It was never a good idea to drive an old and defective British roadster into the western desert, but the promise of adventure was so irresistible I did it anyway. It was June, 1987. Ronald Reagan was president and the Berlin Wall had not yet fallen. I was twenty-four years old, heartbroken from a great, failed romance. I was ready to take risks I would normally have never considered.
The entire enterprise would never have happened had I not, several months earlier, become smitten by the kind of desperate love a young man can only feel for an automobile. I noticed it sitting in the parking lot of a grocery store in Snellville, Georgia. I’d never seen anything like it. I was utterly enthralled. I took a photo. I still have that original photo from 35 years ago. Here it is:
See what I mean? This little beast was nothing like the boxy cars and pickup trucks of the Reagan era. It was a mischievous, smiling little oaf in a parking lot of boring seriousness. It was the obnoxious kid in thick glasses and purple hair at the middle-school dance. It was Rue Paul at a redneck BBQ joint. It was ridiculous and irresistible.
It turned out to be a Triumph motorcar, model designation TR-3A, a British roadster of moderate pedigree from the glamorous, golden age of motoring of the 1950s. Rickety, ramshackle and rusted, it was love at first site. The guy that owned it was named Martin Bogart. His name seemed to match the spirit of the car. I bought it for $1,500, a fortune for me. It was the first car I ever bought and my first-ever bank loan.
Every time I drove it something fell off. At first it was little things, like the chrome “R” in the TRIUMPH logo on the hood. As time passed, more consequential pieces began to detach and clatter to the pavement: a random bolt from god-knew-where, a tail light cover, an engine bracket.
Over time, the car’s alarming trend of unscheduled self-disassembly accelerated to the point of mortal peril. I began to suspect that the Triumph was either suicidal, or murderous, or both. This suspicion was confirmed when, one day on a twisty Appalachian road in north Georgia, just as I was entering a hairpin turn at high speed, the steering wheel detached from the steering column and came free in my hands.
Suddenly, I had no control whatsoever. Zero. I didn’t even have time to hit the brakes.
Now is a good time to point out that there are no safety features in a 1959 Triumph TR-3A. None whatsoever. No seat belts. No roof. The flimsy windshield frame is about as thick as my thumb. The doors are paper thin sheet metal. These cars didn’t even come with door windows.
My passenger, long-time buddy and former college roommate Dave said nothing as the car sailed off the road and went crashing down the mountainside. Dave is like that. When disaster strikes, he always gets a grim look of determination, a sort of pinched-lip scowl that expresses his feelings better than any expletive. He instinctively reached for the “oh god handle”, a stiff metal grab-bar that protruded from the passenger dashboard, engineered to be at exactly the right position to break the passenger’s teeth during a collision.
Somehow the car tracked straight and didn’t flip. After barreling out-of-control through the trees we crossed the same highway again at a lower elevation (it had switched-back on its steep descent down the mountainside). We slammed over both curbs and sailed once again into the trees farther down the mountain. I stared at the naked steering column, which without the steering wheel had become sharp-tipped spear protruding from the dashboard, ready to impale me through the heart if we hit a tree.
Both my feet jabbed into the brake pedal. It didn’t matter. We slid across the layer of forest leaves like like a skater over ice, accelerating down the mountain. Once again a tight switchback put the road below and ahead of us. A building emerged from the foliage on the far side of the road, one of those old-timey, one level motor lodges. We were heading straight for it.
We cleared the trees, shot across the road a second time, and began a slide across the building’s manicured lawn, leaving a sweeping set of muddy skid marks. We jumped another curb into a parking lot. Finally, the brakes found purchase. We came to a screeching, smoking halt, miraculously–MIRACULOUSLY –exactly between the lines of one of the parking spaces, as if we’d just pulled in after a relaxing Sunday drive. The motel clerk behind the big glass window had watched us come down the mountain, crash across the road, and careen straight toward the neon VACANCY sign in her office window.
After a few moments to collect ourselves, Dave and I climbed out of the car, brushed off the leaves and branches we’d collected in our hair and clothes, and went inside, me still clutching the detached steering wheel.
The clerk, an unflappable Appalachian woman with high cheekbones and a cigarette glued to her bottom lip, looked me up and down, glanced at the steering wheel in my hand, and asked wryly, “Car trouble?”
