Elf Sternberg

Omaha and I took the electric vehicle camping in a national forest. Our assessment is that it’s very do-able and very serviceable if you’re willing to do a little planning ahead of time.

TL;DR: Range anxiety is real, but you can manage it with a little advanced planning, and it will get better over time. Your best average speed over the highway will be closer to 40 miles every hour because of charging times. Your car probably has two batteries, you’re screwed if either one dies, and there’s almost nothing in the car that tells you about the second. If you mainly use the car for city driving, you will be shocked by how much the wind resistance of highway speeds eats into your range.

Omaha and I wanted to go hiking in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest area around Mt. Adams in south Washington State. This was our first outing going camping since we’d bought the new Subaru Solterra so we decided to see if it would be a workable solution. We made some plans and did an assessment of every charger location we could possibly need along the route. There were plenty along the north-south corridor of I-5, so that wasn’t too worrisome, and our campsite was only about 15 miles from the Bonneville Hydroelectric Dam which had a charging station as well.

On Range Anxiety

EV range anxiety is real, but it’s not that different from having “ICE gasoline anxiety.” Nobody calls it that, and after you’ve been driving an ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) car for a year or more you kinda understand just how many miles you have left before you need a gas station. EVs are exactly the same, except for two things.

First, the range indicator isn’t a vague needle responding to a float sloshing about in a puddle of liquid explosive, it’s a number, a frighteningly exact number (except when it isn’t– see the section on highway driving) about how many miles are left before your battery dies. Watching that number count down in metronomic precision is like watching a countdown until your execution, or at least becoming stranded with no way to power back up quickly.

Secondly, the availability of chargers in more rural places is spotty at best, and because they’re not usually next to 24/7 facilities they’re often at risk of vandalism or theft, so it can be frustrating to find one only to find it broken. Society doesn’t protect them the way it does gasoline stations. The fact that one can be plunked down anywhere there’s electricity available, and that a (small) profit can be extracted from their being so, doesn’t mean that everyone is willing to do so, provide parking space for it, or put up with the hassles of copper thieves and anti-EV vandals.

The cure for range anxiety is the equally exact numbers that you can derive from any decent modern map program, such as Google Maps, for the distances between where you are and where you’re going. Figure a ten percent buffer on your total battery (i.e. if you have a 240-mile range, save 24 miles of reserve). Double the distance between the charger and your destination (because you have to get there, and get back), add that to the reserve, and keep the range number above that, and you’ll always be able to get to a charger. We drove from Panther Creek into the Trapper Creek and Indian Heaven hiking areas several times before we had to charge the Solterra, which compares favorably with the times we had to fill the old Outback.

On Charge Delay

We had to charge the car three times this road trip: once on the way down, once in the middle of the trip, and once on the way home. Each charging session took about an hour, using a DC charger, to get the car back to 90% charge. EV charging takes time, but on a curve: the first 25% of the pack will charge in about 10 minutes; the next 50% of the car takes about 50 minutes; and each percent thereafter can initially take two minutes each, but climbs to five minutes for the last three or four percent.

But an hour’s charge will give you about 75% to 80% of your car’s total range, and that’s usually enough to get moving. If you plan your road trips well, you can always find a nice park or cafe to wait out the charge, and at my age naps are lovely anyway. The Solterra has something called, I kid you not, “Your Room Mode,” which allows you to leave some parts of the car on even while it’s charging, such as the radio, the AC or the heater.

I’m simply not in such a hurry that an hour-long “pit stop” with bathroom breaks, a chance to stretch my legs, and maybe buy a few snacks or a coffee, every three hours of travel is a tragedy and a conundrum.

On the flip side, hydroelectric power is ridiculously cheap. With gas prices as they are, the Outback’s efficiency was such that for every dollar of gasoline you put into the tank, it got 4 or 5 miles of range. For the Solterra, on a commercial charge, it got 13 miles per dollar put into the battery.

Oh, and residential, off-peak (i.e. between 10pm and 6am) charging? The Solterra gets 68 miles per dollar put into the battery.

