Flattened at Clearwater! (Part 1)

Gentle readers: all gravel roads are not created equal.

Lord knows this blog has never been intended to serve as any sort of educational endeavour, beyond the trivial or the overshared, but if you learn naught else, I beseech and implore you to realize this one fact: Forestry Service Roads are different.

Thanks to visits to my wife's old stomping grounds around High River, I am completely inured at this point to driving or being a passenger on gravel roads while travelling at speeds in excess of 90 or even 100 km/h. Heck, many of these roads have posted speeds of 80 km/h, suggesting that slightly higher speeds are by no means beyond the pale.

But as we made our way out of the town of Clearwater B.C. on our way to our reserved campsite at Mahood Lake in Wells Gray Provincial Park, Google Maps informed us we would be traveling 63 km over a Forestry Service Road (FSR) for over an hour and a half.

While hardly ideal, we had come out here to camp and get dirty after all, so with Audrey at the wheel we got stuck in. The posted speed limit was 50 km/h, up a steep incline and with multiple segments of washboard or areas strewn with holes ranging in depth from two to six inches, so we were rarely at that speed, and towing the Bride of Frankentrailer to boot. I don't think we saw another vehicle while we were under way either.

It was intermittently scenic, with mountain vistas and dense evergreen forests, and we spotted perhaps two dozen tiny bunnies eating something off the gravel before passing the 23 km marker, which was when we heard the portside trailer tire blow out completely.

Now, what we did not know at that point is that the gravel on FSRs is not the smooth, rounded specimen of your traditional rural routes. Heavens no, these are  jagged and pointy bits of weaponized mineral so spiteful that experienced offroaders will often 'air down' their tires to 20 or even 15 psi before traversing FSRs. And there we were, dodging what my Mum called chuckholes at 50-60 km/h while towing a trailer whose tires were lovingly inflated by Audrey the previous day to the recommended 80 psi.

Honestly, it is a wonder we made it as far as we did.

But there we were, with a shredded tire, 1/3 of the way to our destination. With no other recourse, we unloaded the Lander to access the jack and tire iron, and Audrey got the spare off the back of the trailer while I got the scissor jack situated. Laying down in the dusty gravel while Audrey brushed increasingly large and aggressive horseflies off my back, I painstakingly twisted the scissor jack to a point where it at least met the frame of the trailer, which was no mean feat, given how much lower everything was when compared to, say, a car.

It has probably been a decade since I changed a tire, and the lift points on a 50-year olfd tent trailer are not nearly as clearly marked (i.e. not discernible at all) as those on the Corolla (or the Lander, presumably). I make no apologies for my ignorance, why have an AMA membership if you aren't going to use it, after all?

I will apologize for forgetting that the lug nuts must be loosened before lifting the vehicle, or the wheel will simply spin as you fruitlessly lean on your tire iron. But after lowering the jack, I realized the fairing or wheelguard or whatever you want to call it made accessing the nuts even more difficult than usual. But this was not the biggest problem. 

The tire iron for the Lander did not fit the lug nuts on the trailer. 

In retrospect, this was predictable, but up until that fateful moment, lug nuts had existed, in my mind, as a universal constant. Somehow I had forgotten the ubiquitous cross bar tire iron of my youth, with its four distinct sizes. 

It quickly became clear that none of our tools were going to fit the bill, and I had already dismissed two helpful loggers in their pickups, so there was naught else to do but to disconnect the trailer and make our way back to Clearwater.

Audrey drove so that once we were back in cellular range I could use data to find the phone number for a towing company to come change the tire for us as I was hot, sweaty, exhausted and running out of daylight. But when I reached them, I learned in rapid succession that 1) no one could get up there before late tomorrow morning and 2) the hourly rate (including travel time) and surcharge for a callout to an FSR meant the last one had cost the forestry company $750. "It's blowout after blowout up there," he told me, "especially after they grade it."

Since this was more than the cost of the trailer itself, I was crestfallen, After some discussion as to the tools I would need in order to get the tire off, and the realization that even if local stores had what I needed, they had all closed over an hour ago, he suggested he could rent me what I needed, and in a strange mixture of hope and desperation, I agreed. 

We drove to the shop where he helped me load up a three-ton floor jack, an 18" breaker bar (a non-ratcheting, long handled socket wrench with a swivel in the middle so you can flip the wrench 180 degrees while keeping it on the nut), a full set of up-scaled sockets and some penetrating spray to loosen the nuts themselves.

We made our way back to marker 23 at a much more reasonable rate of speed, but not before discovering that there were no rooms to be had in town but the Clear Water Country Inn had space for our trailer so we booked a spot. We also grabbed a Subway on our way out of town and my lovely wife fed me as I cautiously navigated the FSR once more.

Once reunited with our stranded Bride, I still struggled to get the breaker bar around the fairing. I got the 3/4" socket seated on one lug and managed to loosen it but with the bar trapped underneath the trailer itself, it was going to be a tedious process as I could only move it a couple of inches before hitting either the trailer or the road. 

Audrey pointed at the tray of sockets, indicating one with some kind of swivel; "would that help you get a better angle on it maybe?"

I looked and shook my head in frustration. "No, it just changes the direction, when what I need is some kind of exten- hello, what's this?"

Very close to the swivel attachment was an extension that added perhaps 6" to the socked itself, already perhaps 5" long...which was enough to clear the fairing!

It was still a laborious endeavour getting all the nuts loosened, but with generous applications of the penetrating spray and an appropriate transfer of furious mass and desperate grip to the breaker bar, we were soon in business.

Audrey got the somewhat enormous jack under the trailer frame and with three large pumps, I had enough space to get the wheel off and the spare back on. We had to lower it, raise it, spin the wheel and lower it once more in order to get all the nuts tightened properly, but we sorted that out pretty quickly with the big jack. 

Dusty, sweaty, exhausted but triumphant, we made our way to the RV park and set up camp. The site was nothing to speak of but it did feature free showers, and I have never been so grateful for an amenity in my entire life. Unfortunately our campsite, in addition to being very close to Hwy 5, was also  situated right next a a 24-hr gas station that had semis rolling in and out all night long, but it was also close to Kal Tire, which we would need the next morning.

The following day, we wasted no time after waking up from a sleep best decribed as restless and headed straight over to Kal Tire where the incredibly helpful and empathetic Dagan explained he could indeed get the tire I needed but not before Friday noon. When I told him I might be back after searching around (as it was only Tuesday), he checked other nearby locations and told me the Kal Tire in Kamloops (90 min away) had six of them in stock.

And so, with bacon & eggers from the local A&W in hand, Audrey and I set out for Kamloops...

(CONTINUED IN PART 2)