It was definitely time for an automotive reckoning, but despite its murderous tendencies I was so in love with this motorcar that I couldn’t bear to part with it. The feeling of driving the low-slung British roadster on a fast mountain road was pure joy to me. Some weeks later I found an ad in the Atlanta Journal Constitution for another Triumph TR-3, this one in better condition, which is not to say it was more reliable or safe, just that it had fewer parts falling off. It was white 1960 model with a snazzy red leather interior. The seller wanted $2,500, a small fortune.
Dave and I hatched a plan. I would borrow the money from my bank to buy this second Triumph TR-3. We would bring both cars into the garage of the duplex we were renting, and we would combine the best bits and pieces from each car into a new vehicle that would hopefully be less of a death trap. With the parts left over, we would then build a second car and sell it to pay off my loan. In our minds it was a brilliant plan.
The garage in our rented duplex flat had barely enough room for both vehicles. In those tight quarters we stripped both cars down and built a new, better car from the pieces. Simultaneously, with the rusty cast-off parts, we created a second car that was held together by auto-putty and prayers. We then sold this regrettable automotive monstrosity for exactly the amount necessary to pay off my loan. We warned the new owner that the car had many mechanical and safety issues, but with a gleam in his eye he bought it anyway. I knew the gleam. It was the same gleam that had been in my own eyes when I’d first seen Martin Bogart’s TR-3.
Thus refreshed, the little Triumph was ready for its greatest adventure. On the morning of Saturday, June 6th, 1987, Dave and I set off on a cross-country road trip from which neither of us intended to return. We were headed to the West Coast to find new jobs and a new life. I was freshly broken-hearted from my failed romance, the girl of my dreams having abandoned me for better prospects elsewhere. Dave was newly-minted engineer from Georgia Tech, anxious to find the job he was sure awaited him in California.
We’d planned an ambitious, wandering path across America designed to touch as many of the great western parks and monuments as possible. Neither of us had ever traveled west of the Mississippi River, so it was to be a journey of discovery. As every great road trip needed a great car, the plucky little British roadster we’d built from the carcasses of two sad predecessors would be our steed. We were supremely confident that our repairs had solved all the mechanical problems that had previously endangered our lives.
Almost immediately the Triumph started falling apart. Literally. We’d traveled just a few miles into eastern Alabama when the car’s electrical generator fell off. We jury-rigged a new bracket from parts we scrabbled together from a rural hardware store, including a six-inch bolt onto which we strung a hundred steel washers to act as a spacer.
This makeshift repair failed spectacularly a couple of days later as we were driving down the main street of a small Arkansas town. A loud noise, and suddenly it sounded like someone had dropped a coin-filled piggy-bank beneath the car as the bolt broke and a hundred quarter-sized steel washers hit the pavement and rolled away in all directions. All the locals on the sidewalks stopped and stared as the funny-looking car with its two sunburned passengers stalled beneath the town’s only traffic light, blocking traffic from all directions.
That was just the beginning. We were to discover that the generator had been damaged beyond repair by the bracket failure. This meant that the vehicle’s entire electrical system would hover precariously on the edge of total collapse for the rest of our trip. Simply switching the headlights on or off became a two-man job, me operating the light switch and monitoring the voltage on the dashboard gage, while Dave stooped under the open hood, adjusting the antique voltage regulator with a screwdriver. When we needed the windshield wipers, a similar process was necessary. Also, the car’s battery wouldn’t charge if the headlights were on, which meant that we couldn’t drive for more than twenty minutes at night. We ended up disconnecting one headlight and one taillight, which gave us an additional fifteen minutes of drive time before the headlights failed and the car died.
From that moment forward, keeping the TR-3 running became a daily mechanical comedy. After a few hundred miles the bad generator ruined the starter, which meant we had to either use the perilous manual crank-start system or push the car and pop the clutch ever time we wanted to start the engine. After an internal strap broke, we were forced to jam a brick-sized rock into the battery compartment to keep the battery from sliding around. In a moment of sheer absurdity, a freak windstorm in Texas broke the hinges on the front hood and ripped the hood completely off the car, exposing the engine compartment. A blown inner tube in Mississippi meant walking for miles down a highway in 100-degree humidity, carrying a heavy and greasy wheel in search of somebody qualified to make a repair of an antique wire wheel. Engine belts broke. Electrical connections mysteriously severed themselves. The fuel gage stopped working. The cooling system sprang a leak that meant we had to add water every hundred miles or so. The speedometer quit working. In Tennessee, not realizing that the rough roads had caused the fuel intake pipe to disconnect from the gas tank, I pumped ten gallons of gas directly into the car’s trunk instead of the tank. It was a miracle all of us didn’t go up in a ball of fire as the gasoline poured and sizzled onto the overheated rear brakes. All our gear stank of gasoline fumes for the rest of the trip.
