Bob and Shell's Overland Adventures
We have the best customers in the world and love getting to know as many of them as possible. When we met Bob and Shell, we were blown away by their kindness, sense of adventure, and enthusiasm for their Tentrax trailer! We now consider Bob and Shell friends and were ecstatic when he offered to do a guest blog post for us. Enjoy reading about their adventures below! - Brent
You see, it’s all my wife, Shell’s, fault. Although I admit most of her need for “adventure” came from me. I had introduced her to backpacking and together we had trekked thousands of miles, including traversing the whole Continental Divide Trail from Mexico to Canada. So after my retirement she wanted to make sure that I would still be stimulated to explore the “behind the beyond”... that excitement that comes from seeing what’s around the bend, over that ridge, and love of backcountry that one has as a trekker. “Let’s get a Jeep,” she urged. Hmm. OK. But just staying in normal campgrounds wouldn’t begin to scratch that itch to explore. I wanted to be self-sufficient in really remote, wild country. To complete our need to shift from backpacks to having the luxury of “having it all” with us, we needed a trailer, I suggested. Not just any trailer, but a true off-roads trailer that could go anywhere the Jeep could go. She agreed that we should buy both Jeep and trailer at the same time.
We knew we wanted the toughest Jeep for the backcountry, a Rubicon, but which off-road trailer? Scouring the Internet, I found all sorts of rugged, squarish, heavy metal off-roads trailers. Communicating with some of the companies, I encountered a huge variety of responses… from macho man to take it or leave it. I floundered… which to go with? I hesitated. My career had been in the Fine Arts and I kinda was hoping for something that was a thing of beauty as well as a wilderness conqueror. Then I discovered Tentrax!
It was primarily fiberglass and beautifully shaped. There were curves and not just square, angular corners. More aerodynamic. And it definitely had higher clearance than the Jeep! Besides, as I told Tentrax’s Brent Nelson in an email, “From our short communications I can tell that your personality is ideal for making a success of it.” Indeed! I knew we had chosen wisely when, 15 minutes after picking up our new Tentrax, at a stoplight a car pulled up in the next lane, blew his horn and gave us a huge thumbs-up, smiling broadly.
We live in the East, but love the West. As a young teenager, I was taken on hikes by my Dad up wonderful high mountain passes in the Colorado Rockies. Usually our 2-wheel drive Willys Jeep’s carburetor would stall out eventually in the thin high altitude air and we’d have to hike on to the top of the passes. I wanted to go west and get up and over those same passes with the Jeep and Tentrax.
We set out for 5 weeks of seeing incredible scenery, especially in Oregon, SE Washington, Idaho, Wyoming and Colorado… with deep canyons, high 13,000 ft mountain passes (some with snow still on them), gushing rivers, old lava flows, broad sweeping valleys, great wilderness campsites… you name it. Much of it on remote and rough dirt “off-roads” in the Rockies and Cascades that our Jeep and Tentrax trailer handled with ease.
En route out west at Rest Areas, people would ask to take pictures of our Tentrax. Numerous times at viewpoints or at the tops of the old rocky mining roads up 12,000 –13,000 ft Colorado passes where we had pulled over, other drivers would come over, admire the Tentrax, and take pictures. It wasn’t the Jeep, it was the Tentrax! Besides noting the clearance and looks of the Tentrax, they wanted info on our 3-way off-roads trailer hitch… right/left, up/down, and pivoting head that allowed the wheels on the Jeep and Tentrax to be radically elevated in opposing directions.
Going up Argentine Pass (13,207 ft) we paused at the site of the former ghost town, Waldorf, that I had visited as a kid and found both that it had been swallowed by a more recent mine and that a Jeep caravan out for the day was pausing there. Again, much admiration for our Tentrax handling what their Jeeps were doing. One grizzled veteran warned that we’d never make it to the top “with a trailer,” especially with one extremely rocky sharp acute-angle turn up ahead. Little did he know! No problem! On Mosquito Pass (13,209 ft), where decades ago I had hiked and encountered a lone man with his mule crossing in a practice run for the annual Leadville to Fairplay mule race, the Jeep/Tentrax combo met the challenge. Crawling up that old rocky mining road in low gear, I truly had the sensation of slowly driving up into the sky.
Besides pulling the Tentrax over other challenging high passes (Stony, Tincup, Rollins, Ophir, Hurricane, Engineer), we thought it was great to open up the Tentrax at gorgeous camping spots like at Alta Lakes Dispersed Campground near Telluride and at our highest campsite ever (over 12,000 ft) at Jones Pass. We also did some boondocking (remote camping) with the Tentrax on a couple super long and remote roads - The 50-mile Bear Camp Road between Grants Pass and Agness, near the southern Oregon Coast, and the 160 mile Jeep trail, The Rimrocker Trail, from Montrose (CO) to Moab (UT).
A hiker friend of mine whom we visited in Oregon looked at the Tentrax and said, “You’ve got the perfect camping set-up!” Yup! After the Covid pressure eases, we plan on a Southwest US trip, including the “Mojave Road” in southern California and Arizona's “El Camino del Diablo.” Look, really, this is all Shell’s fault!
