Monday, December 7, 2009 - Brantley Lake State Park, Carlsbad NM
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Blue Monday, Brantley Lake State Park, Carlsbad NM, December 7, 2009
New front shocks and a tire balance
Today the crew at Forrest Tire in Carlsbad will install new front shocks and rebalance the front tires in an effort to eliminate the right front tire bounce and cupping that has been plaguing me for some time now.
[mid day] This simple shock replacement isn't going so well. I'm sitting here in a welding shop up the street, nose in the air, watching the guys cut out the broken lower shock mount studs. Both studs broke when the mechanic tried to remove the nuts. The old Bilsteins were on there undisturbed for over 10 years and the nuts were badly corroded in place. Replacing the studs is not simple as simple as it might be. The studs are welded into a stamped plate that is then welded into the concave "U" of the stamped steel radius arms and are tough to get at. But these guys are clever (Carlsbad is in oil and mining country and they are used to making things work around here - I've had trouble finding shops willing to tackle this kind of thing back east) and quickly came up with a way to grind off the broken stud and get a little air powered die grinder in there to make rough mounting holes in the stamped plates to fit Chevy bolt-on type studs. These they then tack welded in place for some extra security and we're good to go.
We decided to hold off on the tire balance, thinking the new shocks are most likely the cause of the bounce since the new tires were balanced when they were installed. The drive back to Brantley Lake State Park proved otherwise - the handling is much improved but the bounce is still there and now feels more like a classic unbalanced tire. Sheesh! Now I'm wondering if the wheel is ok - the bounce is smaller but otherwise similar to what it was with the old, badly cupped, Goodyear tire. I guess the next step is to get them rebalanced and see.
I lost my Site and my Verizon service
(And now I lost this paragraph to the service gremlins too... Knowing there might be upload problems I captured this edit in the clipboard before I hit the "Save" button - or at least I thought I did. Yeah, right. I hit the button - nothing - no signal. And nothing in the clipboard! Sheesh..)
When I headed down to Carlsbad this morning I didn't bother to leave a chair or something on Site 37 to stake my claim while I was gone. The park isn't crowded and I didn't think it likely any of today's few new arrivals would choose my particular site to set up in nor did I really care - there are lots of nice sites open here these days. But wouldn't you know fellow Lazy Daze fulltimer Jerry rolled in today and chose his favorite site - Site 37. That's fine - I just drove on around the bend and set up on Site 42. Nice site. But the reasonably stable Verizon service I had at Site 37 is unusably unstable here at Site 42. Can the service be that location sensitive - I doubt I've moved more than a couple hundred feet? Or is it being affected by the winds that sprang up overnight (I'm writing this early Tuesday morning)? Who knows?
Night camp
Site 42 - Brantley Lake State Park, Carlsbad NM
- Verizon cell phone service - Access is via Extended Network, roaming
- No Verizon EVDO service - access is via the Extended Network and service varies with many drop-outs.
- See a list of the nights I've camped at Brantley Lake State Park
- Locate Brantley Lake State Park on my Night Camps map
- Go to Brantley Lake State Park website
- Locate services on my Resources map
- Check the weather here
A Siberian dog signal-howl
A camp in the middle of a clear, dark winter's night presents a strange, wild appearance. I was awakened, soon after midnight, by cold feet, and, raising myself upon one elbow, I pushed my head out of my frosty fur bag to see by the stars what time it was. The fire had died away to a red heap of smouldering embers. There was just light enough to distinguish the dark outlines of the loaded sledges, the fur-clad forms of our men, lying here and there in groups about the fire, and the frosty dogs, curled up into a hundred little hairy balls upon the snow. Away beyond the limits of the camp stretched the desolate steppe in a series of long snowy undulations, which blended gradually into one great white frozen ocean, and were lost in the distance and darkness of night. High overhead, in a sky which was almost black, sparkled the bright constellations of Orion and the Pleiades--the celestial clocks which marked the long, weary hours between sunrise and sunset. The blue mysterious streamers of the aurora trembled in the north, now shooting up in clear bright lines to the zenith, then waving back and forth in great majestic curves over the silent camp, as if warning back the adventurous traveller from the unknown regions around the Pole. The silence was profound, oppressive. Nothing but the pulsating of the blood in my ears, and the heavy breathing of the sleeping men at my feet, broke the universal lull. Suddenly there rose upon the still night air a long, faint, wailing cry like that of a human being in the last extremity of suffering. Gradually it swelled and deepened until it seemed to fill the whole atmosphere with its volume of mournful sound, dying away at last into a low, despairing moan. It was the signal-howl of a Siberian dog; but so wild and unearthly did it seem in the stillness of the arctic midnight, that it sent the startled blood bounding through my veins to my very finger-ends. In a moment the mournful cry was taken up by another dog, upon a higher key--two or three more joined in, then ten, twenty, forty, sixty, eighty, until the whole pack of a hundred dogs howled one infernal chorus together, making the air fairly tremble with sound, as if from the heavy bass of a great organ. For fully a minute heaven and earth seemed to be filled with yelling, shrieking fiends. Then one by one they began gradually to drop off, the unearthly tumult grew momentarily fainter and fainter, until at last it ended as it began, in one long, inexpressibly melancholy wail, and all was still.