Despite the relentless series of breakdowns, we persevered, determined to complete our route and find our way to the promised land of California. Somehow we were always able to keep the Triumph running. As we left the East and began to experience the rugged beauty of the Great American West, our spirits lifted. Notwithstanding the mechanical issues, there was no better car on Earth to drive into the canyons, mountains and deserts that lay before us. Brutally sunburned and reeking of motor oil and raw engine exhaust, our knuckles bloodied and burned from the endless repairs, we forged on toward our destiny.
At 3:12PM on Friday, June 19th, 3,287 miles into the trip and two weeks out from our start, something extraordinary happened, one of those moments of pure motoring magic that happens once in a lifetime, if you’re lucky.
The morning began with a freezing shower at a campsite outside Tuba City, Arizona. Our financial situation (dead broke) meant that when a cheap state park campsite wasn’t available, we were forced to camp by the side of the road, usually hidden in the brush to avoid detection as trespassers. To bathe, we would find a nearby RV campground, sneak in and use the camp showers and toilets.
We push-started the Triumph, anxious to get on the road. Our plan for the day was to drive 250 miles through northern Arizona and and southern Utah to the village of Moab, site of Arches National Park, reportedly one of the crown jewels of America’s park system. Our driving route would take us through Monument Valley, site of a million Western films, and then through the remote and desolate Natural Bridges National Monument and into the region marked on the map as Canyonlands.
Here’s how the morning went according to the hand-scribbled notes from my trip journal:
7:40AM: Beautiful sunrise, stunning red-rock setting, 68 degrees, cold shower.
8:30AM: We are forced to pause at a truck stop for our regular morning round of car repairs. Using Dave’s string saw, we cut a block of wood and jam it between the generator and the engine block for more support. Then while I go for coffee, Dave rewires one of the dashboard gages that failed yesterday. He uses a piece of yellow electrical wire that we found on the side of the road during a previous breakdown and that he saved, according to him, for “emergencies.”
MILE 3,218, 6,200 ft altitude, 75 degrees: We head back to US 160. The temp is rising quickly as we drop altitude. A huge (and by “huge” I mean “bigger than a small town”) red monolithic slab rises from a massive thrust-fault on our left. We are entering Monument Valley, which I recognize from the old Western films my dad used to watch. It looks unreal, more like a painting than a place.
UTAH STATE LINE, mile 3,251: John Ford-esque scenery surrounds us. Enormous red structures jut up into the sky. Surely this is some kind of alien planet — it’s hard to believe we’re still on Earth. We have to stop and repair the generator mount (again). It’s already 95 degrees in the shade. This is real desert, severe and empty. We’re watching the temperature gage every moment, waiting for the car to overheat (again). If we get stranded out here, it will be bad.
MEXICAN HAT, UTAH, mile 3,270, 4,800 altitude, 100 degrees, 1;15PM: What a strange little town! It’s built in the canyon of the San Juan River, surrounded by desert, and inflicted with some of the curviest roads we’ve experienced on the whole trip. As we turn north on UT 261, the mountains ahead of us look like some insane artist mixed hundreds of colors in a pot and dumped them onto the mountainsides. It’s over a hundred degrees, insanely hot. The Triumph is wheezing and steaming in the heat. We’re preparing for an engine catastrophe.
From Mexican Hat, we took a side road that climbed steeply out of the San Juan canyons and onto a flat expanse of empty red desert. We had entered a trackless region labelled on the map as the Valley of the Gods. We’d not seen another vehicle in the fifteen miles since leaving Mexican Hat, and as the road narrowed and became sand-swept neither of us could help but notice the giant escarpment that seemed to block the road to the north like a wall of geological battlements.
We stopped when the pavement ended at a single-lane desert track. We stared up at the gigantic, unbroken escarpment, still far ahead, which extended endlessly to either side of us, disappearing over the horizon both to the east and west. I checked the map. Sure enough, it showed our road going north, straight as an arrow. There was no indication of the thousand-foot cliff that blocked our path.