Two Batteries

The Solterra, like its equivalents, the Toyota BZ4X and the Lexus RZ 450e, has two batteries. The first is the one you see all the time on your dashboard, and it’s called the Traction Battery. The other one is a plain, old-fashioned, unremarkable lead-acid thing called the Accessories Battery. The latter powers “everything else” in the car: the radio, the seat warmers, the headlights and interior lights, the door locks. It’s charged from the Traction Battery when you’re driving, providing a moderating pass-through much the same way such batteries do on ICE cars with their alternators. When the car is officially “off,” though, it discharges in the same way as it would, and it will die if you leave your headlights or the seat warmers on too long. When it gets down, the only warning you’ll get about it is a “Power Low: Please Turn Off Accesories” notification (a big one, you can’t miss it) on your dashboard.

A lot of Solterra owners recommended replacing the lead-acid battery with something more modern; although deep-charging lead-acid batteries exist, that battery slot on the Solterra can handle a lithium-based automotive battery, of which there are now several. I haven’t decided if it’s a problem serious enough to warrant replacing it before it’s time. But if you see the warning often enough, have your dealer check the health of the Accessories Battery, because some of them sat idle and uncharged for months on a dock somewhere, and that’s not at all healthy for lead-acid batteries.

3.5 M/KWh city, 2.8 M/KWh highway

The similarly-shaped and platformed Toyota RAV-4 ICE version of our car says that it gets 27 miles per gallon in city driving, and 33 miles per gallon highway driving. For the first automotive century, highway driving was always more efficient because, frankly, ICE cars are hideously inefficient. Idling uses up gasoline. Accelerating from a dead stop uses a lot of fuel, most of it wasted. On the highway a car needs only maintain a constant speed, and an ICE car with a smart transmission can optimize all of that as much as possible.

An EV, on the other hand, uses zero electricity while sitting at a stoplight. It just sits there, waiting. It doesn’t idle; idling is a phenomenon of not being able to turn the engine off in order to have acceleration ready-to-hand, but electricity, unlike gasoline, is instantaneous. It’s also complete: exactly as much energy goes into getting the car up-to-speed as is needed, no more, and no less.

The faster you drive a car, the bigger the buffer of air compressed by the nose travelling through the atmosphere becomes and the more drag the car experiences. For an ICE car, the inefficiency of city driving is so bad that ICE cars are still more efficient at highway speeds than in the city, but for EVs that reality is reversed.

When we drove home, we had 210 miles on the pack at our average use rate of 3.5M/KWh, and from the charger in Vancouver I estimated we would make it with about 45 miles left on the pack. When we pulled into the driveway there was barely 20 miles left, and the car reported that we’d had about 2.8M/KWh of usage, almost entirely due to driving on Washington’s freeways at 70MPH.

Another thing to factor into range management. What a drag.

Overall

Overall, though, I’m mostly delighted with the Solterra. The LIDAR-informed cruise control and optical lane-keeping features make driving it on the freeways feel safer and easier without encouraging you to take your hands off the wheel; it’s a good balance of being helpful while acknowledging that it’s gonna be a long time before humans can stop paying attention to the road. Although the Solterra’s suspension is a little stiff compared to the Outback or Forester I have owned, that’s compensated greatly by the profound quiet experienced inside a car without any engine grumbling inside its frame. The reduced number of moving parts makes EVs a much lower-maintenance prospect as well. The cabin is comfy as hell, and Subaru, like Volvo, has gone out of its way to provide haptic (touchable, discrete, independent) buttons, levers, and dials, so you can signal, control the lights, the heat & AC, the windows, the locks, all of the usual things, without having to take your eyes off the road and look at a viewscreen. The CAN (controller area network) on these cars has independent modules and redundant wiring, unlike in a Tesla, so it will still work even if the radio is having a bad day. (I once crashed a friend’s Tesla by bringing up a website on the viewscreen while we were waiting at some restaurant.)

Range anxiety is managable, and more chargers installed in more locations will make range anxiety fade away. Charging times will hopefully get better, and in the meantime 180 miles of range followed by an hour of rest is probably not a tragic trade-off for most people. Besides, 90% of all trips are within 6 miles of your home, so most people just won’t have a range-management experience all that often. Knowing about the dual battery issue and more discussion of the the reality of highway driving an EV would be useful before buying one.

