JC Dubeau is a full-time bike nerd and ice climber always looking for the next adventure.

They say older Toyotas are good because you can run them forever. I had a 2008 Tundra that was totally jacked up, looked like a small tank. I had the thing for the better part of 15 years. It served me well. I’d drive over things, drive through things. In the winter, I would use my winter sleeping bag, a sleeping bag liner, and then my summer sleeping bag as an overbag. I did the full-on open-air camping, and then I went from that to a Tonneau cover. It would basically Velcro down, so I would crack one side open so I could breathe, and crawl in and enclose myself under the cover. And it would always be funny when you crawl out of the back of it in the morning and people are like, “What? There was somebody in there?” I eventually upgraded to a camper shell.

It met an untimely end early last year, so I ended up picking up a 2022 Tundra. My first road trip had no issues. Fast forward a few months to summer 2024. In the Rockies, there’s an area called the Booming Ice Chasm. It’s this cold trap cave with huge vertical ice flows in it year-round. Basically, 600 feet of calf-burning grade 2, but there are a couple small pillars in there that are probably in the grade four, five range. From the parking lot to the entrance of the cave is 2300 to 2500 feet of elevation gain, and then you rappel three full rope lengths down into it.

On the road to get there, it says “high clearance four-wheel drive is required,” and for good reason. It’s basically a service access road you follow up. Then you start to hit some pretty large potholes and mud pits. So, ideally, you don’t do it after a solid rain.

We'd had almost a week of rain. I was leery about going through some of the holes, but the truck made it through. It was about two weeks later I went back in. Somebody had gone and cut drain holes in a couple of the big pits, drained the water, turned it into sludge. I got through those, got to the last big mud hole, and drove through it. No problems. I’m going up the last little hill, and the truck just sort of lights up. I lose all the power. I make it to the parking area and it shuts down. Fortunately, I had cell service up there. Called a tow truck, and it took him five hours to get a wrecker in. I was on the phone with my buddy who's a mechanic. He’s like, “Do this, do this.” Disconnected all the sensors I could, made sure they were dry. 

The wrecker shows up at six o’clock at night. He was able to get the truck turned around — made a bit of a disaster of the whole parking area to do it — but picks it up, pulls it all out, and took probably an hour to get back to the main road and onto the highway. He’s like, “Yeah, you're not the first, one person actually made it a little bit further than you.”

In the process of hooking up to the truck, he lowered the boom so he could put the hooks under the truck. I’m standing beside the truck and as I’m looking up, I hear this crunch. He put the boom through the window of the back of the truck and the camper. He’s just like, ”35 years, that’s only the second time I’ve done that.” It cost me 60 bucks for a replacement window from the manufacturer, so it’s all good.

When I started my most recent trip in December, I was in Hyalite Canyon for two and a half weeks, and I got to pay it forward a little bit. The number of vehicles that I pulled out of snow banks and drifts. I’ve got the hook on my truck and folks are just like, “Oh, you got a winch, you can just pull me out!” And I was like, “No man!” And I pull the recovery boards out of the back of my truck instead.

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