A Couple of Days Off

The cold mornings continue. 17.8° at sunrise today. It is pretty interesting that the temperature always seems to go down an additional degree or two between when we get up and sunrise and is coldest just before dawn.

Even The Local Black Phoebe Has His Down Coat On This Morning

Yesterday we made our weekly trip to Tucson. In addition to shopping, we met up with Bob, our friend of a friend Tucsonian. Once again at the Speedway Whole Foods, this time on purpose. He took us to lunch at the Blue Willow, a small Tucson favorite. It is in an old house and the restaurant has been in existence for about as long as Bob has lived in Tucson. He arrived in 1955.

We sat in a pleasant outdoor patio and had a couple of their rather eclectic specials. I had the tostada with avocado, one huge light crispy flour tostada piled with goodies. Ellen had salmon cakes with cucumber sauce. It is a pretty nice restaurant and the company was hard to beat as Bob regaled us with stories of Tucson 50 years ago.

Bob is an emeritus professor at the University of Arizona. He started teaching there in 1955 when there were only a few thousand students. It has now grown to 42,000 students. He still does research and goes in several times a week. (I suspect that academic careers like that are vanishing since universities are becoming less likely to have tenured academicians, opting for cheaper adjunct staff.)

He took us on an auto tour around the campus, which is huge, but is a mixture of older, adobe-style buildings and new modern structures. The biggest structure of all is, of course, the football stadium, complete with several stories of luxury boxes on one side. Bob lamented the fact that the football coach gets paid two million a year, much more than the president of the university.

He also took us through some of the older neighborhoods near the university with some really interesting smaller houses and through his own neighborhood (where he has lived since the fifties) which was a small subdivision on the fringes of the city then, but is well inside the city now. It was a nice visit and we hope to get together again and see downtown Tucson.

When we made our second stop for food, at yet another Fry's, I brought Speedy next door to Tucson Dodge ... yup, another Speedy problem. The van starts to squeak somewhere in the front suspension or steering components after it heats up. We can drive most of the way to Tucson before it starts to squeak going over bumps, but once it starts it continues until we stop for the day. But that wasn't the main problem.

The last time we were out in Speedy (the trip to Sells and Kitt Peak) I decided to take a look underneath to see if I could locate the source by feeling around for a warm connector. While doing so, I noticed power steering fluid all over the new steering box. It looked like there is a leak somewhere in the lines from the power steering pump to the steering box and the fluid level was a bit low. It looks like the small cooling radiator has a leak since it is the highest point in the line and the oil seems to start there. I've made an appointment to bring it in for service next Monday. By the time we got back to the refuge, the level had fallen even more. I hope that I can find some fluid on our next trip to Arivaca at the Mercantile. We may need it to get back to Tucson.

We made a couple of other stops to get a water filter to replace the one that froze and cracked and to get some insulation to wrap it and a drop light to heat the compartment where the water line enters the van. We hoped that the heated water hose had arrived.

On our way back, we were passed by the UPS truck. Yippee! This was a good sign since we were on the road to the refuge, but when we got to the visitor center, the UPS box was empty. We hadn't seen the truck stop, so were a bit disappointed. As we were about to leave the visitor center parking lot, we saw a truck coming up the entrance road. It was the UPS truck and the driver had our hose. He had made a stop on the way to the refuge allowing us to pass it.

It was already dark when we got back to the outpost and parked Speedy, but we made time to attach the heated hose as it was getting cold quickly. I got it all connected and plugged it in. By the time I also set up the heat lamp, the hose was feeling warm. This was a good sign. I wrapped the faucet with insulating tape and hoped it would all work.

The Blue Heated Hose

To our great disappointment, it did not.

When we got up to that 17° sunrise, there was no water. Something had frozen. The hose was warm, so that couldn't be the problem. The compartment didn't seem too cold either. The post where the faucets are is insulated and the two faucets have pipe wrap. I open the unconnected faucet and no water came out. The water must have frozen at the top. Needless to say, as soon as the sun came up a few degrees, the temperature followed and the water started flowing again.

Today we spend most of the time here at the Sonoran Outpost. Ellen did laundry while I corresponded with our friend Sally over making reservations for camping at Denali National Park next August. We are again planning a trip to Alaska, this time with Harry and Sally, a two Roadtrek convoy. Reservations for the Denali campgrounds opened today. There are not many RV campsites within the park and August is the most busy period (the weather is good and the mosquitoes are mostly gone).

I tried to make reservations online last night after midnight, but they had not opened them up yet. The phone lines would be open at 8 a.m. (Mountain Standard Time) today and Sally was going to make the call. She was successful and we have reservations for five days at Teklanika campground, 39 miles into the park, and five days at Savage River campground, 13 miles into the park, starting next August 1st. Here's hoping Speedy makes it.

After lunch, it was time to disconnect the water and electricity from Speedy, turn it around and dump our tanks. After this, I looked at the water problem some more. Probably the best solution is to build an insulated box that would slip over the existing water post, enclosing the water pipe, faucets, filter and hose connections. This could be augmented with a small outdoor lamp mounted inside. I decided to ride over to the maintenance garage to see if they had any foam board that I could use. Ellen stayed behind to put together the Brown Canyon Hike slideshow and catch up on email.

Unfortunately, no one was to be found, either at the maintenance garage, the headquarters building or the visitor center. The only people in the area were us and Ann, the biologist, who was at her office. Since I was up there, I stooped in to talk with her and pick up a field notebook for our Arivaca Cienega hydrology project.

There was to be no insulated box today, but what could I do about tonight? Temperatures are predicted to go into the twenties. I decided to try wrapping the water post and faucets in towels, covering them with a trash bag and fastening the assemblage with a bungee cord. Some of the heated hose is within the bundle, so maybe it will be enough for tonight. We'll see.