High mileage

Oct. 20. 2006

By MARY AMES

Frontiersman

BUTTE - Brownie's odometer displays more than 290,000 miles - mostly hard miles - but the award-winning 1988 Chevrolet pickup truck is going strong.

Patrick Garley entered Brownie in the Chevy Silverado 200,000 Mile Club, submitting a photo of the two of them up at Hatcher Pass, and writing about Brownie's life as a working man's truck, in temperatures ranging from 100 degrees to minus 20. As a result, Brownie won the &#8220Most Extreme” category, and Patrick and his wife, Sandra Garley, Wasilla's deputy administrator, won a trip to the Texas State Fair.

When Patrick Garley bought the pickup truck in New Mexico, the odometer had 80,000 miles on it already.

&#8220We don't buy new vehicles,” Garley said. &#8220We drive them until their wheels fall off. As long as they're reliable, we keep driving them.”

Garley said he is an artist, not a mechanic, but for the most part, he maintained the full-throttle, fuel-injected Brownie himself.

&#8220That's what's nice with an older truck,” he said. &#8220You can work on them. Nowadays, it's worse and worse.”

Brownie's life with Garley hasn't been the Life of Riley. Garley bought the truck for his work as a construction contractor, and drove it in four-wheel drive on the back roads of New Mexico at high temperatures. It's been used in the sandy back roads of the desert hunting birds, and on the rocky and muddy roads of the mountains hunting elk, bears and cougar, Garley wrote to Chevrolet for the contest.

&#8220I was not easy on it,” he said.

New Mexico has more roads than Alaska, he said, and everything is a lot farther apart. Garley and his wife put about 30,000 miles on three vehicles in a year, he said, but up here, since neither of them commute to Anchorage, they average no more than 15,000 miles a year.

The Garleys drove Brownie to Alaska, towing a trailer, in 1999, when its odometer read 200,000 miles. They named it Brownie after the Alaska bear, Garley wrote.

The first thing Garley did for Brownie once they landed in Alaska was install an engine block heater, he said. Brownie rarely stayed in a garage.

&#8220I'll put it in the shop in the deadest of winter, if I have room,” he said.

Chevrolet set up the 200,000 Mile Club Web site in June, and since then posted more than 2,000 stories, according to a company statement. Garley learned about the club when he brought his wife's car in for an oil change at Lithia in Wasilla, he said. A salesman came out to speak with him, and gave Garley a card with information about the club, he said.

&#8220Otherwise, I'd never have heard about it,” he said. &#8220The Texas State Fair was a lot of fun.”

The company flew the Garleys down to the fair, threw them a party and had country singer Montgomery Gentry play for about 150 people, including the other nine winners, on Sept. 27. The next day, the Garleys and the other winners attended the unveiling of the 2007 Chevy Silverado and the GMC Sierra heavy duty pickup trucks.

&#8220The new ones are nice, with a new body style, ” Garley said.

To keep a vehicle running for a long time, Garley had little advice.

&#8220Keep driving it,” he said. &#8220It's hard to do that up here unless you commute to Anchorage.”

To see a photograph of Garley and Brownie at Hatcher Pass, log on to: http://chevy200k.com/gallery/detail.php?id=b4a436d8

Contact Mary Ames at

352-2284 or mary.ames@

frontiersman.com.