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I enjoy this thread as it isn't just about problems we have but includes the positive side of these cars. I have an xkr and an xjs and sometimes they can just feel like constant work!! Great photos too.
I enjoy this thread as it isn't just about problems we have but includes the positive side of these cars. I have an xkr and an xjs and sometimes they can just feel like constant work!! Great photos too.
Mrs S and I went up to ride around the beautiful Lake Tahoe/Upper Truckee bike trail system in celebration of our 35th wedding anniversary. Normally we'd take our slow VW camper, like the one in the picture, to act as a mobile base/changing room/nap station. Since the bus engine is currently on my workbench being rebuilt, we threw the bikes on the back the XKR (in spite of how silly they look back there) and took it. Needless to say, the mountain driving experience between a heavy 94hp Vanagon camper with the aerodynamics of a barn door and a sleek low-slung supercharged V8 XKR convertible was almost orthogonal at altitude,
Earlier, we took a fast run up to Donner Pass. While I never need affirmation from others that the XKR is an awesome vehicle, it still was nice to unexpectedly have a beefy group of rough-tough been-everywhere seen-everything ex-military/ex-SEAL guys just gush over it all evening at a friend's picnic dinner last night. "That's so beautiful", "I've got to get me one of those", "That, sir, is the sign of someone who's got the world by the b*lls!", "Supercharged V8? Really, not a V12?"
Fortunately, the interior is in rough enough shape that I never have to hesitate about bringing the Husky along.
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It was promising to be rather warm on the desert floor today, so Tunes and I threw some snacks and water in a pack and headed a few thousand feet (750m) up into the mountains for a hike where it's a bit cooler. We found a nice parking space up on top of Donner Summit, which is one of our go-to mountain spots. Yes, the front growler needs to be epoxied back on, luckily I discovered it was loose when it was in the garage.
The views from up on top were magnificent. And the air was cool and fresh.
You can see a bit of the twisty mountain road that is so much fun to zoom up in the XKR.
Those far mountains are 25 miles (40KM) away.
The goal was to explore a section of the Pacific Crest Trail passing through Donner Summit that we haven't been on yet.
The initial section of the trail was quite technical, ascending steeply though boulders and broken scree fields next to sheer drop-offs until it leveled off up in the trees.
Siberian Huskies were bred to pull and Tuna is no exception. With her harness, she pulls like a freight train.
On the uphill, I nicknamed her "The Escalator" for how easy & quick she makes it going up.
On the way down, it was a lot of "Whoa! Slow down Husky!", particularly on the steep part.
The wild flowers were in bloom all over
Once back at the XKR, we spent some time relaxing and rehydrating in the brilliant sunshine, taking in the view, and enjoying the cool mountain breeze before heading back down the mountain to join Mrs S for a burger and a pint of yummy Amber Ale at our favorite brew pub down in Reno.
That little gem is Donner Lake, named for the infamous Donner Party who spent the winter of 1846 snowbound under 26 feet! of snow at the far end of the lake.
Consider it as possessing Mary-Ann's quaint plain charm as compared to to Lake Tahoe's massive Ginger-like movie-star glamor.
While it doesn't have the majestic presence and dramatic on-lake view lines of Tahoe, if one is looking for a beautiful mountain lake without hotels, casinos, gated communities, crowds, and hour-long traffic queues, it's just the place.
love the pics with the Husky,,I Have a female Malamute,Luna.
In my Mustang i deleted the rear seat and made
a shelf for her,,gonna do the same to the Jag here soon,,
We've been off the grid for awhile, rafting a river with family through SE Utah's awesome canyon country.
Now that we are back, it is another hot day in the Reno valley, so we took a drive as high up in the Sierras as we could get, where it is nice and cool.
The XKR performed magnificently as usual, pulling effortlessly up the high mountain grades.
There we parked the XKR in the shade and went for a walk in the woods to tick off another portion of the PCT.
It was another day at altitude to escape the warm valley temperatures.
Pulling into the parking lot near the top of Genoa Peak, the charisma of the X100 design showed itself with a big group of college-aged hikers literally tripping over themselves trying to walk to the trail head while simultaneously watching and pointing at the XKR with the Husky idling up behind them.
One reason to get high was to climb out of the near-surface smoke coming in from all the wildfires in California right now.
But the main reason we were there was that Tuna and I were wreck hunting for a Lockheed Constellation that had crashed just below the peak in very rough, high gradient, terrain in back 1964.
We hiked up to the top of the peak and descended the VERY steep mountainside to the GPS location of the crash and did a search, but found nothing. Either the recovery team completely scrubbed the site or the GPS location is wrong. I'm betting the latter as the round 39.000000 latitude just seems too convenient and some of the wreck descriptions put the crash on the west side of the ridge.
We'll be back to continue the search and the upside is that Tunes and I enjoyed a nice cool late summer afternoon driving and hiking through the high Sierras.
I was part of a search crew that found a crashed private plane (they were hauling illegal drugs) one miserable rainy night in February 1977 in the woods approaching the RDU Airport. I have been back to that exact site a couple of times during the past ten years or so (it is in the adjoining state park) and there is not a scrap of wreckage to be found now...
It's been 56 years since that crash. But a Connie is a big plane!
We've hiked to several 1940/1950s era wrecks in Colorado where many recognizable parts and aluminum skin & chips remained. The strangest one was an unexpected find while hiking above the treeline next to a pretty little glacial lake in a high mountain cirque below Arapaho Peak. I turned over a strange looking rock sitting next to the trail and saw that it was a chunk of aluminum with two big holes with butterfly valves in them. It was the beat-up remains of the biggest carburetor I'd ever seen. Looking further down. I then saw more wreckage on the slope below. When I researched what it might be after the hike, I discovered it to be from a C-47 that had crashed on Arapaho Glacier in 1948. The strange thing was that the parts I found were 1/2 mile upstream from the main wreck site. I concluded that the plane coming out of Denver must had first hit the abutment on the ENE side of the cirque and was shedding parts as it continued over the lake before impacting on the glacier in the SW corner of the cirque. ( 40.018597°-105.645018° )
Sunset: Smoke on the horizon looking west into California.
A strong northerly cold front earlier this week pushed the California wildfire smoke west, back into CA. But we can still see the dense fire smoke lingering just over the horizon. We have maybe 1 more day of beautiful CAVU conditions before the prevailing westerlies pick back up and put us back in the soup. We're definitely going for a drive today. The air quality was so bad the other week that I was glad that I had my paint respirator to wear to walk to the end of the driveway to pick up the mail. All I can say is that without the high-end smoke-scrubbing filters that I installed into our HVAC system earlier this summer in anticipation of a bad fire season, we'd be in a world of hurt.
Light red blobs are fires, other colors are the resulting smoke. We're near Reno, in the center of the map. In two days, all that red and purple will be over us.
I just joined the forum to be able to do research and ask noob questions before I buy another Jaguar. I came across this and spent 1 1/2 cups of coffee reading through it.
Thanks for sharing your journey and those fantastic photos!
Where are you here in North Carolina? Several of us get together from time to time to work on our cars together. Always fun and always a chance to learn something new....
Where are you here in North Carolina? Several of us get together from time to time to work on our cars together. Always fun and always a chance to learn something new....
I'm your neighbor, in Cary!
That sounds great, having local resources and of course we can all meet up at Cars and Coffee. Of course, it's tougher these days with the 'rona.
I haven't bought my Jaguar yet... I meant to write an intro post but I'm at work and they keep bothering me here, LOL. Any good independent shop(s) you can recommend in the area for a PPI?
03-18-2020 | 09:31 PM
