The Northern California segment and the Pacific Northwest segment of the NCM 99 Caravan to Bowling Green, Kentucky continued from the Valley Fair mall in West Valley (Salt Lake City Suburb) to Denver Colorado. Gus Paulos Chevrolet provided donuts, bagels and coffee to start the day. Two routes were available, a northern route via I80 to Cheyanne, Wyoming and I25 south to Denver, or a Southern route via I70.

We took the northern route with about 30 or so other cars, including a 66 Corvette.

Around 100 cars took the southern route.

The caravan started with West Valley police providing traffic control to get us back to I215, and a Gus Paulos Chevrolet employee escorting us to I80 through the Wasach range. The sun poking through the clouds made for a dramatic sky.

Here's a shot of us driving through the canyon out of Salt Lake City.

Another shot of us following a couple of Grand Sports. That wouldn't last the morning.

We caravaned to the Little America Truck stop in Wyoming for our first break. Several of us were frustrated with the rubber band effect that was happening on the run, and the pace at barely the speed limit. The caravan leader, Vince commented on how well my solid axle kept up. I told him it had no problem keeping up yesterday when we were caravaning through Nevada at 30 mph faster.

This Stingray joined us on the Northern run, but was having oil consumption problems keeping up with the pack. We'll see if he made it to Denver.

Once we got out of traffic, the Hookers, Jerry, and I broke off from the caravan and stepped it up to 80 mph. This apparently was frowned on by the car gods, because we then found ourselves about 30 miles from civilization when mod fever struck.

Here we are on the side of I80, pondering the next mod to Brett's ZR1.

How many ZR1s are running around with AC Delete option on their LT5s? This is why Brett was inspired to make this mod 30 miles from nowhere. You can see the junk spilling out of the seized AC compressor clutch, and the heat damage on the edge of the clutch. A few more miles, and I'm sure the belt would have left the party.

It took us a couple of hours to figure out a ballpark length of serpentine belt to make the mod, drive the 4 miles to the next exit to turn around and drive the 30 miles back to Rock Springs, get the belt we thought we needed, and the belts immediately larger and smaller, and reassemble the car sans AC compressor in the belt path.

Here's the belt that every ZR-1 owner should carry as a spare in case the AC Compressor seizes up.

Here's the front of a ZR-1 motor taken at the Corvette Museum. On Brett's car, we routed the shorter belt directly from the water pump to the power steering pump, bypassing the AC Compressor.

We made use of the rest stop west of Table Rock after three hours on the side of the road (Brett did bring back a bucket of KFC chicken for the stranded gang) and took this group photo of the sacrificial serpentine belt that was about to be shreaded by the seized compressor clutch.

Jim and Jan from Discovery Bay Corvettes joined our party on the side of I80 with their shark. Just as we finally got everything back together and were ready to leave, a stray C5 also from California joined us. The eight of us then proceeded on to Rawlins, Wyoming for gas where this nearly complete five generation picture was taken.

The weather gods provided nice, cool driving weather most of the day, but shortly west of Laramie, Wyoming we encountered a few scattered showers, and a few rainbows. Apparently, along the way several bugs encountered our windshield as well. The windshield was my first casualty of the trip, with a crack forming some time between last night and this morning right under my PE II Tech Sticker. We'll see how it grows during the trip. I think this was the glass gods reacting to my comment on the sandblasting all the trips across Nevada have done to the windshield.

Since we were way behind schedule, and Wyoming doesn't always offer the most dynamic scenery, we decided to take a shortcut down highway 237 between Laramie and Ft. Collins, Colorado. The first 30 miles or so had me thinking this would be a great venue for a C.A.R.S. Open Road Race. Following this we crossed into Colorado and encountered some really incredible scenery. Here's several shots of the four generations off this road.

Fuel Log