To the Canyon, slowly

About midway into the journey — after the transatlantic passage, after the reassurance from one of Jay Leno's mechanics, after the tires were caked in mud, while the two drivers were behind a trailer in the woods changing into their pants and suspenders — the 113-year-old car caught on fire.

Up until then, everything had been fine, really.

The trip, while a bit unusual, seemed reasonable. Fated, even: This wasn't the car's first time to make the drive.

The 1901 Toledo was a rare beast known as a steam car, powered by a burner, a boiler and a steam piston, built before internal-combustion engines were the world standard.

British collector Nick Howell had purchased the Toledo at a 2004 auction. Not long after, he had discovered that it was the very same car that had made the first automobile trip to the Grand Canyon more than a century earlier — a groundbreaking journey that had taken days and been described in at least one history book as "a trip from Hell."

Halfway around the world, more than a century later, Nick had been enthralled by the discovery. Naturally, there was only one thing to do: Ship his car back to the United States and make the same trek.

After all, Nick is fond of saying, cars were meant to be driven.

He phoned his younger brother, Chris, in Cornwall to ask if he would accompany him. Chris readily agreed.

The idea soon captured the imagination of a small but passionate group of outdoors and car enthusiasts. Jay Leno offered them space in his garage. Arizona trails experts volunteered to map and scout the route in advance so the brothers could follow as closely as possible the original route. Others stepped up to provide food breaks — with tea — and to trail the Toledo to support it.

None of them had ever met Nick or Chris Howell. But over weeks of mass emails, the Howells and the Flagstaff crew assembled a detailed itinerary that described even the slightest turn.

As interest in the trip grew, a photographer doubled as public relations person, insisting that the brothers be able to "have the adventure" and maintain the sense they were doing this alone. At least one volunteer reassured everyone the trip would go smoothly. After all, the roads today were in far better condition than they were 112 years ago, and the Howells would have far more support than the team had in 1902.

By the time the group converged on their first stretch of dirt road below the San Francisco Peaks, they were a full campaign. The steam car was fully refurbished. They were driving almost half a dozen chase vehicles with four-wheel drive. The group included one of Jay Leno's mechanics, a steam car expert who was close as one gets to a certified maintenance guy on a 1901-model anything.

They had rain gear, water for both human and vehicular consumption, fully charged cell phones and a generous supply Tetley tea. How could the trip possibly fail?

But there they were, on the morning of the second day, with the air smelling of forest drizzle, fresh mud and, then, the unmistakable scent of burning car.

The caravan gathered in the forest just outside Flagstaff at 7:30 a.m. Tuesday is a sight: a ragtag group surrounding Nick and Chris Howell, observing as the British brothers gingerly unloaded their shiny black antique vehicle into the clearing.

It was there, at the junction of Highway 180 and forest road 151, that the Howells would begin the trip.

Nick, 63, had spent nearly eight years meticulously restoring it. In the cool Flagstaff morning air, he donned a long blue lab coat over his dark T-shirt to fiddle with the steam car's engine and — with his mop of white hair and spectacles — looked not unlike a cross between Bill Gates and Bill Nye.

While Nick tinkered with the steam valve, Chris joked with the handful of people who gathered to send the brothers off. ("Did you bring the lariat so we could attach the horses?") Chris, 61, wore jeans and a black t-shirt with a picture of the Terminator that read "I'll be back." His booming laugh echoed through the woods. He snapped some pictures with an iPad. Occasionally he pretended to kick his older brother in the pants.

As Nick continued to make adjustments to the engine, Chris plopped one device after another on the steam car seat, gadgets that would have seemed alien in 1902. There was a GoPro camera with a Gorilla clip, a two-way radio ("so we can say 'we're lost!' ") and a GPS with the route pre-programmed.

"We just have to follow the blue line," Chris said. "It's not the yellow-brick road. It's the blue line."

At last, with the boiler cooperating, the car began emitting a high whistle and a cloud of white steam.

The preparations were complete, save one thing. The brothers disappeared quickly behind their trailer to take off their clothes.

In a moment they returned, in heavy brown pants, suspenders and tweed vests.

Of course they were always going to change into period costumes, Chris said. They wanted to stay true to the spirit of the 1902 drive. The found some historically appropriate, turn-of-the-century clothing on the Internet.

"You can't sit here in jeans and a T-shirt with Arnie in front!" Chris cried.

