Hike the Heartland: Mountains of Kansas and Iowa

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Outside Magazine March 2004

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Climb Every Mole Hill (cont.)

OUR ECONOLINE featured two captain's seats up front and four bench seats. We had removed the rear bench to make room for luggage, which meant only one guy at a time could catch quality winks by going horizontal.

It wasn't enough. We needed another sleep bay. After arriving punch-drunk at a truck stop in Amarillo, Texas, I positioned a Therm-a-Rest atop the luggage in the very back. I stretched out on it, not caring how many toothpaste tubes I squished. It was absurdly comfortable. Fresh, rested drivers were suddenly a possibility.

We rocketed east, intercepting dawn near Henryetta, Oklahoma. Then came serendipity: In Fort Smith, Arkansas, we stumbled across a restaurant called Sweet Bay Coffee. We caffeinated until we could caffeinate no more.

From Fort Smith, a series of twisty roads took us up into the Ozark National Forest. After spending so much time navigating open range, the Ozarks' leafy glades seemed foreign and wrong. Had we really been in North Dakota just two days ago? Our instincts said it couldn't be possible, though the odometer and our collective stench insisted that it was.

At 2,753 feet, Magazine Mountain was the second-shortest of the Seven Dwarfs but the fourth most difficult, requiring a 20-minute uphill walk. A simple wooden sign marked the top. I touched it. Dave filmed. We sipped bourbon from my flask. And history was made.

Seven up, seven down. As we headed back toward Kansas City, we felt like the heroes we truly were. For about two hours. Then, on U.S. 71 outside Butler, Missouri, we came to a screeching halt behind a long train of barely moving cars.

"Good God," Dave groaned. "Do these people know who we are and what we've done? We've been elite road warriors all weekend! But now look at us. We're just more schlubs stuck in holiday traffic."

There was no way we'd get Dorrell to the airport in time if we stayed on 71. Our only option was to cross into Kansas and hope that U.S. 69 would take us to K.C. through less traffic.

It worked. Dorrell made his flight; he even had time to take an ineffective sponge bath in the airport loo. The van was returned and Payless Car Rental called me only once to complain about its condition. Dave went back to Santa Monica, where he has yet to begin editing the alleged documentary that brought us to the Great Plains in the first place.

He has, however, found time to compile our statistics. We were out on the road for 86.5 hours. We drove 3,168 miles. We were cited for zero moving violations, though one or two might have occurred. We returned home feeling like mountaineering legends, but as the numbers made clear, the real champ was the Econoline.

"If you do the math," Dave later wrote us, "you see that, even at the moment we were gorging on apricot turnovers at the Longhorn Cafe, it was still averaging 36.6 miles per hour."

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