The chaos began in Grand Junction CO, in the last week of July with the temperature sitting around 105º. There we commenced a surprising amount of work on the Beetle for it being such a simple vehicle. The three of us were Matt Carrol (Hew), Cedar Christiansen (Cedar the Ultimate Wanker), and myself (FreeSnakeWilly). Additionally our good friend Ima (Single Cabana), who came to help work on the Bug and see us off. Grand Junction is a scorching spot to be in the middle of summer but the Beetle resides there at my father's house, much to his chagrin, with the bimonthly "So what's the plan for the Bug?" over the phone when I talk to him.

"Whats the plan? Oh we've got a plan dad, don’t worry."

The backstory here is fairly simple, basically Cedar and I, the year prior, sunbaked in some parking lot in southern Australia, decided we should buy a VW beetle to race in the "Class 11" of the Baja 1000. This is a prestigious offroad event and there is a class of mostly "stock" VW bugs that race. So we purchased a bug upon our arrival in the US only to realize it was the wrong type. Cedar made quick work and sold that one for a small profit, and then I found the bright yellow 1974 Bug that this story will center around.

So back to Grand Junction, where the Bug has been sitting for a year when Cedar and I realized we are too poor to race in the Baja 1000. A new plan has emerged, not 1000 but 3500 miles instead. A few day of wrenching on the bug and were off, or at least that’s the plan. Thankfully my folks were not home to witness our junk show. So we begin, and Matt and I somehow managed to spend a whole day trying to install a "guaranteed to fit" alternator that involved actually cutting the housing of the new part with an angle grinder to make it fit. This you may notice will be a theme here of us buying cheap knock off parts and wondering why they don’t work as we expect…

Cedar and Ima arrived and we condensed on the big ticket items: brakes, carburetor, distributor, welding a roof rack, suspension and some electrical gremlins. My parents neighbors later expressed their confusion as four shirtless, barefoot guys manically worked for 14 hours a day on the little yellow Bug except for stopping mid-day for a wine, cheese and salad lunch on the porch curtesy of Basque Ima.

A couple days in, while wiring in a new headlight switch, Cedar decided to lay in the front bonnet of the bug (engine is in the back) shirtless, to pose for a Tinder profile shot, and just as I was about to capture the token shot, sparks shot out from behind Cedar and a little puff of smoke emerged from inside the car. Some troubleshooting later and we realized that Cedar's failed glory shot managed to burn out the ignition switch and now the Bug would not start…

So we hot wired our own car, which is pretty easy to do on an old bug, and overnighted a new switch.

After five sweaty days we were finally ready for a test drive, and in the golden evening light, we puttered up through the Colorado National Monument and deemed the bug ready to rip.

The following evening, after a lot of stuffing shit into the bug the three of us took off, headed north hoping for a break from the oppressive heat. The first 2.5 hours were smooth and filled with lots of optimism and even a bit concern from Cedar, that the trip might be too easy. Then we stopped for gas and it all went to shit.

I took the wheel pulling out of Vernal UT and immediately the Bug began to hesitate and stutter violently as though it was running out of gas. After 10 rough miles we pulled off and rebuilt the carburetor hoping a simple clogged jet would get us fixed. Nope, we continued on, the stuttering becoming slightly more intermittent but we were still making miles albeit slowly and much less gracefully. At this point the clock had passed midnight and in the middle of nowhere we sputtered violently along hoping to make it to Salt Lake, and a friends house for refuge. I passed my driving shift to Matt and took up the small backseat position, falling asleep on a haulbag. Something like a fever dream, I would awake periodically to the Bug violently sputtering and the whole vehicle bucking and shaking as Matt slowly crawled us over some dark mountain pass. All while casually discussing love lives with Cedar… this is a fucking strange experience I thought, before drifting off again.

3:30am and we literally coast up to Bailey's (B Violence) house in SLC and knocked out for a while.

In the morning after a nice coffee with Bailey and homie Josh, we began trying to diagnose our issues. "it’s a carb problem!" no "its air leaks in the intake manifold!" no "Its maybe just bad fuel!" no "its our fuel pump!" Maybe? This new fuel pump provided some false hope as the bug seemed to have loss some of its sickness. So again we hit the road, at this point it was already night but we figured we'd make up for the 16 hour day of stagnation. About 40 minutes up the interstate, the studders came back and for the next several miles we took every single exit on the highway. The problems got worse and the Bug eventually refused to hold an idle anymore. We literally begged it to the next exit, where we pulled down some road to the entrance for an open-pit mine. There happened to be a large pull off at the mine's entrance and just as I was nursing the last 20 feet, the engine finally quit and we rolled off and called it for the night.