I've finally gotten the hang of this waking early thing. I made coffee and wrote, and Omaha rose an hour later. We made pancakes and bacon, the bacon mostly just to season the pan but nobody rejects bacon, right? The pancakes were amazing, some of the best I've ever made. The existence of pancake mix offends me evermore.

We drove to Barlow Pass, a pass between two smaller mounts in the Snoqualmie National Forest and the site of four trailheads. The most popular head southwest, but Omaha and I decided to take a look at a much shorter trail, the Barlow Point Lookout trail. It was in the book as a "side trail" to the much longer Monte Cristo trail, but we decided we weren't up for the long hike, which was also rated as a Level 4 (out of 5) difficulty.

We learned a lesson: always assume side-hikes are as hard or harder as the primary trail. Barlow Point was a peak right in the middle of a vast valley, with great views all around, to watch for forest fires. It burned down in the early 1960s and was never rebuilt. Omaha and I wanted to see what was left.


The hike was hard. A constant, uphill climb that put immense strain on our knees and ankles. Omaha was doing much better after her painful Tuesday experience, but we were still huffing and puffing, stopping every few hundred yards. Omaha and I had a wonderful time, though. It was lovely, and when we got to the top, it was gorgeous. Despite the still-present woodsmoke, the views were lovely, and there were all these pretty alpine bees flitting around.

We walked back down, which was much easier, and then drove up to the Ice Caves Trail. We pumped filtered water from a nearby stream to refill our bottles, then stopped to have lunch, only to discover that the picnic area was roped off with sherrif's tape! They're still searching for Sam Sayers, an experienced hiker who went missing almost three weeks ago, and the S&R team was using the Ice Cave picnic area as a landing and refueling pitch. The sherrif said it would be more than an hour until the chopper came back, so we could use the shelter if we wanted. We did, making egg salad sandwiches, then made our way to the Ice Caves.

This was a level 1 walk: groomed pathways, in some places literally a boardwalk, filled with families. Hardly the arduous trek of the morning. The Ice Caves themselves are fascinating, snow-filled pockets in the lee of a mountain so that they never get sunlight, but undercut by water running down the mountain that brings warmth, energy and motion below the snowpacks, resulting in huge, hollow caves of packed snow.

There are markers all along the trail warning us that the ice caves were dangerous and we shouldn't go near. Omaha and I went close enough for a photo, but nowhere near the actual caves themselves. Just a few years ago, those caves killed a little girl, and have claimed three other lives in the past twenty years. That didn't stop another family from walking right up to, and in some cases under, the overhang of the caves. Idiots. As we were watching, another young lady informed us she'd heard rumors of a rattlesnake. We newer heard any rattling.

After we got back to our campsite, Omaha took a short nap, and we made a quick meal of Calico Beans & Meat. The neighboring campsite is full of Germans on holiday. Now that it's Friday, the campsite is full, despite the "problem bear" warning. Some sites have as many as six or eight people and three cars!

We tried baking apples over the campfire, but they didn't work. We ended up going to bed a little early.

Wednesday was a bit of a disappointment. The Fitbit says I awoke around 3:15 to use the loo, but didn't fall asleep again until 3:50. The next time I looked up it was 8:30. I guess that means I slept well.

Omaha rose about a half hour later and we had scrambled eggs and bacon. The bacon was amazing, I must get that brand again. We burned two pieces of toast so badly they were sacrificed to the fire, but the next two came out perfect. It was one of the nicest breakfasts I've had in a long time.


Omaha and I headed out for Slide Lake. At first, it seemed that we'd taken a trail that led to a washed-out and impassible road, but no, our navigation was worse than that; we were entirely on the wrong side of the map. Recalibrating, we headed out a place called Lookout Tree Trail, which had one of the largest Red Cedars left in these woods. It was supposed to be the backend of Beaver Lake Trail (the part that was marked inaccessible yesterday on the map). The tree was quite fantastic, but beyond it the trail was completely overgrown, and there was no way we were gonna get to see the other side of Beaver Lake.

