#158 Evergreen road boondock, high sierra on the road to Hetch - Hetchy 7 days

Using the information the ranger gave us we left El Portal and headed up to Evergreen Road to look for a boondock.

I was looking at maps and the reason that it was okay for us to be where we were for seven days is that it was in the Stanislaus National Forest. It is at the border of Yosemite National Park. You can’t boondock on the side of the road in a national park but just a mile away or less is national forest property and then you’re all good. After we crossed the boundary I started looking. After a mile or so I went up a hill and saw a cool place right on the river. I saw some no parking signs nearby and felt we would be begging for a ranger visit. It was also on a steep grade that might not work without new tires and 4-wheel drive. Just up the hill, I saw a turn-around type place with an old campfire pit. I thought this could be us. It turned out to be a great boondock. This is the road you take to go to Hetch Hetchy and there are some pretty amazing Resorts down that road a few miles. They’re also 250 a night. Our place was free and insanely beautiful. We would stay here 7 nights and had a great experience. It was a challenge as it was still boondocking. Up on top of the hill near Evergreen road, there was only one civilization-type thing and it was the crane flat gas station and bus stop.

It was these two and nothing more but you could catch a bus here or get fuel and camping supplies. This where we could go to catch a bus that would take us down to the Yosemite Valley.

This was our plan. We went down to the valley and it was much easier to let somebody else drive. Take the bus.

As I might have mentioned before we typically always try to have a church service on Sunday. We went to a town called Groveland.

It was a half-hour away and it was a nice small town. They had a service outdoors on folding chairs. It was great. After that, we went to lunch at a really cool diner/bar.

Even though the town was tiny I thought it was cool to see a Tesla charging area where we had parked.

Later we went to the public library for several reasons. No matter what town we’re in we learned that the library would always have high-speed internet.

While we might browse a book or two, we would start up like 20 downloads from Netflix or amazon to watch later at the RV. On this visit, I wanted to find a pin diagram drawing and print it out for my dodge truck computer. I came to learn there are two-pin plugs. One with 50 wired pins and the other with 60. That’s a lot of inputs and outputs for just one engine. The 6 wires I was most interested in pertaining to the throttle position sensor. If anything went wrong, I wanted as much info as possible when I started replacing the wires to the sensor.

The next day I began to plan the day how I would return to Merced to pick up the generator.

I took the route the GPS suggested. When I was in the middle of it I was on the most spooky switchbacks that you would ever want to see. Scary but okay in a vehicle. Driving a rig would have been a bad idea.

The route would be off of Highway 120 and you pass through a small community called Buck Meadows. I remember it is just had a gas station, restaurant, and a small motel. You take a left turn on what looks like Highway 132 and then it just turns into a state road called Merced Falls Road later it would change names to Snelling Road.

I'm just saying that it would go what feels like straight down the hill and then hairpin curves and I mean like a dozen of them. There was no guardrail and it looked like it was like a thousand feet down.

I'm sure it would have been a pretty good thing in a sports car or if you're crazy. Then you take the big highway down through LaGrange. I survived but it was quite a ride.

When I finished all the hairpin turns and was on a more normal highway I got to the top of a hill and saw this marker

On the way back to the RV from Merced which had become a long day I saw a nice sunset

In Merced, I picked up the generator and these guys were so good to me. The generator worked great now and there was no charge for their efforts

In the week to follow whenever we left out of Evergreen Road with the big rig I made a point of taking a long way. It would be to go all the way-out Highway 120 to Groveland through a place called Chinese camp then to Merced. Longer but surviving is good too.

When I saw the town Chinese camp I could’ve but didn’t even need to look it up. I guessing it was where thousands of Chinese were practically stored for use in building the railroad. I’m sure they were segregated because they were seen as subhuman by the rail foremen and townspeople. Sadly, this is a repeating theme with wealthy white folks. Every time I turn around I feel shame for the deeds of people who came before me who look like me.

On the way back I saw something called Hardin Flat Road. I went down there wandering around and on the river, which is really kind of pretty of course, was the Southfork Tuolumne River. I drove around a little bit and saw a big RV Campground where you could be right on the river. It was named Thousand Trails. They are a national franchise similar to KOA.

I thought to myself wow that would be about a heavenly thing so I went in to talk to the guy. He said that there was no availability for about 30 days and it was $85 a night. It was a nice place although congested with RVs. I would have enjoyed being there for a minute because it had civilization, beauty, Wi-Fi, and all that.

Obviously, I was not interested in waiting 30 days and then I just cannot see spending $85 a night ever. Later in my story, I would spend 105 a night for 3 nights in the Key West area. I guess my values changed over time. Now I would say if I could be right on the river and catch my limit of fish every day in my back yard near Yosemite, I might be tempted to stay several days.

While I was there, I asked the guy if they had Wi-Fi and he said yes in the clubhouse ask him what the password he said there wasn't really a password.

Try to remember we've got a teenage daughter with us who is going through withdrawal for a little internet access. Although we can be out in these remote areas, we feel like we need to expose her to a little internet now and then or she'll just die. It's also a place for us to download movies for us to playback later.

To make Evergreen Road work we needed to conserve water. That means no showers. We decided to use Thousand Trails Campground 20 miles away to solve the shower problem. We started out the process with a full tank of 60 gallons of water. We managed to make this work for the seven nights for toilets, hand washing, and dishes.

