First official trip into the wilderness!
Two years ago when I bought this mythical 2500 Suburban I decided to test it's off-road superiority and went on an easy drive, mostly highway but there was about 1/2 mile of dirt to a really big can of PBR in the the Nevada Desert. The truck did OK on the highway, ride was rough but bearable. And then came the dirt, it was outright miserable and from that day on I have firmly stood against taking a 2500 chassis off road or even on "overland" dirt roads.
This is all about to change...
Two weeks ago I took my trusty 2000 K1500 Suburban deep into the North Maine Woods, it was a great trip however 80 some miles from camp and 260 miles from home the transmission went out. I got home safely with the kids however had to leave my pop-up camper in the wilderness for a few days. Last week the kids and I got into the white Sub and went back to the North Maine woods to recover the camper and spend a couple more days exploring.
I chose to leave the house later than usual so that the kids could nap for the first two hours of the drive and give me some peace of mind. This would get us to the camper at around 7-7.30pm and at the campsite around 8.30pm.
2 miles, YES TWO MILES! after getting onto the legendary Golden Road, I see steam billowing out from under the hood. I was not even going fast, maybe 25-30mph. Yep lost a heating hose connector.
To make things worse it was too late and i would not make it to a car parts store in time to fix it. Had to do an emergency roadside fix. Luckily I have the parts I needed to fix and keep going. Including topping off 3 gallons of coolant that I lost.
I connected the feed and return heater core hoses with a /2" metal pipe that I had in my tool kit (just for this particularly common GM failure).
For some reason I did not have any hose clamps so gaffers tape had to do. I topped off the 3 gallons of coolant and we continued on our way to pick up the camper at 7.45pm. And headed to to a closer campsite than we originally planned on going to. Other than having no heat, we made it to our campsite around 9pm.
Driving dirt roads in the 2500 Suburban was a slow and unpleasant process compared to driving the same roads in the 1500 Suburban. Difference was about 1/2 the speed, in other words 23 miles usually takes me 30 minutes to drive in the 1500 and it took over one hour in the 2500.
Around 10pm it started raining, sometime during the night rain changed to snow. Weatherman said it was supposed to be 58F and partly cloudy, he was wrong.
It was snowing but not sticking all morning.
Kids had some fun throwing rocks and sticks into the nearby stream.
They had more fun warming up by the fire.
Snow started sticking to the trees, and after a couple hours eating and playing games int eh camper I decided to call it a day, pack up and head home.
Last week in April in the North Maine Woods, and its snowing.
Suburban had absolutely no problems pulling the 1,200# pop up, however the rutted out dirt roads were rough on the truck and made going slow.
Temperature dropped to 32F and snow started sticking to the ground. It was cold in the truck with no heat. We spent nearly three hours driving 40 miles to get off the dirt roads.
Finally made it to car parts store for 3 feet of heater hose, 3 hose clamps and a heater core plastic connector. Quick and easy fix and the heat is working again fro the drive home. Kids are now warm and cozy without all the winter jackets and pants!
This is the connector that broke after 2 miles of bouncing round on dirt roads. I did have a spare one in my toolkit but without extra heater hose it would have broken off too so I decided to bypass the heater cores when i did a quick roadside fix.
Found a tank on the way home.
Trying to not exceed the load capacity of the roof rack with a helicopter.
We made it home with no other problems, well I do have to replace another upper control arm because less than 100 miles on dirt wore my ball joint out, which I was expecting. With everyone that has 1500 trucks and is dreaming of a 2500 chassis for overlanding, don't. Unless you plan on spending more on suspension/lift upgrades than you spent on the truck the extra weight of unnecessary "heavy duty" parts is just not worth it.
I like to drive quick off road, I like keeping my weight down and ground clearance high yet center of gravity low. All this simply points to the 1500 chassis as far superior to the 2500 off road. And this short little adventure proved my point to me.
If I were to build this 2500 Suburban for actual overland travel, I would put a front coiolver lift kit, 6" diff drop kit and 40" tires. As well as 4.56 gears and a Detroit rear locker. At this point I will be looking at $10,000 in upgrades alone to make this 2500 chassis be remotely comparable to my low budget 1500 setup.
