From a Flat Tire in Kanab to The Stratosphere in Las Vegas
After an uneventful trip from Page, Arizona to Kanab, Utah, I set up camp at the venerable Kanab RV Corral.
By booking early, I was able to enjoy the bucolic charm of old Kanab.
Since I first stayed at the RV Corral in 2006, tourist facilities in
the City of Kanab have expanded exponentially. New hotels and RV Parks
seem to sprout up every year. Even so, the population of Kanab now
stands at only 4,636.
To the east of the city, the Grand Plateau RV Resort features eighty RV
spaces and fifteen cabins. Nearby, Red Canyon Cabins features
approximately fifty-five individual cabins, which wrap around the Kanab
Quality Inn. Upon my arrival at the Kanab RV Corral, I learned that
there was not a single unreserved RV 
space in Kanab that night. Not ironically, the Kanab Creek aquifer draws on the same watershed that feed the Colorado River and Lake Mead
downstream. As the eastern gateway to Zion National Park and Bryce
Canyon National Park, Kanab now appears dominated by developers and
hoteliers. Each new facility uses untold amounts of water.
While in Kanab, I visited the historic Parry Lodge,
first built as a private home in 1892. In 1930, the Parry brothers,
converted the large property into a Hollywood movie support
destination, complete with motel and luxury hotel accommodations. In
2021, with decreased revenue and an increased cost of operation, the
property closed during the depths of the health crisis. As of August
2021, the historic lodge is again open for business.
Although
tourists could not enter during my visit, I could peer down the
driveway and see “Randolph Scott’s Room”, which was the first door along
an otherwise deserted driveway. John Wayne’s room was farther down the
driveway. Out front, there were memorial plaques honoring various
Western movie heroes of the 20th century, including Ronald Reagan and
Joel McCrea. On August 14, 2003, the complex became a listing on the
National Register of Historic Places. While I was strolling the
grounds, a woman told me about a nearby historical movie site.
Intrigued, I drove up along Kanab Creek to the Best Friends Animal Sanctuary.
Remembering it as a small outpost of animal care in 2006, I was amazed
to see a huge ranch and campus designed to care for everything from
horses to raptors. Since I did not have a tour reservation, I stuck to
the dirt road and went up canyon. Near the upper reaches of the
facility, I discovered an 
historical
red barn. Other than a new roof, the barn looked just as it did for
over a century. During that time, the wooden structure had served as
both a horse barn and a Hollywood Western movie location. From the
woman in town, I had learned that none other than the late, great
George “Gabby” Hayes had filmed there.
On the morning of May 26, I prepared for the 207-mile trip from Kanab to Las Vegas, Nevada.
While checking my RV tires, I realized that my left-rear tire was
woefully low on pressure. Although I could not see it then, a steel
screw had punctured the tread. After a failed attempt to pump up the
tire, I decided to roll my rig slowly to the Ramsay Towing & Service Center,
just up the highway. There, the nice woman behind the counter said it
would be a minimum two hour wait for service. I decided to roll slowly
down the back streets of Kanab to the nearby Best Tire and Wheel 
Shop.
There, a tired voice from the back of the shop told me that he had
appointments stacked up and more customers expected soon. He suggested
that I try Hatch Automotive, just across the highway.
At the rustic Hatch Automotive garage, an older gentleman (Dr.
Livingston, I presume) stood inside, wearing a sparkling clean set of
clothes. As I waited for him to finish a conversation, I noticed a
tire-busting machine in the corner of the garage. It looked like it had
last seen service twenty years prior. When the gentleman turned to me,
he almost chuckled at my request for assistance. He pointed to the
depths of the garage and said that a young man who was up to his elbows
in grease was the only person who did any work around there. It was
then that I realized that Hatch Automotive was probably a hobby for
that retired gentleman. “I guess I’ll just fix it myself”, I said.
“That would be a good idea”, the gentleman replied.