The blowing steam created an even, high-pitched whistle as the car chugged away from the clearing at cruising speed, 10 mph.

"Is that tea brewing over the hill yet?" Chris joked. Then, as the car nearly disappeared from sight, one of the brothers yelled: "Yahoo!"

0.1 mile out

Just out of sight of the bystanders, the Howells stopped. The steam valve had popped open, the equivalent of a modern-day car accelerator jamming, Nick said.

"A 112-year-old," said Chris. "It's a bit temperamental."

The steam valve jammed repeatedly over the next mile, owing to the incline of the first part of the road. With each attempted restart, huge plumes of white steam billowed from underneath the Toledo.

"We'll be here all day," said Brian Blue, a Flagstaff resident who, along with about eight others, volunteered to trail the brothers and help support the trip. In Blue's Jeep were 30 gallons of water, a bicycle air pump and a variety of other equipment.

"We're trying to double their time," Chris said with a laugh.

"They" meaning Los Angeles photographer Oliver Lippincott and company. They were the first ones to do this trip, in this car.

The year was 1902 — the Toledo was practically factory-new then — when Lippincott had planned the outlandish journey: driving the roughly 70 miles from Flagstaff to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. He had been accompanied by a local guide and two reporters from the Los Angeles Herald.

They had estimated the trip at seven hours, so they packed no food, and of course, they had no iPad.

The actual drive had taken anywhere from two day to two weeks, depending on which account of the journey is to be believed. They feared for their lives, hallucinated images of wild animals, ran out of water. Some sought refuge in a hunter's cabin along the way. Disoriented with hunger, one of them dreamed of a turkey dinner and flew into a murderous rage upon discovering an inaccurate mileage marker on a road sign. He walked the last 18 miles of the route.

Their stories can be found in the breathless, abundant prose of the 1902 style. At least one history book records it as "a trip from Hell."

The Howell brothers, in 2014, had few such worries.

Alan Travis, a local antique car enthusiast, and Arnold Schmidt, a California resident and steam car specialist who met the Howells through Jay Leno, were part of the chase team. Schmidt reassured the bunch that once the engine got warmed up, it would "be a better car."

"Right now with all that white smoke coming out, it's not efficient," he said. "As soon as that white stuff goes away, it'll be twice as efficient."

For the time, though, Travis and Schmidt agreed it would be best to hitch the steam car to a 21st-century vehicle so that it could make it up the initial incline. Five minutes later, the Toledo was strapped to Blue's Jeep. In the rearview mirror, Blue could see the brothers are grinning, but the only communication was by two-way radio.

"Do you have your own brakes or should I stop on an incline?" Blue asked the brothers. "Over."

"We have brakes, obviously, but it'd probably be sensible to stop on an incline," Chris said. "Over."

Blue: "Roger that."

There was a long pause, and then Blue radioed again.

"Did I mention my towing rates? Over."

"Uh, I didn't hear you. No copy."

5.5 miles out

The steam car continued to stall at each significant incline. Each time, Chris hopped out of the vehicle, pushing the Toledo from behind while his brother tampered with the car. After a slow jog, Chris would hoist himself into the moving vehicle.

"I started this at 220 pounds," Chris said. "Maybe I'll end up at 180!"

Despite the challenges, the brothers and the support crew have fallen into an easy banter over two-way radio. Might the steam car have an easier time traversing these roads if they dumped Chris?

At 11:15 a.m., plump raindrops began falling from the sky. The brothers were utterly unfazed. The day before, forecasters had predicted a monsoon storm would pass through Flagstaff. (Some in the support group had circulated an e-mail asking if the trip should be delayed. "No!" Nick had written in a reply-all. "We are Brits.")

"If it's a little bit of drizzle, we'll put the coats on and keep going," said Chris. He did put on his fedora.

"It'll make us feel at home," Nick added, pipe still hanging out the corner of his mouth.

15 miles out

Thunder eventually gave way to a steady, light rain. In the Jeep, Blue switched his windshield wipers to a faster setting. Over the two-way radio, the jokes were fewer and farther between, though the Howells were now clipping along at 10 mph, oblivious to the rain.

At the 15-mile mark, the damp and chill was too much for even a pair of British brothers — and the Howells admitted it. They stopped and threw on unmistakably modern rain coats.