6am came loudly, and in a cloud of dust when 18 wheelers, one after another, began rolling in droves past us, to the mine. A not-so-quick carb clean got us limping down the street to an Autozone, and a Burger King across the street provided a very dismal, low-moral breakfast as we schemed what the problem could be.

"Its got to be fuel related" we all agreed given our symptoms.

We dug in, or I should say I dug in, with the occasional burst of assistance from Matt and Cedar when they weren't curled up in the fetal-position napping under a tree outside the Autozone. Being up with the latest tech and diagnostic software, we queried Chat GPT endlessly about our problems. Each time it would come back with some incoherent blurb about how each problem we found being our "SMOKING GUN". Yet despite seemly endless smoking guns the problems were still there.

Eventually after finding that our fuel pump had a "sticky pushrod" (another smoking gun and classic beetle issue according to the AI) We decided to build our own electric fuel system and bail on the old mechanical setup all together.

After drilling some holes in the Bug using a screwdriver and a hammer, our new electric pump was mounted and we were off and humming 50mph down the road, smug with our new system. We crested the Idaho state line and just then, sputter sputter same old shit. FUUUCK! How could this still be happening? We pulled off after a couple more hours of problem solving into some farmer's field, for indescrete bivy by an old grain silo. The next morning we decided to swap our new ($40 Chinese) distributor out for the original 50 year-old German spare we had brought. Ignition timing reset and "Wait! it’s actually running pretty good!" just then the engine cuts and we coast to the side of the freeway.

Scratching our heads in frustration we cleaned engine grounds and tried an assortment of random things, but no start and our battery was rapidly loosing its gusto. Then the-big-brain-chemist-Matt has the brilliant epiphany: "Are we just out of gas?"

Our gas gauge had been on the fritz the whole trip swinging full to empty sporadically, much like our emotions at this point. Sure enough there was no gas in the car. Fortunately a spare 2 gallons on the roof saw us to a gas station where we seized the opportunity of an empty gas tank to pull it out and clean 50 years of sand particulates, metal shavings, and large chunks of old hose out of the gas tank.

A clean gas tank, the old distributor in and we were finally making miles. A quick hiccup when we broke the old set of ignition points, but by nightfall we had made it to Redfish Lake, where we would pack into the Elephants Perch the next day, just in time to see my girlfriend Letty (dropitlowgirl) and our friend Alex (hikergirl123). They had been there for 3 days expecting to overlap with us but given the innumerable breakdowns were about to pack out.

We resupplied them a bit and the five of us got to relish in the alpine local of the "Perch". We climbed the classic the Direct Becky and tried the lower pitches of a harder route, Boomers Story.

Cedar, despite not having climbed a single pitch in months and wearing baggy, muddy TC Pros, had a casual toprope flash of the 5.13 crux stem pitch in true clown fashion.

Back on the road we puttered up out of Idaho into smokey Montana, stopping at auto parts stores frequently for the random odd thing that would "maybe help us run cooler"

1000 miles into the trip and we had just realized our cheap oil temperature sensor/ light was mis-calibrated and we had probably been overheating the air-cooled-overloaded Bug, the whole way. Using precision instruments such as our Jetboil and a turkey thermometer we honed in our sensor and found that during the heat of the day, we would overheat about every hour of driving. This meant we had lots of time to squint through the hazy smoke and enjoy the view that we imagined was out there.

During one of these such view/ cool-down stops, Matt forgot to fasten the lid of our roof-mounted Rubbermaid bin, and as soon as we hit the road, it blew off along with all of our plastic bowls for eating. A 18-wheel truck made quick work of ensuring that we'd not be using those anymore and I found myself sitting again, in the back of the Bug but now with a lidless bin on my lap.

