Back to Cummins in Grand Junction, Colorado National Monument and Canyonlands by Night

We departed Montrose on Sunday September 1, headed for Moab UT.  Our Grand Circle caravan starts on the 2nd, but we had made a reservation to arrive one day early on the 1st.  We headed north on US 50 which would take us back to Grand Junction, then I-70 west into Utah and finally south on US 191 into Moab, a distance of about 180 miles.  There was another, shorter (158 miles), more direct and scenic route that would take us over the mountains and away from Grand Junction.  But we elected to take the more civilized route through Grand Junction just so we wouldn't be so far off in the boonies if we had another engine issue.  

And it was a wise decision.  About half way back to Grand Junction we threw another fault code, this time  for "Intake Manifold Pressure" and "EGR System". 

We pulled over to the side of the road to once again cry and curse and plan our next move.  We really, really, really wanted to arrive at Portal RV in Moab tonight, if for no other reason than we had made a reservation and paid $143.65, which would be forfeited if we didn't arrive.  I made calls to the Cummins corporate help line, to the service manager at Cummins (I had his cell number) and to the Cummins emergency hotline at Cummins Grand Junction, but no one answered.  I primarily wanted to know the severity of these new codes and whether we should drive or not.  But we never received a call back.  Our route would take us within 1/2 mile of the Cummins service center in Grand Junction, but if we stopped there we knew they wouldn't open until Tuesday, due to the Labor Day holiday.  That would mean two more nights in the Cummins lot waiting for them to open and missing the start of our caravan.  In the end we felt we had no other choice than to go back to Cummins in Grand Junction. 

We arrived at Cummins Grand Junction and set up in our usual space in their RV parking area and plugged in to 50A power.  By the time I arrived the fault codes had become inactive.  Since there were only a few occurrences of the codes and they had become inactive, I really wanted feedback from Cummins if we really even needed to be here. I again called all the numbers I had called earlier, and again received no answers and no callbacks. Ultimately we decided to stay here until next Tuesday next week and let them have another look.  In the meantime our friends Dave and Lynn, who we had been trying to travel with since we left Pueblo CO an eon ago, and who were with us at Montrose, stopped by the shop to offer moral support and any help they could render.  They too are enroute to Moab to attend the Grand Circle caravan and had departed Montrose about an hour after we did.  We greatly appreciated their support, but there was not anything they could do, so after a short while they continued on to Moab.

The orientation meeting for our caravan was to be on Monday September 2 at 2:00, followed by a dinner at 5:00 and a "Canyonlands by Night" Colorado River tour at 6:00.  Since we were stuck at Cummins in Grand Junction with nothing better to do Dorcas and I decided to drive the 106 miles to Moab to attend these events and return to Grand Junction that evening, to hopefully get the coach into the shop on Tuesday morning.  On the way to Moab we would do a windshield tour of Colorado National Monument on Rim Rock Drive.

From Wikipedia:

Sheer-walled canyons cut deep into sandstone and granite–gneiss–schist rock formations. This is an area of desert land high on the Colorado Plateau, with pinyon and juniper forests on the plateau. The park hosts a wide range of wildlife, including red-tailed hawks, golden eagles, ravens, jays, desert bighorn sheep, and coyotes. There are scenic views from trails, Rim Rock Drive, which winds along the plateau, and the campground. Nearby are the Book Cliffs and the largest flat-topped mountain in the world, the Grand Mesa.

The monument's feature attraction is Monument Canyon, which runs the width of the park and includes rock formations such as Independence Monument, the Kissing Couple, and Coke Ovens. The monument includes 20,500 acres (32.0 sq mi), much of which has been recommended to Congress for designation as wilderness.

After our drive on Rim Rock Drive in Colorado National Monument we dropped down off the plateau, back onto I-70 and continued to Moab.  We arrived just in time for the orientation where we learned details on how the caravan would work and met the other attendees.  There would be a total of 25 coaches, including our Host coach and our Co-Host coach.  We also viewed the vacant campsite we had paid for and reserved but which we could not use.

We met at the "Canyonlands by Night" facility, just a few miles from camp for a group dinner.    After dinner about dusk we boarded a boat for the "Canyonlands by Night" on the Colorado River.  "Canyonlands By Night & Day" is a family-owned tour company on the banks of the Colorado River near Moab. They have been providing guests with experiences of a lifetime in the Canyonlands area since 1963. We motored upstream about 5-6 miles then began to drift as a truck mounted with powerful lights illuminated the canyon walls from the road that parallels the river.  At the same time they played a narrative of the history of the canyon and the river from the beginning of time until the present along with dramatic music.  It was really cool.