At 3 p.m., about 17 miles in to their 62-mile journey, the Howell brothers called it a day. Both of them were drenched.

"This is a wrap!" Chris said, high-fiving anyone around him.

The rest would have to wait for the second day.

In a clearing off Highway 180 and Forest Road 417, 9½ miles farther north than where they left off the day before, Nick and Chris Howell were taking turns heating up the Toledo.

It was a familiar ritual by now, the blowtorch to start the burner, the many minutes of uneven simmering, until the boiler was finally up to temperature. While they waited, the two ducked behind their trailer to change into their period costumes.

In the momentary distraction, someone left the fire-inspection door open.

As the burner hummed away, small flames begin creeping out of the compartment, licking the wooden body of the car.

Alan Travis, the car enthusiast from Phoenix, professes to be more of an internal-combustion vehicle expert, but even he knew something was wrong.

"Hey, uh, look at your fire a little bit!" he shouted to the brothers.

In truth, it wasn't a very big fire. The wooden trim was just beginning to scorch. Nick blew on it, heavily, puffing out the flame. He fiddled with a gas valve until the flame shrank away.

But Day Two of was not off to a particularly great start.

44.7 miles to go

Today Travis and Arnold Schmidt, the steam car expert, trailed the steamer in Travis' Volkswagen, to provide mechanical support whenever anything went wrong. They estimated the Howells were going 13 mph. Practically speeding.

Two miles down the road, Nick lost control of the steering and the steam car lurched left into a muddy pit.

By some miracle, it stayed upright, and the brothers examined what went wrong. A steering pin had nearly slid out of a bar on the car. If it had disappeared into the mud completely, they would have no longer been able to steer the car at all.

"Thank you, the ghost of the Kaibab, or whatever!" Chris said.

Schmidt suggested wrapping tape around the beam so the steering pin doesn't fall out again.

"No!" Nick cried. "That's going to spoil the look of it."

They settled on brushing the steering pin with a red gel sealant Schmidt referred to simply as "old car glue," and pushing the pin back into its hole.

"Now where is this tea stop?" Nick asked. "Tea's more important."

35.5 miles to go

Travis and Schmidt had begun measuring the trip in "calamities per mile." The car's steam valve-jamming by then was a regular occurrence. Each time, the brothers frantically tried to slow it down on an incline, which causes the car to lose steam rapidly. Each time, they had to stop and wait another five to 10 minutes for the steam pressure to build up again.

The right sleeve of Nick's white button-down shirt from GentlemansEmporium.com was speckled with dirt.

But all of their frustrations seemed to evaporate when they descended from the Coconino National Forest into ranchland. Gone were the pinyon pine and juniper trees, replaced by a panoramic expanse of sagebrush, thin grasses and yellow and lavender wildflowers.

Nick and Chris spotted individual grasshoppers and beetles trying to cross the road. Both of them saw a roadrunner for the first time. ("Quite good fun.") Above, enormous clouds filtered windows of light and cast shadowy shapes onto the hills.

On the flat ranchland, the steam car was performing remarkably well, only stopping occasionally at the direction of Tom Martin, the photographer. Martin instructed the caravan of support vehicles to hang back for at least a mile. He wanted to capture the perfect shots of the Howells re-creating their adventurous drive, alone.

The group broke for lunch at noon, and for the first time, there was a sense of urgency. They were at least five hours away from their destination — and that was with no more calamities per mile. If they couldn't make it to the Grand Canyon today, was everybody willing to extend the trip? The brothers and the crew joked: Short of taking Martin's camera away, how could they make the drive go more quickly?

The Howells balked at trailering the Toledo through the rest of the ranchland, but they agreed to one concession: Any more inclines, and they'd accept a tow.

"Let's carry on," Nick said.

17.8 miles to go

The storm from the night before had created slick bogs of mud in the Kaibab National Forest, some as deep as three inches. Worried about time, the Howells decided to hitch the Toledo to Travis' Volkswagen for the long haul, until they could escape the mud.

"I wouldn't fancy having a stuck valve over this road," Nick said.

In some ways, a tow makes the drive even more challenging. One quick jerk and the steam can could tip. Travis estimated the Toledo weighed a couple thousand pounds, compared to his Volkswagen's 9,000 pounds. If the steam car's tiller had come loose a little bit in yesterday's drive, it could snap easily.

