This week’s pic reminds me that it’s been way too long since my friend Rick Pewe and I have embarked on one of our off-road adventures called DED Tours (DED = Dirt Every Day, plus we nearly die virtually every time we go).

The adventure depicted here is from April of 2005. A friend of my father’s had given me a ’73 Jeep J10 pickup, which was a total score since the truck has a 401, a four-speed, and a flanged (rather than full-floating) Dana 60 rear. It was not running because the gas tank had fallen out and the guy didn’t want to deal with it. It had been sitting for about a year by the time that we picked it up, fixed the tank, and hit the road for an aimless four-day wander through the SoCal desert seeking abandoned old airfields.

The gas tank thing would come back to bite us. At one point we were north of Palm Desert, about 70 miles from pavement in any direction. It was dusk. And the gas tank fell out again. The good news was that we’d installed it with a loop of rubber fuel line so that the line did not break off when the tank hit the ground and started dragging behind the truck. Not a drop of gas was spilled on the pristine desert floor.

It was windy and freezing, so we decided to call it a night and fix the truck in the morning. The shot of the dashboard lights shows the partial remnants of the evening’s festivities in the truck cab. The next morning we made the fix, thereby saving our own lives cuz there was no way we could have walked out for help. The second photo of the campfire reveals a more typical camping scene outside truck and with an approprate white-man’s fire the next evening.

Somewhere you’ll find an entire story about all this in an issue of 4-Wheel & Of-Road, but you won’t see these photos.

I hate that the J10 is, by neccessity, on today’s sell list.