‘Til the Wheels Come Off
Wheel comes off driving up Spyrock Road. Pretty gnarly when you have a 36” lift.
When I first met Old Gold it was the morning after ascending slowly up a rugged old dirt logging road for what felt like hours into the pitched darkness of the Northern Mendocino County redwoods. Although much to the detriment of my truck’s suspension, I would later be able to fly up that same road in 20 minutes flat.
I had just traveled from Seattle with some friends to a pot farm erected in the shadow of a 70s communal homestead. Now called Little Bear, or LB for those on the IN, it still maintained an iconic hexagonal shaped cabin and some smaller wood butchered structures among newer hand built cabins and sheds fashioned in the same style as it’s back-to-the-lander counterparts. But I wouldn’t see any of this until the sun came up. All I saw that evening was a handsome man and his big brown lab dog named Ham and a cowboy hot tub, which was enough for me.
That morning I stepped out onto the porch of the little cabin and saw said man in a ten gallon and shredded Willie Nelson t-shirt and said dog in front of said truck- Old Gold- and that about did it. We all hopped into Old Gold and cut across to the 395 headed out to the desert where we promptly broke down.
Broken down somewhere outside of Barstow but feeling good.
By that time that Old Gold had already helped build up that little piece of land; traversing the treacherous backroads of Branscomb hauling trimmers, groceries from the 1hr drive to town, trailers full of freshly harvest weed in the dead of night, goats, pounds, machinery, you name it. The farms were a little oasis frequented by other groovy folks from all over the world, hidden and exclusive, and built by hand with the help of that big old truck.
Soon permits replaced the midnight 215 loads and carseats replaced the trimmers, but Old Gold’s still with us on the farms as a mechanical testament to the hard work and consistent love we have always, and will continue to always, to put into our little patches of soil in the beautiful hills of Mendocino County.
No one loved Old Gold more than our son when he was a baby.
In Josh’s own words-
When I was 24 I rolled my 1994 Toyota Pickup off Spyrock Road in the fog at about 1am. I flipped that thing down the mountain and took out about 5 trees, knocked myself unconscious and woke up in the bed of someone’s pickup who had evidently pulled me out of the smashed cab and dragged me up the hill back to the road. This was a particularly unfortunate event as the bed of that truck was also where I slept.
We finished the harvest, and back then pounds were about $3500, so I got to buy another truck. I found a used Ford F350 Superduty with a 7.3L Powerstroke, the guy had already pulled off the muffler and put in a giant straight pipe. Gold and black. Named her Old Gold. Best truck I have ever owned, and the 7.3L Powerstroke is the best engine ever made, sorry 5.9L Cummins folks you’re wrong. I lived in that thing for years on the farm before I built my house, put 350,000 miles on it and she still works on the ranch every season hauling dirt. So here’s to Old Gold.
