After being gone for the last seven months, we wanted to go check out our property as soon as we arrived in Terlingua. The area had received a lot more rain this year so we were curious about the state of the seven miles of dirt roads we traverse to get to our property. The first four or five miles are very well maintained by a mine further down the road. The main dirt road is wide (two vehicles can easily pass each other), flat, and doesn’t have many rocky or bumpy sections. Our first turnoff road is also relatively flat and easy to traverse, though it is a bit narrower (two cars can pass each other, but it’s pretty tight). Two sections are always sketchy, crossing the creek and “washboard hill”. The creek has only had running water once when we were here so it’s usually just a rocky bed with a steep incline. The hill is a steep incline around a curve and has always had washboard bumps. We use 4-wheel drive and, while sketchy, they’re not an obstacle. The final turnoff road is quite narrow (comfortably one lane) and is used very seldomly and probably only by us.
As we drove out, we were impressed by the condition of the road: very smooth. When we got to our little side road we encountered water erosion in several places. We were expecting this, and this is why we don’t drive directly out to our property, giving us a chance to spend some time smoothing out the road. We had left our tools in our shed on the property so did not do any work on the way out. Once we arrived at our property we were surprised to discover one of our water tanks was missing.
After looking around a bit, we discovered it at the bottom of the gully.
We were worried about vandals, thinking it was intentionally damaged and pushed down the hill for fun. However, after further inspection and discussion with the guy who installed the shed and tanks in the first place, we think it was just the wind. We don’t know how much water is still inside it (we thought it had at least 200g), but the tank itself is about 300lbs. It’ll be difficult to haul back up the cliff. Our water guy has a side-by-side with a winch, so hopefully we can use that to retrieve it. He’ll be delivering about 1000g of water early this week so we’ll know more then.
We did a bunch of work on the road to smooth out all the erosion, mostly just filling in the holes, not doing the harder work to resolve the problems so this doesn’t continue to happen. Maybe that’ll be a project for later this winter.
Our last night in Terlingua before moving out there was a big storm, lots of dust and wind and some rain. As we packed up to go on Saturday morning, we checked our tire pressure and that rear passenger tire was super low (like 20psi?). We set to pumping it up, but when we got to around 90psi we could hear hissing, like the tire was losing air. We had an issue before where just the rotation of the wheel caused some sort of imbalance of pressure on the tire and caused a slow leak. So we moved the fifth-wheel forward a little until we didn’t hear the hissing any longer and continued pumping it up. We got to around 100psi before we depleted the three batteries we have for our air compressor. It’s supposed to be 110psi, but we figured 100psi was close enough to get us out to the property as long as it didn’t continue to leak. We’ll have to have someone look at this tire again, but for the moment, it was full enough for us to drive out to the property. As we drove, the pressure in that tire stayed consistent. We did start seeing evidence of water, both on the paved road and in the ditches on the side of the highway. Then we got to our dirt road and encountered some relatively big puddles. This area has a lot of bentonite clay, a very absorbent clay body that can easily trap vehicles so we were a bit worried we’d get stuck. There wasn’t much we could do to drain the water or dry up the mud so we just went for it.
Going through it we lost traction a bit on the drivers side but we had enough momentum to bring us through okay, just mud splattered.
Then we got to another puddle, this one much wider.
This one was actually less gushy/muddy, and again we got through without issue. This was right before the creek crossing so we were curious to see what that looked like but it turns out the creek was dry. We didn’t encounter any additional puddles the rest of the drive. All of the work we had done was still in tact and we made it to our property without running into any additional trouble. We still need to figure out the water tank and that back passenger tire, but for now we are enjoying the solitude of being in the middle of nowhere.