A round of mini golf and seemingly endless road hours later we found ourselves crossing the Canadian boarder. This was much to the amusement of the boarder officer who was not impressed by the ear-numbing rumble from our hole-filled exhaust, but he let us pass without issue. With suffocating wildfire smoke and a poor forecast, we decided to bail to Canmore for a week of sport climbing on limestone. This provided a much needed break from the Bug and reminded us that there was more to life than squatting behind the engine of our beetle.

A few days later, we were finally hiking into the Bugaboos after a long rattly journey up the 30mile dirt road to the trail head in the Bug. Everyone at the trailhead wraps their cars with chicken wire to protect from rubber-hungry porcupines who will supposedly attack unprotected cars for their tires and wires. With a lack of definitive proof of said porcupines and being an upstream swimmer, Matt insisted on us not wrapping the Bug and gambling our little vehicle to the Canadian wildlife.

Finally in the Bugaboos with a few good days of weather, we somehow managed to do shockingly little climbing. We tried a new obscure route, where Cedar managed to fall out of the biggest jug on the route and I aid climbed a horrendously dirty crux pitch. Next with the ambition of trying the "classic" Sendero Norte route, we hiked out to find that the whole entire first pitch of the route was indeed missing, having fallen down into the glacier. A day and a half of scoping the terrifying, hang-nail flakes now guarding the start of the route, we bailed a mere 20 feet off the snow. Instead opting for the neighboring route which we got lost on, got scared on, and decided was too dirty to climb, so again bailed with our tails between our legs.

We tried to salvage our day by likely doing the first free ascent of a beautiful 40 meter long corner crack on the far left side of Snow Patch Spire. Although in good clown fashion, after I got a rope up, no one lead it clean.

The last of our days in the Bugaboos we ripped the classic east ridge of Bugaboo spire with Alex and Letty in a full "Gumby Death Train" deploying micro traxions to the maximum and stacking incredible meters quickly. From here we set sail in our little yellow submarine, that seemingly survived the voracious porcupines without problem, and headed south the long haul to Colorado.

We found a cadence where we would drive for 6 or so hours in the evening, and maybe make it a mere 150-200 miles. We'd then sleep and climb the next morning for a while then repeat. This allowed us some amazing climbing of the bolted variety in Montana near Helena and Butte on our way. Here Cedar came close to climbing a sun-baked 5.12+ project in approach shoes, and Matt spent a considerable amount of time napping in various locations in-between his quick ticks of the daily projects.

Our final run back to Grand Junction was relatively smooth. Humming along at 40mph with often up to 30 or 40 cars stacked up behind us. We'd pull over, and people would stream by often surprisingly stoked, giving us thumbs up and hoots. Semi trucks would toot their horns and grandmothers took photos out the window. With the hundreds of human hours we likely wasted, only one person gave us The Bird, angered by our half-speed-limit pace.

We finished the trip in the "Choss-Arena" of Rifle Mountain Park. Matt bailed out onto an airplane to go see his girlfriend, so Cedar and I headed for the canyon to get desperately pumped on the slippery warmups. In keeping with the hardened alpinist we had become, we chose to seek refuge from the overnight rain in one of the big limestone caves, placing our bivys at the base of the next days project. Bright and early we sparked up the Jetboil, guzzled our brew, stick clipped the 3rd bolt, eyed the chalk smeared holds in the dingy light, and executed a month of preparation.

Cedar who doesn’t own a backpack, and had to borrow one of mine for the trip, placed all his belongings in a cardboard box with "Looking for a ride to Denver or Boulder" written in sharpie on the side. For a while he sat in the middle of the road waiting hopefully for a ride. A begrudging Front-Range dweller conceded to being stuck in the car with Cedar and then it was just me and the Bug.

I fired up the little motor the hear it making a hell of a racket. In classic fashion something would have to go wrong before this could be over. Some inspection revealed that in our many miles of bumpy dirt roads we had lost several of the bolts holding the shroud around the engine fan and now the fan itself was rubbing; hence the noise. Our 10,000 trips to the auto parts store had prepared me well, and spare bolts quickly were found. I waited for the rain to stop, as our singular windshield wiper had died the day prior, and under a large moon I headed the last couple hours back to Grand Junction. With the cool night air and nothing but me in the Bug, I hummed along 60mph the whole way. "Lets just see what happens" had been our mantra the from the start of this venture, and 3500 miles, roughly 54 individual breakdowns, and over 90hours in the Bug, we knew.