Escaping the Heat by Going to……..ARIZONA????

It got hot!! Really HOT!!!! 110 degrees Fahrenheit hot. These temperatures happened way before they normally do in Hurricane, UT, where we were still busily working on projects. With all the delays because of problems, mistakes and shipping issues, etc., it was now the middle of June and we were still waiting to launch.

We had accomplished a lot of major projects. We had installed a Frontrunner Extreme Roof Rack. This involved drilling holes in the roof of our Beauty. That was nerve-racking. Then we installed a Nomadic 270 LT Awning by Overland Vehicle System. We really love the awning. It keeps off the sun and the rain. We’ve used it in both situations. I also installed a back up camera (Brandmotion 9002-8858V2 Rear Vision System with CMOS Infrared Camera and Adjustable Bracket for 2007-2018 Jeep Wrangler JK with Aftermarket Display) on Beauty and what a difference that made. We love that upgrade a lot. It makes it so much safer and easier to back up. Jeeps don’t have great visibility out the back window, so this has been a game changer for us both on-road and off-road. Check out some photos below.

Beast (the RV) got a cleaned and newly sealed roof. We cleaned it really good and painted on a rubber sealant that will keep the roof in good shape for some time to come. We used Dicor’s Fiberglass Roof Coating Cleaner and Coating Paint (Dicor RPFRC1 Fiberglass RV Roof Coating – White). It was a lot of work, but pretty simple to do. The roof never looked so good. Worth the time and effort to avoid any leaks which are the things that will damage an RV and need to be prevented. Without leaks, we should be able to keep our RV for many years to come even though it is 23 years old now.

Mike built a lithium battery for Beast that can store all the power we need and we also installed an additional two solar panels on the roof. He ordered the cells from China and the Battery Monitoring System (BMS) from Batrium in Australia. It was quite a project with a learning curve, sometimes painful and a sense of accomplishment when it worked so great. We also saved a lot of money by doing it this way. It was about half the cost of what it would have been if we would have bought Battle Born Lithium Batteries or any number of other ready made lithium batteries. We will make a full post on that project later. There were several other smaller projects, but those were the major ones.

My in-laws left town for a few days in mid-June so we were by ourselves at their house. That was a good thing because we basically move into their house to escape the blazing hot temperatures. It was so hot that our RV refrigerator just stopped working. Absorption fridges can only cool down so much from what the temperature is outside. With the temperatures in the 100s, our fridge just could not do it. So we had to shut it down and move all the food into the fridge and freezer in the house. Also, the air conditioner in the RV could not keep up with the heat either, so we just shut the whole rig down and moved inside the house for a few days while we kept working early in the morning and in the evenings after the sun went down.

The heat drove us to launch regardless of what was still on the list to be done. So we finished off a few essentials and decided that the next day we had to leave. RVs just don’t do when in the extreme heat or extreme cold. They like a happy medium. It was 110 degrees Fahrenheit by 10 am on the morning we left/launched. We got everything ready the night before in the dark to avoid the overwhelming heat. And we pulled away from their house at about 8am (it was over 90 degrees already). We were worried because “Beast” had been having some overheating problems when climbing hills and the climb out of Hurricane to where we were going was substantial and the temperatures were extreme. But Beast performed admirably and we made it out.

So with all that heat, where did we go to escape it? ARIZONA!!!! You may think that was a crazy idea, but we went to the Kaibab National Forest a few miles north and west of the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. It was only about a 2 1/2 hour drive but it was at about 8500 feet elevation that we were boondocking. During the day, the temperatures got up to the low 90s and high 80s, but at night it cooled way off to the 50s and 60s. It was perfect. So much cooler than Hurricane or much of the rest of the country. Besides that, it was absolutely stunning as well.

We enjoyed one and a half weeks by ourselves without seeing another soul. I began a morning routine of going walking. It was fabulous to get up in the morning and go on a long walk in the stillness of the forest. We continued to finish up a few of our projects, but it was much more pleasant at 8500 feet. We installed new water level monitors on our three water tanks and installed a new gauge display for them in the RV and in the wet bay. We used Garnet SeeLevel II 709 three tank system. This has been absolutely awesome. The display shows the percentage of the tank that is full to the percentage point, not a big block like it did before. This makes it so much easier to monitor our resources when boondocking especially. We love it. The display inside was installed on top of the one that was their originally. My nephew built us a nice wood frame for it. Thank you Brandon! The display in the wet bay has been super helpful when dumping and filling the tanks. various other small projects so we were ready to hit the road.

After our week and a half alone, my in-laws and my husband’s sister and her family were planning to meet us at this location in the Kaibab for a week of camping together with their fifth wheels. We planned to go quading/jeeping for the week. It is a great place to do that sort of thing. In order to boondock for that long, we set up an outdoor shower and would take our dish water outside instead of putting it down the drain. This extended how long we could camp before our gray water tank needed to be dumped. There was also a spring nearby that you could fill up 15 gallons of water per day. That spring water was amazing to drink and a ready supply to refill our fresh water tank. With that set up we could have boondocked for weeks longer then we actually did. But more on the camping later.