From
there, I slowly rolled my rig to a wide street behind the nearby La
Quinta Inn. I remember what a mobile tire-buster once told me near the
Arizona border. "You can do it yourself. Just roll one axle up high
enough that the second axle lifts its tire off the ground. Then it is
as easy as changing a tire on your car". Utilizing various pieces of
lumber that I normally use to level my rig, I managed to pull forward
on to my makeshift wooden ramp. With the rear axle suspended in the
air, I used my trusty lug wrench to remove the offending wheel. Way
back in Needles, on the first day of my trip, I had checked my spare
tire for proper inflation. Confident that it could do the job, I rolled
my spare tire and rearward and then mounted it on the rear axle.
Within twenty minutes, I finished by using my trusty torque wrench to
cinch down the lug nuts to a proper level. After rolling off my
makeshift lumberyard, I was ready to roll. Soon, the stress of looking
for nonexistent tire-service in Kanab disappeared. Happy to be moving
again, I looked at my watch. My entire tire escapade in Kanab had taken
just over one hour. It felt like instant manifestation all over again.
Across
the U.S. there is a shortage of labor, especially in the smaller towns.
For the available wages, young people do not want to bust tires or
learn automotive repair. If he was paid a fair wage, the 1980's Chevy
Dinosaur that the young mechanic was digging into at Hatch Automotive
would not be worth the time it took to repair. With a college or a
trade school degree, a young person could escape the grease and grime
associated with being an underpaid mechanic in Kanab, Utah. A young
auto mechanic would be better off taking an unpaid apprenticeship at a
Tesla Service Center. At least there is a future in working on electric
vehicles. With over 570,000 RVs sold in the past year, there are now
tens of thousands more travelers on the road. The lesson I learned on
this trip was to depend on myself for minor repairs. If you need a flat
tire fixed in Kanab, be prepared to wait most of a day for service. If
you need after-hours roadside RV service near Aztec, New Mexico,
be prepared for a $500 service call, plus time and one half for any
actual repairs. With that, the price to change and fix a flat tire on
the road could easily approach $1,000. My new motto is, “Be Prepared.
Have a spare.”
From the snow of Southwestern Colorado to the heat of Las Vegas,
my arrival in Nevada was a shock. My fifth wheel has a single air
conditioning unit aboard. Until arriving in Las Vegas in late May 2021,
I never imagined that I might need a second A/C unit. After a
relatively cool first night, I spoke with my neighbor at the Las Vegas RV Resort.
He was a specialist in industrial plumbing design and installation. He
and his wife had recently arrived in Las Vegas from his Florida home.
His main task in Las Vegas was to design and oversee the installation of
industrial piping at the former Molycorp Mine (Now called the Mountain Pass Mine), south of Primm, Nevada. Mountain Pass Mine is not an historical mine tucked into a romantic mountain pass. It is a strip mine, pure and simple.
When
he arrived in Las Vegas, my RV neighbor found inadequate Wi-Fi and
scorching desert heat. With plans to spend fourteen months in Las Vegas,
he needed quick relief. By the time I departed, two days later, he had
shade cloth installed on all his exterior windows and a microwave
Wi-Fi disk installed atop his access ladder. With high-speed internet,
he could view and revise the water, chemical and steam pipes required
to restart one of the few rare-earth mineral mines in the United
States. Although the Department of Defense had partnered with the
mine’s new owners in 2019, decades of neglect and intermittent closures
at the mine had left its infrastructure inoperable. Apparently, it was
in worse shape than any highway I had recently driven in the Four Corners Region. In essence, the entire mineral processing system at the mine would require a redesign and replacement.
When I asked how long that would take, he sighed and said, “They think
the mine can be operational in twelve to fourteen months”. After a long
pause, he said, “I’m not sure I can get enough skilled pipe-fitters to
complete that task in the 120-degree heat of the Mojave Desert”. The
former owner of the Mountain Pass Mine
was Molycorp, which went bankrupt in 2014. The mine had suffered the
same fate as many “green energy” technologies, such as solar panels and
lithium-ion
batteries. For decades, China had undercut U.S. domestic prices and,
in this case, had driven the only major rare-earth minerals mine in
America out of business.
