you guys start fighting?" I hadn't thought about it at the time, but we didn't once get into a fight. In fact, we didn't even listen to any music on the stereo either. I guess it must've been a lot of fun.
FINIS

Part IV: The Racetrack

The Racetrack is a roughly kidney-shaped playa, a dry lakebed that is the dead-end for a few very intermittent streams in the northern section of the park. So when it does actually rain, the water in Racetrack Valley collects at its southern end, where it is trapped in the occasional lake that is the Racetrack. The water evaporates, leaving its silt behind, resulting in the remarkably flat surface of the Racetrack: it's about 3mi long north-to-south and the northern end is a mere four inches higher than the southern end.

 Melissa from atop The Grandstand

The Grandstand is what's left of a mountain of dolomite that was gradually eroded away by the streams that feed the Racetrack. In addition to being eroded away by rain from above, stream-borne sediment buries it at its base. The picture above is from as high up as I could climb. The picture below is from the reverse perspective-me on top taken by Melissa from the playa.

 Mitch from below the Grandstand

 A racer and its path. The Grandstand is in the background at center-right, more than 2.5mi distant.

Racers are rocks that fall off the mountains that abut the southern end of the Racetrack, (and sometimes off the Grandstand at the northern end). When conditions are just right, the rocks move across the playa leaving tracks behind. Exactly what these conditions are isn't entirely clear: amazingly, no one has ever seen the rocks move. Along with strong gusty winds, it's suspected that the surface has to be saturated with water. Some scientists think a thin layer of ice has to form. In any case, the rocks move, sometimes dozens of yards all in one go. Some of the racers have had their movements tracked since the 1940s.

 Melissa interpreting racer movements

Imagining how the racers could move at all is hard enough; it's almost completely unbelievable when you see how big some of them are. They range in size from that of a small book to bigger than a television. The bigger ones weigh well in excess of 250lbs, yet even these clearly have moved and left trails to prove it. (Apparently once in a while a racer is lost to a visitor with a truck. If the road in were better, more racers would probably disappear this way; hence, the rangers like the road just how it is.)

some racers' criss-crossing paths 

Racers' tracks run in long sweeping curves, squiggles, sharp u-turns and zig-zags. I wonder how often there's a collision (probably not often).

 Lunch with Ludwig at The Racetrack. Don't let the presence of that Honda or whatever it is lead you to think I've misled you about the awfulness of the Racetrack Valley Road; earlier we saw that they sacrificed a tire to it.


All this mention of water might mislead one into thinking that Death Valley is a wet place. Not so. Though these processes are dependent upon water, water there is so rare that it makes you pause when you think how grindingly long it has taken for all this--the formation of the playa, the eroding of the Grandstand, and the creation of the racers themselves--to occur. And that though a racer might move a few dozen yards in a shot, it might not move again for decades. The world and its workings really are stranger and more magical than any story made up by people.


(next: driving home in second gear)

Part III: The Racetrack Valley Road

The road to the Racetrack is 27 miles of dust, crushed rocks, non-crushed rocks, and extreme washboards. Trust us, the pictures do not do the washboards justice. At times we thought the van would rattle completely apart. Our speed was 20mph at best. Various people in the park gave us the impression that the road is a living entity that subsists exclusively on tires. (We didn't lose any.)

 Dust

The Racetrack Valley Road (Click on the picture and you'll see rain on Ludwig's windshield. The second-driest place in the Western Hemisphere and we got sprinkled on.)

The landscape along the road (and in the park generally) is geologically interesting. The whole area is part of the Basin and Range province, a giant section of the North American Plate that is slowly being stretched apart, east to west. This makes the crust thinner, and subterreanean lava can readily bubble up.

Lava Outcropping

The road also goes through a giant Joshua Tree forest, apparently the northernmost such forest in the world.

Joshua Tree forest

I've seen Teakettle Junction on some road atlases marked as though it were a municipality. Our brief stop there shows why one can't always trust a road atlas to present accurate conditions. Apparently there was a working telephone there at one time.

Teakettle Junction, Calif. pop: 0

As we topped a hill, The Grandstand came into view, jutting up from the northern end of The Racetrack. I figured The Racetrack would be interesting; I didn't figure it would actually be magical.

The Grandstand

(next: The Racetrack)

Part II: Ubehebe Crater

The ranger I'd called weeks earlier said we'd have no problem finding a site at Mesquite Springs Campground on a Thursday night, since it is the Northern, less-visited section of the park. We rolled around the campground twice, but didn't see any empty sites. Death Valley National Park is one of the biggest, if not The Biggest, National Park in the lower 48, and we didn't relish the idea of driving the seventy miles to the next campground. There was a sign that told us camping was available just outside the park boundary (also the California-Nevada border) about five miles east. It turned out the "campsite" was a turnout by the park entrance sign. This is what we awoke to in the morning:

Welcome to Nevada

During the night I got up and looked at the night sky--it was about the most incredible thing I'd seen in my life. I grew up in rural Nebraska and thought I'd seen stars. Well, the Death Valley night sky made those nights look like I'd been on a Manhattan rooftop: it really seemed like there were more stars than sky. And the quiet was overwhelming. I'll just say, if you want to directly experience the utter smallness of your own existence, walk around Death Valley in the middle of the night.

Ludwig may not go from 0 to 60 in six seconds, but he can sleep up to four and cook them breakfast

After eating we went back to the real campground and got a freshly-vacated spot. 
Death Valley is surprisingly cold in the spring. This was late March and there was plenty of snow on the mountains. At night it got into the upper 30s, and daytime highs were in the low 60s.

Aramagosa Range from Mesquite Springs Campground

After securing a campsite, the first stop of the day was Ubehebe Crater, a 777ft-deep bowl created a couple thousand years ago when pent-up underground water boiled and burst forth like soup from underneath soup-skin. It's not an impact crater like a meteor would make.

Melissa at Ubehebe Crater

The wind around the crater was furious, with sustained winds probably over 50mph. It was almost hard to stand up sometimes. I guess it's because it's located at the very North end of the valley and all the prevailing winds get channelled into the narrow chasm that is Death Valley.
Once we were below the rim, the winds stopped. The trail was a zig-zag on very loose, coarse gravel. On the way down we passed by a big stone intrusion, made out of some other kind of rock that was strong enough to withstand the blast that made the crater.

Mitch and the Intrusion

Ubehebe Crater floor

The trip down was easy. The trip back up was hard enough that we had to stop and rest a few times. We saw some older people down there and wondered how often some old guy has to get rescued from the bottom. In the photo below you can barely make out Ludwig, parked right at the edge of the crater.

Ludwig at left

I also wondered how many cars had rolled out of the precarious parking lot and down into the crater.
The next stop was The Racetrack, about 30 miles away on a horribly washboarded gravel road.

Racetrack Valley Road, Cottonwood Mountains in the background

(to be continued...)