I couldn’t see any way, despite the map, that this road could cross the looming geological barrier. We hadn’t seen another car in forever. There was no sign of civilization in any direction. The dirt road ahead of us was pitted and rough, doubtlessly filled with bumps and judders that would shake more pieces off our poor car.
It was decision-time. Head back to Mexican Hat and the smooth highway to Moab, or continue on the straight dirt track that the map insisted went on for miles beyond the cliff-barrier, all the way to the remote Natural Bridges National Monument?
If we turned back we would miss Natural Bridges, but it would be far safer to break down on the main highway than on some desert track in the middle of nowhere. Plus, how in the name of God would we get over the escarpment that blocked our way north? The dirt track ahead of us extended to the base of the cliff where it seemingly ended. We could see no road climbing its sheer flank.
MILE 3,284, 103 degrees, 5,000 ft: The paved road just ended, and the biggest cliff I’ve ever seen blocks our way forward. It’s still off in the distance but it must be a thousand feet high, like a wall. I don’t see any way to get over it, but the map says the road keeps going beyond it, so we’ve decided to risk it.
Sure enough, the dirt track was rough enough to rattle our teeth and shake the car like a tin-can full of bolts. A rooster-tail of red dust rose like a solid cloud behind us, no matter how slowly we drove. Everything in the Triumph’s open cockpit, including the human passengers, was quickly coated in a thick layer of red. Coughing, both of us used our bandanas to cover our noses. It was insufferably hot.
We crept through the Valley of the Gods toward the base of the escarpment, fully expecting at any moment to hear a mechanical death-clang as some crucial automotive component was shaken from the car, or a hiss as the radiator finally blew a seal.
We craned our necks at the approaching cliff. The lower half was a steeply-sloped mass of red stone that had eroded onto the floor of the valley. The upper half comprised several cake-layers of white stone that formed a vertical wall. On top, barely visible, was a thin line green of desert vegetation.
It was breathtaking. Here, the Earth had fractured on an seemingly endless fault-line. The flat valley we were traversing had dropped more than a thousand feet below the more northerly desert.
We approached to within a few hundred yards of the red alluvial fan at the cliff base where the road stopped.
It just… stopped. The damned map was wrong.
Then suddenly, it wasn’t. I realized that my sense of scale had been distorted by the epic size of the escarpment. There was a road climbing the sheer cliffside in a series of tight, narrow switchbacks, like a line of sewing thread draped back-and-forth across the vertical face. It had been too small, too narrow and too steep to make out from a distance. Now that we were at the base of the cliff, we could see portions of it high above.
Dave turned off the car, which was a risk because it was so hard to re-start. We listened to the engine cool in clicks and pops while we stared up. Back in our home state of Georgia the geology was soft and molded and covered in a comforting layer of green forests. Here in Utah the landscape was a blistering shriek of raw color and hard rock. Neither of us had ever been so close to something so… big, so… unexpected.
The little Triumph TR-3 had been designed for the cool, mist-swept roads of 1950s England, not the harsh desert landscapes of the American West, and certainly not for a steep, pitted road carved into the side of a thousand-foot cliffside. Even when the car was new from the factory it probably hadn’t been particularly reliable or robust. Now, thirty years after it had rolled off the assembly line, battered and beaten from decades of poor maintenance and the recent whims of twenty-something road-trippers, it stood at the foot of what would be the greatest challenge of its long life.
A sun-scorched sign with hand-painted skulls-and-crossbones warned us that we were at the base of the Moki Dugway, and that only four-wheel-drive vehicles should attempt the ascent. Dave and I spent a lot of time staring at that sign, considering the possible outcomes if we decided to continue. We both knew we probably wouldn’t die if the Triumph broke down on the climb. After all, despite the fact we hadn’t seen another vehicle in over an hour there had to be occasional traffic here, right? Other adventure seekers like ourselves would certainly come along soon enough, wouldn’t they? It wasn’t until we’d climbed a couple of hundred feet on the narrow cliff-road that we saw the first overturned car, crushed and mangled by a fall from high above. It wasn’t an old car, either, but a recent-model coupe, precariously trapped between two boulders hanging from the cliffside. I recalled the previous incident where the Triumph’s steering wheel had come of in my hands. Neither of us spoke. I saw Dave’s scowl deepen, but he didn’t stop. There wasn’t room to turn around, anyway. We were committed.
