Thursday, January 1, 2009 - Guadalupe Mountains National Park, Salt Flat TX
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Dawn at the Visitors Center, Guadalupe Mountains National Park, January 1, 2009
An update on my transmission seal blow-out
There isn't much progress. Some quick Googling yesterday confirmed what I had come surmised earlier in reading forum posts about these Lazy Daze RVs - that the Ford E4OD transmission in this 1992 rig is a fairly early iteration of these transmissions and that they tend to be somewhat fragile and prone to overheating and blowing the front seal.
Then I came across a forum post from a guy who had an experience similar to mine and he learned that the seal will often reseat itself after the transmission cools down. He tried it and after 50 slow miles and a couple of quarts of fluid - it did. That got me thinking this might be worth a try if I can lay my hands on some transmission fluid. It was just quitting time at the Visitors Center when I found this post so I ran over and was able to enlist the poor staffer who had to come in to work today to bring me some fluid. Which he graciously did.
I replaced the quart that had leaked out, started the engine and ran it through the gears - with the brakes on, not moving - and the leak returned. And it's a big leak - there's no way the 6 quarts of fluid I have would take me the 60 miles to Carlsbad I need to go if the seal didn't heal on the road pretty quickly. Phooeey.....
It's time to take a hike
As long as I'm here I might as well enjoy the Park. So I took a hike up the Devil's Hall trail as far as the staircase, about 2 miles. I haven't been hiking much lately so that was more than enough for the day and a beautiful walk up through the canyon to a natural staircase swept clean by the stream flowing down through the canyon.
Question... if you get a whiff of tom cat back in there, what cat are you whiffing?
Night camp
Visitors Center parking lot - not the Pine Springs Campground - Guadalupe Mountains National Park, Salt Flat TX
- This is a small, primitive campground with not very level paved sites
- There are lots of good hiking trails in the mountains
- Verizon cell phone signal is a little weak but adequate - Access is via Extended Network, roaming
- No Verizon EVDO service - access is via the Extended Network and service is slow
- Find other references to Guadalupe National Park
- List the nights I've camped here
- Check the weather
- Go to Guadalupe Mountains National Park website
- Get a Google Street View and a map
Listening
As the poet Gary Snyder said so well, "Beyond all this studying and managing and calculating, there's another level to nature. You can go about learning the names of things and doing inventories of trees, bushes, and flowers. But nature often just flits by and is not easily seen in a hard, clear light. Our actual experience of many birds and wildlife is chancy and quick. Wildlife is known as a call, a cough in the dark, a shadow in the shrubs. You can watch a cougar on a wildlife video for hours, but the real cougar shows herself only once or twice in a lifetime. One must be tuned to hints and nuances." After more than thirty years of living in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada and spending a great deal of that time out-of-doors, Snyder has seen the mountain lion on just a few occasions. One of these sightings was most unusual. Gary had been visiting a neighbor and was walking down from the nearby ridge to his home when he observed a cougar sitting near one of the windows of the house. The animal appeared to be listening intently as one of Snyder's stepdaughters practiced the piano.