Izzy was our guide and narrator. She was great

After the boat tour we piled back into the Pilot for the 106 mile drive back to Grand Junction. We arrived back at the coach shortly after midnight and crashed.

Bright and early at 7:30 am on Tuesday I was at the service counter at the Cummins facility.  We were repeat customers, and they got us into a service bay pretty quickly. Following is the report from the technician: 

CLOCKED INTO JOB AND RV WAS MOVED INTO SHOP. COMPLETED JSA. PLUGGED INTO RV AND CONNECTED INSIGHT READ FAULT CODES. 3389 AND 3361, ALL INACTIVE WITH 1 COUNT EACH.  ENTERED THEM INTO THE FAULT CODE ANALYZER AND FOUND 3361 TO BE RELATED TO 3389.  STARTED DIAG OF 3389. WENT THROUGH TSBS FOR UNIT AND FOUND NONE THAT ARE RELEVENT TO UNIT. NEXT STEP WAS TO PERFORM AN AIR HANDLING PERFORMNCE TEST. HAD TO LET UNIT WARM UP TO BEGIN TEST. ONCE UNIT WAS WARMED UP AFTER 10 MINUTES OF RUNNING I STARTED TEST. TEST COMPLETED AND FOUND NO PROBLEMS AND STARTED THAT ALL TESTS COMPLETED SUCCESSFULLY AND NO FURTHER REPAIRS NEEDED. CHECKED THE CALIBRATION HISTORY. UNIT IS UP TO DATE ON THE ECM CALIBRATION. NO PRIOR ECM CALIBRATIONS ARE SPECIFIC TO FAULT CODE. NOTIFIED SUPERVISOR OF FINDINGS. CLEANED UP WORK AREA. AND CLOCKED OUT. 

In summary: they could find nothing wrong.  All was fine.  Everyone was baffled. The fault codes had cleared, but they could find no reason why they had occurred in the first place.  In the end all we could do was to continue on our journey and hope for the best.

So that's what we did.  By 10:30 we were on the road to Moab to catch up with our caravan. We topped off with the last relatively cheap fuel we would see for a while before leaving Grand Junction. We headed west on I-70 and shortly entered Utah. Then south on US 191, then, just outside Moab .... you guessed it, another fault code.

I sent a text message to the service manager at Grand Junction:

Since 1) there seemed to be no clear solution 2) the coach seems to be running fine and 3) we really, really, really don't want to miss any more of our caravan, we will continue on and hope for the best.

The Utah desert is a lonely place to break down

The Adventure continues ......

Montrose CO and Black Canyon

We departed Cummins in Grand Junction on Thursday morning August 29 after Cummins made a few final checks and we settled our latest bill.  The drive to Montrose was uneventful, for which we were grateful.  During the drive Dorcas received a series of texts, whose "dings" sound a lot like the ding when the "Check Engine" light comes on, which gave me quite a number of starts. 

Our original reservation at Meadows of San Juan RV Resort was for 8 nights, for which we would earn a discounted weekly rate.  But our repairs had whittled our stay down such that we only had 3 nights available to stay before we were scheduled to arrive in Moab on September 1, the day before the start of our Grand Circle caravan.  So it goes.  Meadows of San Juan was very gracious and credited us the unused portion of our deposit.

We had passed through Montrose during our trip in 2017 and I was looking forward to visiting again.  There are a lot of interesting things to see and do nearby: Black Canyon of the Gunnison, Ouray, Telluride, Gunnison and Silverton, to name a few.  But now we would have time to do only a few things.  It turns out, the road to Gunnison is blocked due to a recently closed bridge, and there was a large festival happening in Telluride, so that was no longer appealing.  We did however spend a day at Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, just a few miles out of town.  Since we visited there in 2017, Black Canyon has been promoted from a National Monument to a National Park. 

From Wikipedia:

"The canyon's name owes itself to the fact that parts of the gorge only receive 33 minutes of sunlight a day.  Several canyons of the American West are longer and some are deeper, but none combines the depth, sheerness, narrowness, darkness, and dread of the Black Canyon."

Eddy out left behind that rock!

 I saw a sign in Montrose for a water park and found where they had created a section of rapids along the Uncompahgre River.  One guy was trying to teach another guy to surf in the river.  But the 2nd guy just wasn't getting it.  He never really got up on a wave.

We really didn't do much else in Montrose but rest and decompress from the stress of dealing with our repair issues.  I will say cool adult beverages were consumed.