In 2019, the U.S. Department of Defense awoke from its slumber and
agreed to partially fund the reopening of the Mountain Pass Mine. As we
know, if China were to curtail the supply of rare-earth minerals to
the U.S., the emerging electrical vehicle (EV) industry would fail
almost immediately. The Mountain Pass Mine
is located just across the Nevada border, in San Bernardino County,
California. As such, every part of the refurbishment project will be
subject to review by California state agencies. When he had retrofitted
paper mills throughout the Southern U.S., my neighbor told me, the
state of jurisdiction would issue one permit for an entire project.
California, he said, requires a separate permit for each aspect of
design and construction. With California environmental rules and
bureaucracy in mind, the reopening of the Mountain Pass Mine in late
2022 sounded like a “pipe dream” to me.
On
my layover day in Las Vegas, the air temperature rose to about
105-degrees. On the asphalt pads of the RV Park, the temperature was
ten or fifteen degrees higher. The intense heat and my under-powered
air conditioner reminded me about a story from Yuma, Arizona. For
decades, Yuma was renowned as the hottest city in America. Tired of
constantly being the butt of “hot city” jokes, Yuma relocated its
official weather station to the center of a well-watered citrus orchard.
Almost instantly, Phoenix, Arizona
became the hottest city in America, with 169 days each year at 90F
degrees or more. As the Colorado River wanes to a trickle, there will be
insufficient imported water for cotton farming and cattle ranching in
Southern Arizona. Soon after that, we can expect outlawing of the
outdoor water-mister systems that make dining or relaxing outdoors in Phoenix possible.
On Friday May 28, I bid my Las Vegas RV Resort neighbor adieu and drove the final 305-miles home to Simi Valley,
California. While in Las Vegas, I had spent under $20 to get my Kanab
flat tire repaired and ready for redeployment. As luck would have it, my
final dash through the Mojave Desert was uneventful. The following
week, I visited Simi RV. The parts specialist there had a Dometic
refrigerator thermo fuse replacement kit hanging on the rack. The RV
refrigerator failure at the beginning of my trip had been an
inconvenience, but not a full-scale disaster. Looking back, I had spent
$24 for three temporary foam coolers, $30 for two Igloo permanent
coolers and $15 for ice, just to keep my food from rotting. Then I
spent $168 for the unneeded printed circuit board (PCB), $34 to exchange
the PCB for a proper spare. I paid another $212 for a technician in
Aztec, New Mexico to fully diagnose the thermo fuse issue. Adding $65
for my new thermo-fuse replacement kit brought the grand total for RV
refrigerator repairs to over $550.
While
purchasing my new thermo fuse replacement kit, I told the owner of Simi
RV about my refrigerator issue. He said that other owners of some
Cougar and Montana model RVs had experienced similar thermo-fuse
failures. With a lot of research and testing, he had determined that
wind created a low-pressure area along the side of the RV. Wind
entering the upper vent was making the propane flame burn too hot, thus
burning out the thermo-fuse. The remedy was to put an aluminum wing or
baffle at the leading edge of the refrigerator vent. That would
deflect the passing air around the refrigerator unit and keep the flame
operating at the proper temperature.
Since my RV is beyond its warranty period, he could fix the problem, but
Simi RV had almost a three month wait for service. Instead, we agreed
that I would complete my own repair. He gave me an unfinished, bent
piece of aluminum, 
which
I customized to my satisfaction, including a black paint job. I
installed long screws, which passed through my new creation and into
the structure of the upper RV vent. Soon, I shall take another RV trip,
which will include a live test of my new baffle.
On the bright side, for $550 I got my RV refrigerator working. For that
amount, I also now have the equivalent of an associate degree in RV
refrigerator repair. Since I was able to avoid scuttling my annual,
two-week visit to the Four Corners Region, I believe it was all well
worth the price. After a subsequent RV trip to Morro Bay, California, I am happy to report that my refrigeration issue appears to be solved.
This concludes Part Five of a Five-Part Article. To return to Part One, click HERE.
By James McGillis at 03:39 PM | Travel | Comments (0) | Link
As a character in my online novel, “
