Betty Rides
Apr 28th, 2007 by Victoria Leigh
Today I upgraded Betty with 6 new Bosch spark plugs and Alex gave Remington an oil change after a spark plug & wire upgrade a few days earlier. I’ve never changed spark plugs in ANY car before. In my previous car they got so bad the charge was arcing off the block. Whoops! “Wait – you’re supposed to change those things?”
After this vehicle TLC we headed out east into the mountains for some bouldering/rock climbing location reconnaissance. Our motorcade ended out at “Reiter Pit” where we took a well-established trail up the mountain.
When we came to the upper fork we spotted some guys chillin’ with their packs. Alex stopped to talk to them a bit and we moved along to scout the boulders in the area and get an idea of what it had to offer. We spotted some kids bouldering up in the tree line and noticed some good boulders and top roping opportunities down slope that we’ll have to come back and try out. Turns out those guys we ran across had been hiking since 6 am and covered 9 miles. When we got to them it was around 2 or 3 in the afternoon and they were pretty much spanked. Somewhere in their plans to get to the nearby lake for some camping/fishing, they’d gotten way off course, so we offered them a ride down the mountain, which they graciously accepted.
After we dropped off the guys at their car so they could be on their way for post-hike beer and food we drove over to Wallace Falls for a little hike ourselves. We’ve hiked out here before and it’s really a nice place for a day hike and well trafficked. We weren’t really equipped for a big hike so we took the railroad grade trail up and cut over to the creek-side trail, which made for a nice easy loop. Douglas Adams would’ve been proud, I used the towel in the back of my Jeep to wipe the mud off my shoes post-hike.
This was Betty’s first time off road and she’s all mud-a-licious now, she really needs a bath.
She forgot to mention that the prior-owner plugs were .070″ on an engine with a .035 spec!
If you drive all the way to the end of the main road at reiter pit, you can get extremely close to lake isabelle. The “road” towards the end (after the old washout) is strewn with 3 foot boulders, huge ruts, washouts, and closed in by trees. It would be interesting to see if I could squeeze the big unimog up there. The last time I was there was about 5 years ago, in a much smaller unimog.
Once you park at the end of the trail, it’s a little bit of a scramble, (probably about a mile) and pretty steep. There are a couple rubber rafts parked on the shore up there.