The sky goes white and there’s another crack.
The windscreen wipers have failed on the Jeep. They’re stuck pointing at the sky, which is not actually unusual since this Jeep was made in 1988, 34 years ago. Back then, for some reason, the wipers were designed to point upward when not in use. Today, wipers lay flat to stay out of the wind and out of view. But a 1988 Wrangler is already the opposite of aerodynamic, wipers laying flat won’t help anyone.
I’m considering my life choices. Stuck at over 13,000 feet on the side of a Colorado mountain in a thunder-hail-lightning storm in an ancient Jeep. A Jeep that is having major systems failures. How did I get here?
Telluride, Colorado sits at the end of a flat-bottomed valley. Canyon may be a better word. Telluride is essentially Disneyland - far away, expensive and full of people pretending to be someone else. Fashionable to a different set of people, saving the planet by wearing high-end technical plastic fabrics which hint adventure.
Telluride itself is a small grid of homes and a Main Street mostly built a century or so ago. Charming, beautiful and astronomically expensive because like in most of the western world it’s illegal to build anything.
Most people will spend their time in Mountain Village which is where the bulk of the ski resort is and where it was, however briefly, legal to build things. A free gondola connects the two. At one end there are 10-story hotels, concrete car-parks and deca-million-dollar mansions. At the other, a town trying to live as if it’s 1850 and proud of it. You may visit one and back again in 20 minutes.
Imogene Pass starts innocently on the North side of Telluride. The paved road becomes gravel and that’s it. As you ascend there are people hiking and you can convince yourself you’re still in town for miles, there’s even the occasional Victorian house on the gravel that in the winter you might need a skimobile to reach.
My Jeep is the opposite of what the Telluride elite would (publicly) enjoy. It’s old, extremely noisy, inefficient and dirty. I’m embarrassed. Up the trail, it will gain many compliments but here on the edge of town, we’re limited to thin smiles and rolling of eyes.
How Jeepy Came to Be
As children, my brother and I were usually sent to spend the summers with family. We nominally lived with our father, apart from long stints in various other places. Our mother had left when we were toddlers and we saw her occasionally.
One summer we were being dropped by my dad at our aunt and uncles house, about an hour from home. We were taken upstairs where my dad sat my brother and I down in the spare bedroom. He explained it wasn’t just a summer stay as usual this time, but permanent because he was getting divorced. Again.
My brother, 8 or 9, started crying and leapt to my dad. I was shocked. I was 10. I could tell the permanence was my fault because my dad cradled my brother and said “you know this is your fault.”
It couldn’t have been easy having your wife(ves) leave you and trying to raise two boys in your twenties, especially if you yourself had essentially Victorian parents with Victorian values. And I was no Angel. But still, the mind boggles at blaming at 10-year-old for your failures.
I mention this because any kind of escape from that life was bliss. Long bike rides became my freedom. Washing cars in the summer brought cash to be spent on buckets of fizzy sugary drinks and sweets. And then when I was twelve, Jurassic Park came out.
For an earlier generation (and a later one) the escape may have been Star Wars. But for me, living in the middle of nowhere, England, Jurassic Part was so mind-bending that I started reading books, long after having been convinced I was too stupid to do so by my various teachers and parents.
When I saw the Jeeps in Jurassic Park, when I was twelve in 1993, I wanted one. This felt about as obtainable as warp speed. I can remember six years later being on a bus going past a Jeep dealership and seeing the Sahara’s lined up and sighing.
And now I have one.
Today, the original Jurassic Park Jeep has become a cultural icon and there are now thousands(?) of replicas, art on Etsy, and even a club.
The Jeep - Jeepy - began its life in Utah where I picked it up. Jeepy looked amazing. Jeepy has “Jurassic Park” on the side of it. Almost everything has been replaced. The engine is a 90s Mustang V8. The transmission and so on are Ford 9”. It’s been lifted and has 37” tires.
And when I picked it up nothing worked. A feature of Jeeps, especially older Jeeps, is that everything breaks. The battery needed replacement, the lights didn’t work. The horn didn’t work. The steering column had fallen off. The twin exhausts dumped at the doors not at the back of the car and were louder than a Harley. I could go on.
I loved it. Because Jeepy is maybe 90% screen-accurate to the 1993 movie.
Jeepy has secrets. The “JEEP” logos on the side have little T-Rex skulls instead of “E”’s. The radio antenna is a bullet. The mirrors say “Objects in mirror may eat you”.
And, amongst all these secrets and oily smells, Jeepy Will Kill You.
