swalker
Very helpful member
- Joined
- Dec 11, 2014
- Messages
- 1,576
- Reason
- DX MND
- Diagnosis
- 07/2014
- Country
- US
- State
- CO
- City
- Vail
Betty, I lived in Spearfish, South Dakota in the summer of 1978. That summer, we did a trip to the Tetons, driving through Casper, Wyoming on our trip west to the Tetons. We returned home driving a bit north, going through Yellowstone and coming out the east entrance and then through Cody Wyoming.
It was a beautiful drive!
Keven, thanks for the running commentary. I think it really adds a lot! We have stayed at Rifle Falls back when we had our trailer. It is a beautiful park. Last year there was a flood that damaged the road to it. I would be hesitant to drive our motorhome there now.
We have been to Mueller State Park many years ago. It is too close to the big cities (Denver and Colorado Springs) of the front range for our tastes.
We have not yet camped at Ridgway State Park, but will have to check that one out. It looks very nice.
In my telling of this story, I have really not had a chance to say just how great it was to be able to make this trip. We really did have some fun amidst all the challenges of trying to make our motorhome behave. I plan to post some stories about those fun things later in this thread!
We were boondocking in Yellowstone for the first 3 weeks of the trip. That means we did not have any power, water, or sewer connections. The motorhome had to be self sufficient. If we ran out of water, we would need to break camp and head to the dump station, where we could empty the gray and black tanks and fill up with fresh water. We really wanted to avoid doing this because it was a challenge to get the motorhome parked at our campsite.
That campsite is rated for a 30 foot total combined vehicle length. If you had a typical SUV that is about 18 ft long, then you could have a 12 foot trailer.
We, of course, had a 38 ft motorhome and a full-size van to fit on the site. On our first trip to Yellowstone with the motorhome, we thought it would fit in that specific campsite, because we were familiar with the site and had measured things carefully. It turns out that our motorhome does just barely fit, but requires quite a bit of back and forth to sneak it into position. Once it was tucked into the site, there was room for the wheelchair van behind the motorhome.
But, it really is a chore to get the motorhome into that site, so we did not want to have to break camp to dump and refill with fresh water. So, we were careful to conserve water so that the 100 gallons of fresh water we started with would last the entire 3 weeks. Our gray water tank is only 40 gallons, which means we could only put 40 gallons down the sinks, shower, etc.
In our efforts to conserve water, we would run the faucets at a slow trickle when washing dishes, etc.
When boondocking, water pressure is provided by a water pump, which should turn on whenever sufficiently low pressure is detected in the motorhome's water lines.
One night, after my wife had done the dishes, she went to wash her face and discovered no water came out when she turned on the bathroom sink's faucet. Rats one more time.
It soon became obvious that the water pump was not turning on when there was sufficiently low pressure in the plumbing. We had encountered this before on our fall 2019 trip to Yellowstone, but each previous time this happened, the outside temperatures were well below freezing. We had it looked at by the repair shop at the end of that trip and they assured us the water pump was working fine and that we probably just had a minor ice blockage in the lines.
Apparently, the repair shop was wrong! I really did not know what to do, so in desperation I cycled the power to the water pump, leaving power off for about 30 seconds. That did not fix the problem. We turned the water pump off and finished up the evening using bottled water. We went to bed a bit dejected by yet another failure.
In an act of wishful thinking, I turned the water pump on when we got up the next morning. The water pump worked!
This scenario repeated itself several times throughout the trip. Each time, it seemed to be after we had run a sustained, slow trickle of water from a faucet. Through trial and error, we discovered that when the pump failed, if would work if we turned power to the pump off for at least 5 minutes and then restored power to the pump.
We still don't know what is wrong. It is likely that we need a new water pump. Replacing it is a significant job (lots of labor) because of where it is located. It appears the pump has been replaced once before (there is a code in the serial number indicating it was sold through a retail outlet rather than to the motorhome manufacturer). And, it is a special, high-volume pump that is no longer manufactured. There is no comparable pump on the market today. So, we don't want to just replace the pump to see if that fixes this intermittent problem.
