Ten Sleep, Wyoming
Our maiden voyage in Bam Bam, our oil-leaking 16,000-pound ambulance, took place through the mountain west in an arduous, failed cruise-control module drive from Los Angeles to Jackson Hole, Wyoming. We set sail for the 21-hour drive at a comfortable 20 mph below the CA highway speed limit with our hazards on in the rightmost lane, receiving middle fingers every hour on the hour from kind passing vehicles. We assumed our black ambulance looked synonymous with membership to the NRA despite our best attempts to look like a mixed-race gay couple. We averaged a whopping 62 mph on the highway, but we appreciated noticeable increases in speed when Chappell Roan helped to drown out the conspicuous noises the 2002 ambulance engine made.
For the uninitiated, my dear friend Sam and I decided to purchase a semi-converted ambulance to live in for the next year and change. While we don’t exactly recall whose idea this vehicle was (and still debate whether or not it was a good or bad idea), it certainly was quite an idea. When we acquired the seemingly undocumented ambulance, we spent the greater part of two and a half months converting it and learning how to drive it. Unsurprisingly, Bam Bam drives a lot like a boat, where the steering wheel often seems it is solely for decoration and merely helps suggest the car where to go. For a short while, the vehicle was my daily commuter to the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles, an era where I learned to accept the other driver’s middle fingers with grace.
After our 3rd hour on the road, Danny (my temporary roommate) and I began profusely sweating despite our efforts to crank the AC. Little did we know, what would later reveal itself as a cracked exhaust pipe, hot exhaust air was shooting straight into the cabin from the engine running at ~220 F causing our cabin to feel just shy of boiling. During this windows-down stint, we hadn’t managed to take a photo of our shirtless, straw hat-wearing selves because both of our phones stayed perpetually in overheat mode. Interestingly, CarPlay still worked and we could resume our Chappell Roan mute of all concerning sounds. With a final push, we took shelter for our first night in the Walmart parking lot of Cedar City Utah. There’s something very American and very freeing about soberly peeing on rocks in a parking lot at 2 am, only to then realize you were facing the security camera head-on the entire time.
Danny and I had decided to make a ~slight~ (5 hour) detour in my journey to Jackson. We decided to spend 9 days in the small town of Ten Sleep, Wyoming, a destination location for many rock climbers across the country. Nonetheless, the town of Ten Sleep remains to have the oddities one would expect from any town this far from any metropolitan area. Of most interest was the flock(?) of what I can only assume to be Mennonite gentleman travelling 30-some mph on their one-wheeled Segways.
We rolled into a pullout on the Old Highway in the Ten Sleep Canyon and settled in for 9 days of pocket-pulling, steep, hard crux sport climbing. Danny, far more versed in hard climbing, served as my coach and mentor for the majority of the week. While he climbed things I could barely touch, he coached me on improving my climbing and pushing my limits.
After our first few days getting familiar with the limestone pockets and how quickly its razor-sharp edges had taken a toll on our skin, Danny and I enjoyed the remaining days making fairly quick work of some of the area’s classic lines and the not-so-classic, really bad, 0/10 climbs in the area as well.
Ten Sleep is an ideal place to push yourself from a technical level. None of the climbs are all that long, and the position of the bolts is more than generous, making it a great place to kick off my year on the road and see how hard I could pull. My proudest climb during that trip was a varied 5.11a by the name of Atheist Childhood that required crack climbing technique, pinch power, and sustained moves on pockets that barely fit two fingers in them. At the end of the trip, I was inches away from my first 5.11c, one which I will have to return for next summer.
In Ten Sleep, we mostly stayed in the parking lot of the local Ten Sleep Brewing Company, where the head brewer was a former engineer at Boeing who found the pleasure of a simpler way of life. He noted that it is much harder for doors to fly off of brewing vessels than airplanes and generously filled our water tank while telling us stories about the company that will have me driving Bam Bam more often than I would like to. The local festivities featured live music and awfully small ponies that Danny and I were eager to make acquaintance with. Though it isn’t entirely out of character, Danny and I were not the ones responsible for the pony art.
Our trip to Ten Sleep fortunately wrapped up without any injuries beyond the usual sore fingertips and smashed toes. A highlight of the trip will remain the many dogs we met along the way each day. Saying bitter goodbyes to all the four-legged friends, and a brief funeral for a mantis we accidentally decapitated in an effort to rescue it from the window, we set sails with our shirts off in our hot cabin for Jackson Hole eager for our next trip back to the canyon.