"It would take that tiller right out of their hand," Travis says. "And they'd both fall right out, because the only thing they have to hold on to is the tiller. If something were to go bad, it would go very, very bad very quickly on a tiller car."

He points out the Toledo's wheels, too. Essentially bicycle tires, he says.

And so the speed remained anywhere between 6 and 11 mph.

Instead of using the two-way radio, the brothers and the lead car developed an elaborate pantomime that involved Travis and Schmidt sticking their hands out of the windows to wave and point at rocks in the road, while Chris gestured wildly from the seat of the Toledo. He gave a thumbs up if the tow was going smoothly, waved his hands low to the ground if the Volkswagen needed to slow down and rolled his hands frantically like Tina Turner performing "Proud Mary" if the tow line fell too slack.

The excruciating dance continued for two hours, the attached cars — with arms protruding in all directions — twisting and moving slowly up the muddy road like some odd, mechanical arthropod.

In order to maintain balance, the brothers contorted themselves into comical positions with each bump and lurch. Still, they couldn't resist making faces, laughing and filming mud specks flying up from the steam car's wheels with their GoPro camera.

Travis and Schmidt shook their heads and laughed at what they saw in their rearview mirror. They tried to imagine how they would explain the last two days to their friends.

" 'We towed Laurel and Hardy through the mud in a 113-year-old car,' " Travis suggested. " 'Just so they could see the Grand Canyon.' "

5.3 miles to go

The caravan, now five cars deep, came upon a sign for sore eyes: "GRANDVIEW 2"

Grandview Tower at the South Rim was only two miles away.

Everyone turned right onto Forest Road 302. It's glorious road, more gravel than dirt. There was no hint of mud anywhere.

Emboldened, Travis upped his towing speed to 15 mph.

At 5:45 p.m., they arrived at Grandview Tower, and everyone cheered.

"Good tow, Alan," Chris said. "Good tow."

"We're cutting you loose, whether you like it or not!" Travis said, undoing the tow line. The brothers would complete the rest of their drive — just over three miles to the Grandview Point lookout — on their own.

On the last stretch, Travis pulled back. He wanted the Howells to have their moment. He held his breath as the steam car made a slow left turn onto Desert View Drive straight into the setting sun.

The brothers were in their element — Chris tipped his hat to drivers passing in the opposite direction, who were clearly startled at the sight of the steam car. In their lane, a National Park Service shuttle bus came hurtling around a bend and barely missed them. More cars whizzed by, switching lanes at the last minute and narrowly avoiding the steam car. They couldn't have been going faster than 25 or 30 mph, but suddenly everyone else seemed to be in a great and unnecessary hurry.

A quarter-mile from the turn into Grandview Point, the Toledo stalled once more. They would need to build up steam again, one last time. As they waited, Nick and Chris looked back and see their support caravan, all with emergency blinkers on.

They had not met these people until two days ago, and for 48 hours, the group had followed the brothers through the mud at 10 mph.

"The support and the teamwork, just fantastic," Nick said. Chris nods his head.

They seemed on the verge of sentimentality before Nick added: "We could have done it ourselves, maybe, but it would have been four weeks and we'd be in a ditch somewhere…"

When they build up enough steam, the brothers gathered with several of the volunteers.

"This is it!" someone shouted.

"Team Toledo!" Chris yelled.

"Team Toledo!" the rest echoed.

The Howell brothers hopped into the steam car, while Schmidt and Travis ran behind and gave it a final push. The steam car sputtered ahead. Chris tipped his hat one more time as they made a right turn and disappeared toward Grandview Point.

At the South Rim

Like startled pigeons, tourists dispersed to make way for the 113-year-old steam car emerging from the woods, then stepped forward cautiously to encircle the curiosity.

Nick and Chris stopped the car, then leaped out, whooping.

"We did it, brother!" Chris yelled while tossing his hat toward the canyon. The crowd erupted in spontaneous applause, even if no one was quite sure who the Howells were or what they just did.

Not missing a beat, Chris launched into a dramatic recount of their journey. Soon, the crowd's attention had been diverted completely away from one of the world's natural wonders.

As the sun set,one of the volunteers pointed out that perhaps the Howells should turn around, reminding them neither one has ever seen the Grand Canyon before.

"Should we go have a look?" Chris asked his brother.

"Ah, yes," Nick said, and they turned to walk toward the edge. "Biggest hole in the world!"