For the first time in nearly twenty years, Omaha and I went camping by ourselves, without the children. Yamaraashi-chan is in her 20s now, lives on her own in a small apartment in Seattle, and can legally drink! Kouryou-chan is eighteen, has her own car and her own friends, and while she still lives with us she begged off and said she wished to have the house to herself for a week.

So Omaha and I made checklists and schedules, spending Sunday cataloging and counting the supplies to make sure we had enough, and a quick trip to the sporting goods store for a few extras. When Monday arrived the car was mostly packed; we had only to go get some dry ice for the cooler, then the food, then the bulk ice. After breakfast and gasoline, we were on the road.

I had had a brilliant idea of stopping by the local second-hand store and buying a few children's soft-bodied lunchboxes, filling them with dry ice, in order to slow the heat transfer and make the whole thing last longer without creating an iceberg at the bottom of the cooler. That had happened last year and at some point we'd had to chip out the meat with a tent stake. While I didn't find any lunchboxes, I did find a child's exercise mat that was exactly the same size as the cooler, and padded with enough foam to provide the insulation I desired. It worked perfectly.

We drove north, our destination the Clear Creek Campground in the Mount Baker – Snoqualmie National Forest. We stopped for our traditional Burger King lunch, and drove on through quiet roads. The West Coast is on fire again, and a pall of woodsmoke from fires raging in eastern Washington, California, Oregon, and Canada colored the sun a dull orange. Visibility was poor.

We reached the campsite at about 4pm, and immediately set up camp. And then I took a nap. I'm not sure why; it wasn't as if I'd slept poorly the night before. But I still needed sleep, and Omaha let me get about an hour.

The campsite was beautiful, right along the Sauk River. Omaha and I trekked out with our new gravity filter and filled our five-gallon water bucket, and the gravity filter worked amazingly well. We had fun watching it fill the bucket while we sat and skipped stones across a side-stream.

We completely skipped dinner, too. We had little meal bars instead, but that's not a meal. We were still full from the very American lunch. We played a round of Unexploded Cow and then headed to bed. To our horror, we forgot our pillows and headlamps. The headlamps we can live without; we had plenty of alternative light sources. The pillows, well... we made do with clean laundry bundled into the sleepsack carry bags, but those are poor substitutes.

I guess we'll live.

Anyway, we went to Wentachee State Park, which is, as far as Omaha and I are concerned, far too civilized, in that decadent way that post-imperial America is supposed to be: there's a camp store, there's electricity, and there are assholes who seem to think that it's perfectly okay to leave trash at the campsite for the rangers to pick up in freakin' bear country. I saw this twice: once, it was food trash, and I and the girls packed it to the bear-safe trash boxes, the second time it was just three empty propane cans left behind. We didn't clean those up.

There were also a lot of people who brought dogs despite all the signs telling them not to. I pointed to a chihuahua and said, "It's so nice of those people to bring the bears and cougars a snack, don't you think?"

Dinner was beercan chicken, our family tradition on outings like this. I used a pear for the head since we'd forgotten the usual potato, patted the bird dry with paper towels then rubbed it down with a mixture of butter and a handful of herbs, and used a mixture of watermelon beer and liquid smoke. We ignored the instructions to cook with "indirect heat," instead making a foil chimney to channel heat around the bird.

We also had broccoli, wrapped in foil and steamed directly in the fire, and egg noodles. It was all magnificently delicious.

We also made s'mores, which were fine with graham cracker, dark chocolate, and marshmallows. Like an idiot, I was tempted to buy "campfire" marshmallows, which were too damned big and made so much of a mess that I must discourage others from buying them: just buy regular marshmallows.

Morning brought scrambled eggs, bacon, toast. Yum.

We broke down camp then walked down to the water. The girls swam until almost three. Thunderstorms rolled in, we quickly packed up and headed back home.

The thunderstorm followed us until Stevens Pass, dropping nasty hail at one point, and then we stopped at Deception Falls for a restroom break. Deception Falls had a number of small paths leading away, and someone had left their lovely ancient convertible open, with two coolers and a large box of... lettuce? Very strange.