Jeepy was built in a time before crumple zones and airbags. Before anti-lock brakes and no-smoking signs. Jeepy is basically a death trap. Jeepy is the anti-Tesla: Jeepy is noisy, cold (or hot), inefficient, unsafe and going to kill you.
Up the Mountain
I was thinking of this death-trap-on-wheels angle while climbing out of Telluride.
The first thing you need to do is get Jeepy out of 2-wheel and into 4-wheel mode, and from high to low gear. Or is it low to high? This is complicated by the fact that the transmission has three levers and no real markings. In a modern Jeep you might push a button. In Jeepy, you have to stop and negotiate. Put it in to park. Try the 2/4-wheel lever, no go. Try the high/low lever. It moves. Try the 2/4 wheel, no go. Put it in to neutral and try again, nothing. Put it in to park. Nothing. Put it in to neutral again, ah the lever moves now, but the other lever has slipped for some reason. Repeat.
In a normal Jeep you could talk to someone next to you. In Jeepy, the noise precludes this.
As you depart Telluride the trail becomes gradually thinner and the sides become steeper. That is, the left-hand-side becomes more of a wall and the right-hand-side becomes more of a cliff. You can’t see Jeepy’s wheels, so you lean out the window to at least track the left-front wheel.
The sky is angry but not yet violent and the air gets thinner. It smells of pine and cold because the temperature drops as you climb.
Occasionally other cars come in the opposite direction. Many of them are rentals. You can tell because the Jeeps look cheap and the driver is gripping the steering wheel like a life raft on an open ocean. They tend to ride the brakes all the way down, unintentionally risking death by burning them out.
At one particular point two work trucks head down towards me on a 3/4-car-wide track in clear violation of the “uphill has priority” fantasy and decide to squeeze up the bank and tilt themselves at 30 or 40 degrees to pass. They look like they’ll roll over but I squeeze past with fractions of an inch to spare. I am not exaggerating.
Jeepy may look legit but I am not. If stopped, as I am, and asked, as I am, I have no idea what shocks it has on it. Who made the three independent LED lighting systems? No clue. Why do I have bead-lock tires? Don’t ask. All I know is that it’s a Jurassic Park Jeep.
A squadron of Land Rovers pass. They look dinky compared to Jeepy, and my British heritage is tingled.
Occasionally the “road”, or pressed collection of rocks, becomes more than gentle and Jeepy trundles onward up the mountain such that you can no longer see the ground. The front view is entirely the hood of the car, plus sky, with no intervening ground. Every time I press the accelerator on this cobbled-together vehicle I’m expecting something to go bang, or something to fall off.
At the top, there’s a film crew. They won’t say what they’re filming or why. Various Jeeps, some modified trucks and the occasional side-by-side pass. There are old mines here. The mountain is a Swiss cheese of rustily covered mine entrances and collapsed wooden buildings.
It’s time to pause and look around. One half of the view is grey and black clouds, the other is mountain peaks in various shades of grey, obscured by distant rainstorms. The trees are far below and we’ve climbed maybe a mile up from Telluride. If you’re new to Colorado this is all very stunning, but I’m more worried about the descent.
It begins to rain. Not hard and not misty. But fat rain drops just occasionally. Ominous, I think.
Jeepy has three main ways to get you down the mountain. You can ride the brakes which will kill you when they fail. You can ride down in 4-wheel low, in 2nd gear, which is too fast and will kill you. Or you can ride in 1st gear, which will kill you just much slower and with opportunities to jump out.
I pick 1st gear.
Jeepy will do a consistent 3-4 mph in 1st which annoys the crap out of people behind riding their brakes so pulling over every 10 minutes is a thing to let them pass. Gear 1 is Jeepy’s soldiers gait. It will trudge on, up and down practically anything in 1st. Jeepy is entirely unconcerned by any and all terrain in 1st gear. It will clear tree logs in 1st with the 37” wheels.
The steering on the other hand is possessed. There is no power steering. If you’ve seen a 50’s movie in black and white where the driver is looking at the passenger while randomly moving the wheel left and right to simulate “driving”, that’s what Jeepy’s steering is like.
While Jeepy is unconcerned about the terrain, it devolves all steering responsibility to the driver. Going up the mountain with the wall on the left is reassuring in a left-hand drive car. Going down the mountain with a cliff on the left is something else.
My main goal is to reach the tree line because the rain has now become hail and the thunder is approximately continuous. When you are in the trees, I theorize that the lightning is less likely to hit your giant lump of metal. And maybe the trees will hold the disintegrating “road” together a bit more.
Visibility drops to a few car-lengths and the lightning is now separated from the thunder by tenths of a second.
