#148 Stayed Saturday night at a dispersed site near Richfield, UT at Fishlake national forest

Our next stop was a boondock on the way to Capitol Reef, again a place I had never heard of. There was another reason to be in Richfield. I've been looking around for some parts for the truck. One was a petcock valve for the radiator that was leaking. I also needed to find a Honda dealership because the starter on the generator wasn't working. The closest place in our path was called Richfield. I had called ahead to the Dodge place and found out they could get the petcock and so I ordered it paid for it and just needed to ride by and pick it up. I made arrangements with the Honda dealership. I went to the Honda place first and they started kind of giving me this story about how they couldn't fit me in for about a week. That was a little disturbing so I guess my next Honda opportunity would be in Utah or Saint George. I went by the Dodge dealership and got the part for the radiator so that was a success. This was a reasonably small town with not a whole lot of campground activity. The few that were around were a little overpriced.

I looked at the map and we were surrounded by National Forest. I started looking for a location where I could be on some road that was within the National Forest boundaries. We would do some unannounced dispersed camping. I found a cool little spot that was down at the end of a road. It's interesting because even though I was just inside the boundaries of the National Forest it was really like a commercial area. It was at the end of an industrial park with lots of business. We ended up on a dirt road overlooking the highway but since I was within the actual forest boundaries the rule applies. I can park anywhere and stay 14 nights if I'm not bothering anybody.

The only weird thing is was at some point a sheriff came by in the middle of the night and kind of paused then turned around and left. I assume he must have decided that I wasn't blocking the road so I figured that means I'm ok. When I was backing into the little spot I kind of gave it a little gas and there was a hill behind me and my landing gear kind of got all garbled up and bent. It still worked but it was now woppy jawed. Richfield was fine for what it was but not to offend the citizens but once we got our parts and got a good night's sleep, we didn't need to spend a lot of time there. We headed up the hill and I would have to say we had apparently not been around many hills until now. It had been a long time since we overheated. This was a steep grade and we noticed that the truck was overheating as we started heading up the grade. I had to pull over about every mile or two and cool down. At some point, I just took the thermostat out. Although we still were running very warm I was able to get up the hill without overheating to the danger point. I thought this sucks because we had this problem last year. We’ve been on flat ground for so long this must have been the first big hills of the Rockies. We found them. We had also stopped having problems with the throttle position sensor for a while. It would fail about every other state since we replaced it in Florida twice, New Mexico. At some point, the people that sold it to me were beginning to ask questions. It’s a 250 part. Well along with overheating this thing is also failing now. It puts his into limp home mode which means I can't go more than 10 miles an hour, sometimes 5 mile an hour. Sometimes you pat it just right and say a little prayer and it'll perk up and you'll be going 50 mph again. if you ever let off the gas again you go back to 5 mph again. Going up a steep hill it's really scary and a problem and we're overheating. I'm not happy and so discouraged because we keep on spending money and we can't seem to get it solved. I decided I'm tough and we'll get through this.