We drove back home, restauranted at Red Robin (Kouryou-chan's choice). They have these tableside cardboard add placements that change every quarter. This quarter they were celebrating their annual "kid's cook" menu, which was oragami'd into the shape of a stove. The placements have a cute note visible only if you pick them up, and this one read, "Stove tops have all the fun. Stove bottoms? Not so much." Oh, the things I could say.

I have discovered that the salt scrub sold at Trader Joes is awesome as a daily defoliant and completely alleviates the itch from my ankle brace.

( Lots more pictures )

For no other reason than because I want to, I hereby present all the flowers Kouryou-chan spotted and identified on our hike over North Sunrise Ridge, around Frozen Lake, across the Berkeley blast field and down into Berkeley Meadows, July 16th. These are all alpine and subalpine breeds growing on Mount Rainier. All identifications were hers, so if they're wrong, well, we did our best.

( Lots of pictures behind the cut )

We started out late. Far from being the first one up, as I usually have been in the past, this vacation I seem to have consistently been the last one to finally drag my butt out of the sleeping bag and get ready for the day. I didn't bring any coffee with me this time, just hot tea, but it's good and it gets us going in the morning.

Omaha made oatmeal, and then we made PB&J sandwiches, loaded up the trail mix and water supplies, and headed out for Olallie Creek.

The trail was up the whole freakin' way! 4.3 miles, all of it uphill, to get to the creek and its attendent campsite. This was one of those places that the trail guides admit is "rarely visited," because it's a short enough hike that hardcore hikers push on to the next camp, but for a day hike there's nothing to it-- no vast Rainier vistas, no beautiful meadows, no amazing waterfalls. Just a lovely little creek slightly above the summer snowline, in the midst of a forest that rarely has human visitors. We refilled our water bottles often from the little streams that line the mountains; my Pur water filter pumps is one of the best investments I've ever made, and I'm down to my last replacement filter, and Pur has long gone out of business.

There was snow above 3900'. The girls were very pleased. At one point we stopped alongside a stream to rest and the girls were utterly fascinated with this tadpole clinging to a rock, wiggling back and forth, its ultimate goal utterly unknowable. There were a lot of trees fallen across the trail, and we had to climb them repeatedly, scraping our backs going under or risking our necks going over.

When we reached the campsite itself, the girls took off their hiking shoes and dunked their feet into the river-- and then Kouryou-chan succeded in dunking more of herself in, making herself very cold.

One of the things we found up at the campsite was one of those horrific, but still absolutely necessary, vault toilets. This one had a surprise-- a geocache stored about two yards away. It was a green ammunition box, locked with a padlock that was not marked with the US National Park Service mark on it, as all the other padlocks I'd seen on Rainier are. We're not sure what was in it, obviously, and geocaches are illegal in national parks, so what it was doing there and why, we have no idea.

Equally distressing, a snowpack covered the trail leading to the toilet and obscured the path, and someone had apparently chosen not to quest up the snow and done their business right there on the side of the trail. Gross. We reported all of this to the park rangers; dunno what they can do about it.

Home was downhill, blessed be. We went home and had the bean & beef premix that Omaha had made before we left-- very high in protein and carbs, and damned yummy, despite Yamaraashi-chan's complaints. It's one of those things you only ever eat while camping.

After that, bedtime. And we were all ready for it.

( Family pics of the day )

Our annual camping trip started out with the traditional Burger King feast, a fateful reminder of what we were not to endure for the next six days. I had the new "XT Steak Burger" and it was awful. It tasted fake, as if they were trying to put one over on the diner. After a fast drive through Rainier Valley, down through Black Diamond to Enumclaw, I turned eastward onto 410 into the Rainier National Forest. All along the way we tried to find Thomas Guides, as I'd forgotten the one we had back at home and it was way out of date anyway. We were short a few flashlights so I bought some at Enumclaw, along with some new sunglasses-- I'd broken the old ones.

At the top of Cayuse Pass, we stopped to play in the snowpacks. The day had been cloudy all the way through the valley, and up here it was misty in that cold, Twin Peaks kind of way, but despite the mist and snow it was all quite beautiful.