When Jeepy was made back in ‘88 it had two 12-volt incandescent headlights which couldn’t illuminate a small kitchen. These have been replaced with LED arrays comparable to modern headlights and are joined by similar fog lights. I switch these on. Above the windscreen is a 3-foot long light bar which is brighter than the sun. I switch that on too. The combined effect is to make the fog-like hail storm look whiter and more menacing.
There is really nothing to do but trudge down the mountain and put one foot in front of the other. The Jeep rocks around and occasionally skids here and there. It’s all fun and games unless you’re near a cliff where torrents of water cascade off in to some unseen abyss. Other faster Jeeps try to get around until there’s a pullout and then five go by at once. They have conveniences like door handles.
Finally at tree line there’s 15 or so vehicles recovering. I ask which way is down. Someone points. Why are they even out of their car in a hail storm at 12,000 feet? Jeepy trudges on.
This takes hours.
Jeepy’s windscreen wipers have failed, probably fall-out from the internal flooding. The windscreen leaks to the point where there are inch-deep puddles in the footwells. The hood is covered in hail. The “windows” and “roof”, which are really just clear plastic and fabric, leak everywhere possible. One set of lights fail, though it is hard to tell which, as none of the switches are labelled and none seem to change the exterior brightness. The inside of the windscreen fogs up because there is no working hot air.
And Jeepy, being a champ, trudges on.
The slick rock in the rain skids and tilts Jeepy at uncomfortable angles. It feels ok apart from two or three points where death seems like a realistic outcome. I’m lifted by the thought that if I was outside and looking at the vehicle, it would probably look a lot better than it feels. In a tin box, on a mountain, pitched with the wheels at opposing angles above some mine.
As the wikipedia article puts it so dryly, “The road is accessible by four wheel drive vehicles, and is not for the novice driver.”
The descent teases you. It flattens for a while, you feel lower down, and then a corner and you can see you’re still thousands of feet up. The washouts start. Sections of the mountain have collapsed on to the dirt road. I stop a Jeep going up and tell them it’s pretty bad up there, they smile and continue up.
Jeepy trudges on.
The “road” now looks like the surface of Mars. Distinctly red Colorado rocks the size of backpacks now litter the “road”.
Jeepy trudges on.
The final flat is actually paved with sections of storm debris on top. Broken trees. Rocks. Impromptu streams of water a few feet across. A Jeep passes going down this time: “You were right it was pretty bad.”
And then hints of civilization. A road sign. A power pole.
The forest service, sheriff and others are at the bottom blocking the highway with multiple vehicles and flashing lights. Rock-scrambling vehicles are going the other way on a rescue mission. Maybe the rescuees have air conditioning and doors that close, but they don’t have Jeepy.
I’m reminded of basics. Hagakure:
There is something to be learned from a rainstorm. When meeting with a sudden shower, you try not to get wet and run quickly along the road. But doing such things as passing under the eaves of houses, you still get wet.
You still get wet.
Most of Jeepy’s systems failed yet we got down the mountain. How does a transmission work, entirely mechanically, such that I shift a lever and it will control everything so we go at a constant speed? Whether going up or down? With four wheels? At any probable angle?
It’s a magic piece of engineering. Someone took this thing apart and replaced the engine, wheels, transmission… and it works. Somehow. Before computers. And entire systems can fail but the core motive force somehow remained. Is it trite to say it was built for humans? When humans built things, which could be repaired by other humans? Maybe. I inventory the things I rely on in life and quickly get reminded I have no idea how most of them work.
There were still people up the mountain in brand new Jeeps specifically built to go up and down this mountain pass and yet there were rescue missions. I made it down in Jeepy, and realized it’s a mental game just like the rest of life. You have to push yourself to the edge to see it, but it’s a mental game. The Jeep wasn’t the thing.
People, Ideas, Machines, as John Boyd said. In that order, as he also said. Jeepy is a tool for the idea of crossing a mountain pass by me, the person. If you get it the wrong way around then it’s about buying a new toy machine and you have no idea why you’re there and then you the person need to be rescued.
In the end, Jeepy is an object. The ideas and then the people are more important.
As much as I love Jeepy, the journey is the reward. If you focus on the goal you’ll just be stranded on some mountain waiting for a rescue mission.
Postscript
A Jeep that didn’t make it over:
When a washed-out road can look like Mars. Just remove the trees and people:
Jeepy and a friend:
Love it Steve! I've owned and still do own the 1978 Jeep CJ-7 I bought in high school for $400. The entire electronics system is about the size of your hand and could be bought at Napa for $25 the last time I needed to replace it.
Keep on Jeeping on!