This failure caused moments of panic, but did not otherwise interfere with our trip too much. We were just glad that it worked well enough to get us through the trip.
Steve
It was a beautiful drive!
Keven, thanks for the running commentary. I think it really adds a lot! We have stayed at Rifle Falls back when we had our trailer. It is a beautiful park. Last year there was a flood that damaged the road to it. I would be hesitant to drive our motorhome there now.
We have been to Mueller State Park many years ago. It is too close to the big cities (Denver and Colorado Springs) of the front range for our tastes.
We have not yet camped at Ridgway State Park, but will have to check that one out. It looks very nice.
In my telling of this story, I have really not had a chance to say just how great it was to be able to make this trip. We really did have some fun amidst all the challenges of trying to make our motorhome behave. I plan to post some stories about those fun things later in this thread!
We were boondocking in Yellowstone for the first 3 weeks of the trip. That means we did not have any power, water, or sewer connections. The motorhome had to be self sufficient. If we ran out of water, we would need to break camp and head to the dump station, where we could empty the gray and black tanks and fill up with fresh water. We really wanted to avoid doing this because it was a challenge to get the motorhome parked at our campsite.
That campsite is rated for a 30 foot total combined vehicle length. If you had a typical SUV that is about 18 ft long, then you could have a 12 foot trailer.
We, of course, had a 38 ft motorhome and a full-size van to fit on the site. On our first trip to Yellowstone with the motorhome, we thought it would fit in that specific campsite, because we were familiar with the site and had measured things carefully. It turns out that our motorhome does just barely fit, but requires quite a bit of back and forth to sneak it into position. Once it was tucked into the site, there was room for the wheelchair van behind the motorhome.
But, it really is a chore to get the motorhome into that site, so we did not want to have to break camp to dump and refill with fresh water. So, we were careful to conserve water so that the 100 gallons of fresh water we started with would last the entire 3 weeks. Our gray water tank is only 40 gallons, which means we could only put 40 gallons down the sinks, shower, etc.
In our efforts to conserve water, we would run the faucets at a slow trickle when washing dishes, etc.
When boondocking, water pressure is provided by a water pump, which should turn on whenever sufficiently low pressure is detected in the motorhome's water lines.
One night, after my wife had done the dishes, she went to wash her face and discovered no water came out when she turned on the bathroom sink's faucet. Rats one more time.
It soon became obvious that the water pump was not turning on when there was sufficiently low pressure in the plumbing. We had encountered this before on our fall 2019 trip to Yellowstone, but each previous time this happened, the outside temperatures were well below freezing. We had it looked at by the repair shop at the end of that trip and they assured us the water pump was working fine and that we probably just had a minor ice blockage in the lines.
Apparently, the repair shop was wrong! I really did not know what to do, so in desperation I cycled the power to the water pump, leaving power off for about 30 seconds. That did not fix the problem. We turned the water pump off and finished up the evening using bottled water. We went to bed a bit dejected by yet another failure.
In an act of wishful thinking, I turned the water pump on when we got up the next morning. The water pump worked!
This scenario repeated itself several times throughout the trip. Each time, it seemed to be after we had run a sustained, slow trickle of water from a faucet. Through trial and error, we discovered that when the pump failed, if would work if we turned power to the pump off for at least 5 minutes and then restored power to the pump.
We still don't know what is wrong. It is likely that we need a new water pump. Replacing it is a significant job (lots of labor) because of where it is located. It appears the pump has been replaced once before (there is a code in the serial number indicating it was sold through a retail outlet rather than to the motorhome manufacturer). And, it is a special, high-volume pump that is no longer manufactured. There is no comparable pump on the market today. So, we don't want to just replace the pump to see if that fixes this intermittent problem.
This failure caused moments of panic, but did not otherwise interfere with our trip too much. We were just glad that it worked well enough to get us through the trip.
Steve