It's a Team's Life

Cascadia part mountain goat

Entering the Picnic Area

We took a load back into the mountains to a new gun range that was being built.   The road deteriorated from pavement to dirt and wound through a beautiful campground complete with low hanging trees.   I wound my way through the trees and was glad there was no traffic to contend with.  

We stopped at our last checkpoint, which took us onto an Indian Reservation, and this is when the road became really quirky.   The road was dirt, narrow and a steady climb upward.   I had the truck held manually in 4th gear as we steadily climbed upward while twisting and turning.   We finally made it to the top and found our delivery.   The temperature change was huge and we were searching for our winter coats.   We made our lift gate delivery and headed back down the mountain on the narrow dusty trail.

Mountain Goat part of trail

We next took a load to Washington, which led us over the Grapevine as well as Shasta, and we were able to try out the trucks jake breaks and I am here to report that they preformed even better than anticipated.  

Our M2 did not have any type of engine compression brake and going to the powerful jake brake of the DD13 is amazing.   The truck has a three-stage brake and I found that on the highest setting that it slowed me down to much and I had to use the throttle to keep us going down the hill!   

Another interesting thing happened on our trip, we were pulled into a scale for a level one inspection.   Normally the sound of talking always wakes me up but not this time.   Bob told me when he woke me up to drive that we passed our Level One with flying colors there was much discussion over his uniform and the use of a tie in our business.  

One of the things we fight the most driving team is getting enough sleep and we appreciate anything that will keep us from being disturbed.   The Cascadia is not only a joy to drive the ride of the truck as well as the Bolt Sleeper will perform wonders to keep us well rested and ready to drive anytime day or night.

PS - On this tank of fuel we drove from Las Vegas to California in a tremendous head wind that was causing wrecks, we climbed the mountain on the dirt trail, climbed Grapevine as well as going towards Shasta and still pulled off a respectable 10.2 mpg.