Flow Below Added

You put a lot of pressure on your truck. Not always the shortest route is the best one.

 

That mpg should tell you a lot about what you did to the truck. It's not good.
You should treat your truck like it's your child.

 

He did

 

How do people manage that run in hills and mountains all the time? Coming north out of Phoenix on the interstate my dash shows mid-4’s all the time, same as when I’m climbing any mountain in the Rockies. All the years spent pulling flatbed in the Northwest at 105k we didn’t have any fancy dash readouts but if we averaged 5 for the entire week everyone was happy.

I’m not sure what you’re implying that he did to his truck, but mechanically all he did was work it the way it was intended. It’s not like one trip up through Payson is going to cause him some catastrophic failure. All the years running heavy in the mountains and we weren’t losing transmissions or rear ends or putting holes in the block. We just made sure to put new drive tires on in the fall because we were lucky to get 100k out of them.

 

I would run up 17 just because of where our reloads were and I definitely wasn’t the only truck out there going up the hills headed to Flagstaff. I guess the takeaway from this is to avoid hills at all cost because you will work your engine. If that’s the case then we all need to make sure and park during high winds too because we don’t want to be working the engine all day.

 

Some drivers are very weird about hills and two lanes and go to crazy lengths to avoid them. Won't book loads based on weight or routes. These are heavy duty trucks built to haul heavy loads you're not going to hurt the truck running twisty, curvy, hilly roads.

 

That's how I see it. It's my truck and I'll try to do
whatever is best for my truck.
I've seen so many trucks on the side of the road, and the notions "the truck will be just fine" or "it never happened to me before" are not good enough for me.
I would drive the extra 200 miles and be home on 31-st.