Being a coyote, I grab what I can where I can. We would go down to this campground just about the dark at 9 pm. We just kind of walked over to the showers and helped ourselves. We just looked like normal campers and nobody noticed. They also had a lounge with TV and WI FI so we pretended to be guests there also.

About every two to three days during our visit at Evergreen Road we wandered down to this RV park and pretended that we were guests there. We would pack up all our towels and shower stuff drive down and park the truck somewhere. I was always a fan of using the bus rider park and ride parking area. It made it look like we were there for the bus instead of illegal bathing.

We would make a point of doing it at night because we would just be less obvious what we were doing. We would go down to the showers and take a nice hot shower and then maybe catch a little internet watch a little TV. After a while, we would head back up the hill at some point. It was a sneaky thing, we knew we were naughty but it was fun that nobody knew.

I say if you're going to do something sneaky wait till after dark.

I believe we did these three different times just to get our dose of civilization.

On what I believe was the third visit it was in the evening and some guys were playing Bluegrass up on the stage. It was very low-key and there were about three to four players and probably only 10 patrons.

India, Savannah, and I sat and listened and really enjoyed being entertained by these guys. It was a very pleasant evening of family time.

One afternoon we met a nice couple from Belgium when we were doing the Giant Sequoia walk at Tuolumne meadows. He took this cool picture using kind of a panoramic vertical thing.

I think it's really cool but no matter what you just can't quite get a picture of how big they are. It was a tough hike to the giants. On the way back, walking along a creek bed, I saw a large bear with cubs moving at a pretty good pace. In all my travels this is the only bear I’ve ever seen. I have mixed emotions. I wish I could see one once a week but when we look at the history of the national parks that didn’t go well. In years past the bears became so tame, they would eat a snickers bar from your car window. They became too dependent on humans for food. They hung out at campgrounds eating trash rather than foraging in nature as designed. Some of them weren’t so friendly and people were killed by bears.

They ended all that feeding the bears for entertainment many years ago. Now the bears are way out in the wilderness where they belong not at trash piles. This means you rarely see them. Bad for me, good for the bears.

We learned that when you see a sign like this it means a bear died here this week

One day down in the valley I hiked up a really steep grade to an amazing waterfall. Sadly over the years, several people had died for not reading the warning signs. The name of it was Vernal Falls.

The girls skipped this one because it was pretty intense and but it was a heck of a great hike and they got some amazing pictures. I /we did lots of hikes and all were mostly focus on water features.

One of our excursions was to Hetch Hetchy. I had never heard of it but when I was watching the Ken Burns special it talked a great deal about how John Muir loved the Hetch Hetchy valley more than any place.

San Francisco needed water. John Muir had hoped he had an ally in Theodore Roosevelt. When pressured endlessly he didn't try hard enough to protect it. They built the dam and flooded the Hetch Hetchy Valley and San Francisco got the water at wanted. John Muir fought to stop this for 10 years and lost. When it was flooded he went into a deep depression over it. It was very difficult for him to recover. I went down the road that was Evergreen road where we lived towards Hetch Hetchy which was a good 20 miles it seemed. We went down twisty windy roads. I saw a large area before we got there that looked like all the trees were gray. I came to realize that there had been a major fire there and that's why they were gray. The fire's heat killed them even when they didn’t burn. I asked one of the rangers later why don't cut them down and replant them. They just said that's not what we do here. Nature will figure it out sooner or later and it will renew itself someday. When we got down to where the water is of course there's a cool place to park. You can go on hikes. I can't even imagine what it looked like when it was a valley but this just wasn't all that amazing as a reservoir. I think that's probably what John would have said. I just expected even as a reservoir for it to knock your socks off with beauty and it just didn't really strike me that way. We walked around a bit and walked across the dam. It went into a tunnel to the other side and after a while, we had walked about the shoreline. It was at least good to be at a place where there was so much history had taken place. It was sad to see the place that broke John Muir's heart.

While we were boondocking here I decided to try to solve the throttle position sensor problem using my electrical skills to find a melted wire. I took it all apart at the connector and it did look a little melted. I had tried to find a new connector for the sensor but it didn’t seem to be available online or anywhere. I isolated each wire going from the sensor to the computer. This involved removing most of the turbo tubes and a lot more greasy work than you would want. I replaced each sensor wire one at a time with a new one using stakons.

Bert started watching me get set up to do the work on the speed sensor wires

He came out and tried to help me work on the truck. He was willing but he said it hard with out an opposed thumb.

Skipping forward that would be the last time I would ever have any trouble with the sensor. Here is some technical info just for fun.

Here is the PIN diagram for my throttle position sensor.

There are 6 wires between the ECM and the TPS and nothing else.

ECM-VT/BR to APPS-YL/PK = 5V supply

ECM-BR/VT to APPS-PK/YL = 5V supply

WT/BR = APPS NO.2 signal

BR/VT = APPS NO.2 return

BR/YL = APPS NO.1 return

BR/WT = APPS NO.1 signal

One afternoon I walked over to a tree an saw a bat walking up trying to make it to the top. I wondered if it was weak or sick because I figured the smart play would be to get there by flying. I figured if he could he would have but he didn't respond to my many questions. He was steady and finally made it but I had never seen one so close up.

I took a video of him/her and we hung out for ten minutes or so.

It was a wonderful experience to be here.

In total, we spent about a week and a half in Yosemite