The motor roared as we pulled in low gear up the vertiginous incline. We both watched the engine temperature gage slowly climb into the red zone. We began to smell coolant. Dave stopped immediately to let the engine rest. We’d made it less than a tenth of the way up the cliff, but the view out over the valley was already spectacular. I thought to myself, This was what the Grand Canyon would be like if you had it all to yourself. I could see for many miles. The only trace of mankind’s existence was the geometric line of the approach road that extended to the horizon across the valley floor. The only sound was the quiet click click click of the engine as it cooled. I felt like a tiny ant on the spine of the world.
Twenty minutes later we were on our way up again. The Moki Dugway was narrow and the precipice was sharp and close, especially on the switchback corners. As we ascended it soon became obvious how easy it would be to join the crushed and mangled car we’d seen on the rocks below. Dave’s hand were white as he gripped the wheel. He had the intensity of a brain surgeon performing a life-or-death operation, which wasn’t far from the truth.
The higher we climbed, the more awe-inspiring the view became. My adrenalin probably enhanced the sensation. By this point in our road trip, we’d already visited the Grand Canyon and several other of the sublime geological wonders of America. They’d all been mind-boggling, but this place was different somehow. Here, we were alone. There were no crowds of tourists. There was no ranger or rescue team standing by to save us from our reckless stupidity. We were relying completely on our own abilities. This was a new experience for me. In all my twenty-four years I’d never been in a situation that had the same mix of stunning natural beauty and real, palpable danger. I’d entered unexpected and unexplored territory, and I liked it.
The Moki Dugway was harshly beautiful in a way I had never experienced. Somewhere on the side of that cliff I fell in love with the desert, a passion that would remain for the rest of my life. I’d never felt so alive as in those long moments as we crept up the winding path in an antique British roadster, completely out of place but somehow perfectly aligned with a higher order of the universe.
Our lives are made of seminal moments that define who we are. Most of these moments happen in our youth as we discover new things, but for those of us with open minds and hearts the discovery can continue throughout our lives. This was one of those moments. Caught between the startling blue desert sky and the great red rocks of the Earth with the Valley of the Gods spread beneath me, I felt an intense passion for life that burned me to the core of my being.
It took over an hour to nurse the Triumph to the top of the Moki Dugway, stopping twice more to add canteen water to the radiator. No parts fell off the Triumph, no mechanical component chose to fail, and even though the thirsty radiator had consumed more than half of our drinking water on the ascent, the car hadn’t overheated.
At the summit, we stopped at a wide overlook, where I wrote this in my trip journal:
MILE 2,387, 6,425 feet altitude, at Moki Point: Here I sit on a rock ledge dangling my feet off an 1,100 foot drop. The wind is whistling by, just like in my dad’s old Western movies. It’s a long, long way back down to the desert floor. I feel like a different person up here, like I’m looking out over my whole life. It feels like I just passed some kind of religious test. I don’t know how to describe the sensation. Dave feels it too, I can tell. The little Triumph is resting. It’s cooling now, and all we can do is wait until the radiator temperature drops out of the red zone. Then, we’ll be on our way. I’m so glad we didn’t decide to take the main road. So glad.
POSTSCRIPT, June 2012: Twenty five years later, almost to the day, Dave and I returned to the Moki Dugway. We were driving the very same 1959 Triumph TR-3, which Dave had bought from me decades ago and had restored to excellent mechanical condition. We were on the same road trip route as we’d taken in 1987, reliving the experiences of our youth.
Over the past quarter century since that first road trip I’d returned East to marry the girl that had broken my heart, had two wonderful kids, made a career. I deeply believe that none of these life accomplishments would have come to pass without my experiences on the 1987 road trip, especially that day on the Moki Dugway where I first discovered that risk is an absolutely necessary ingredient of success.
On our 2012 return to the Moki Dugway, Dave and I found to our great dismay that the dangerous path up the cliffside had been widened dramatically, scraped smooth with guard rails erected at the most dangerous curves. We saw RV’s making the ascent with kids and dogs hanging out the windows. Over the intervening twenty-five years this place had been civilized and discovered by the tourists.
Still, it was magical, even with the easy, wide road to the top.