We drove down into the Ohanapekosh Camping Area, 260 campsites in eight "loops" situated along the Ohanapekosh River, and found ours. We must have gotten the smallest campsite of all. There was only one place to put the tent, and it was less than six feet from the fire ring. We practiced tarpaulin origami to create a proper "tent footprint," as we'd been taught at REI, folding the tarp under itself so that if rain fell off the tent's rainfly it would fall on the ground and slip under the footprint, keeping the occupants warm and dry. We unpacked my sorely overburdened car; that clamshell is heavy even when packed only with the bedding, blankets and tent, and we had trouble maintaining even the lower speed limits along the twisting mountain roads. Along the way we cataloged that we'd forgotten beer, batteries, hot dogs, and tomatoes. Fortunately, on this side of the mountain there's a small town not twenty minutes away.

Omaha, the fire goddess herself, made a great fire and in no time we had pizza loaf for dinner: garlic bread sliced in half, filled with pizza sauce and shredded cheese, then wrapped in foil and reheated over the fire. They were a little blackened, but otherwise delicious.

Getting ready for bed in the dark is fun; stumbling around, "where did I put my toothbrush?", discussing how much pajamas and blankets will be necessary. It was never warm at night in Ohanapekosh, but never frigidly cold; I slept great in a pair of sleep shorts and a t-shirt. The girls preferred their usual pajamas, and Omaha wore her usual lovely jammies.

Omaha and I have been blessed this week to be childless. They're both packed off to summer camp for the week, and for the first time in eight years Omaha and I have found an entire six-day stretch to ourselves.

Unfortunately, that didn't turn out completely as well as we'd planned. The state-wide primaries were Tuesday, so Omaha was booked Monday and Tuesday night doing political stuff. It wasn't until Wednesday that we were free to ourselves. We went out to eat at a lovely restaurant called Bennett's, up on Mercer Island, which was pricey but delicious, and went to bed early in the hopes of getting out and onto the road the next day.

Thursday morning, we quickly threw everything we needed for a camping trip into the car, secured the bikes to the back, and rode out for Tahuya State Forest, a "working forest" popular with mountain bikers and off-road vehicle enthusiasts.

We first tried a short run called the Overland, off of a place called The Sandpit. The Sandpit was exactly that: a huge field of gravel. Gravel is the enemy of the bicycle, because it disperses all of your energy, robbing you of any momentum and making it hard to get any traction to build more. Eventually, we crossed the Sandpit and made our way onto the trail. The ride was brutal, with lots of gravel in the trail, and the trail had recently been ground up by dirt bikes. Tires slipped and slid. It was nasty. We did about two miles of that before heading back to the car, taking a shortcut on a forest road. We drove down to Belair State Park for a campsite, then left the campsite to try Mission Creek.

That was a much better ride. Jarring in places, lots of roots, lots of standing water in trail ruts and pots, lots of mud, but at least it was a trail and not a gravel pit with trees. We dumped our bikes quite a lot and our shoes got very wet. We rode for about an hour, then realized we'd left the map we had and turned back.

One thing about these "working" forests; they don't feel right. They have a "used" feel to them, which I suppose is only normal as that's what they are: used. We're not in a forest in the same sense as, say, some of the ancient woods around Mt. Rainier. This place has been chewed through once or twice is the past century by loggers as a way of providing cash for our school system. That's the excuse that the state uses.

It's been a long time since I've ridden on anything other than city streets (and I don't even do that often enough!). My thighs and buttocks were brutalized by the constant pounding of the bicycle seat. I could barely walk.

We returned to the campsite with just enough light left to make Omaha's famous campside meal, foil chicken. I took a quick three-minute shower (50 cents for three minutes) and used as much hot water as I could buy with 50 cents.

I will say that the kilt is pretty much the perfect dress accessory for this kind of outing. I could change into my riding pants without needing privacy, and going regimental in the evening was a damned relief after wearing those things all that time. Also, since we'd forgotten many things in our haste to get out of there (like towels), the kilt was great in allowing me to shower, squeegee myself as well as possible, toss a t-shirt over my damp body, and go. Not too bad.

It felt so weird to be camping without the kids, though. It was the first day I'd really missed them in more than an intellectual fashion. Where are my giggly kids?

I must have slept like a stone that night. I don't remember any of it.