May 26, 2016 – “Lin Ottinger’s Land Tours” is painted across the red Volkswagen bus in bold white lettering. The vehicle looks about the same as it did in past decades when it ferried tourists around the Canyonlands, Arches and Monument Valley regions, but on the inside it is a new machine. Now, after 25 years in storage, the bus is back on the road.
The 1964 Volkswagen 21-window deluxe minibus was part of Ottinger’s tour company fleet in the 1960s through 1980s. Since he came to Moab in the 1950s, Lin Ottinger has been a uranium prospector, a mechanic, a cook, a rockhound, a fossil hunter, a tour guide and an entrepreneur. He began giving tours of the Canyonlands in 1960, the same year that he founded the Moab Rock Shop, making him “the first tour guide in Moab,” according to Rock Shop brochures.
Ottinger’s tour bus was mechanically restored over the course of two months by the Grand Junction Volkswagen auto body shop Kustom Coach Werks. After years of disuse, the bus was in bad shape, according to the Kustom Coach Werks website, with a half-inch of tar lining the bottom of the gas tank, broken torsion springs, worn link pins and everything covered in a thick layer of red Moab dirt.
The engine and transmission were rebuilt. The brakes and shocks were replaced. The paint was left in its original state.
“I’d shoot him if he tried to paint it,” Ottinger said with characteristic bluntness. “I like original.”
The bus made its debut at the April Action Car Show on Saturday, April 29 and Sunday, May 1. Ottinger took a group of friends, family and car show visitors to Porcupine Rim on Saturday in the vehicle. On Sunday, he led a tour up Hurrah Pass to the Wind Caves, also know as the Grotto.
“He’s going up these trails, peeling the back tire out … He’s got to be living large right now,” said Rusty Willey, a Grand Junction Volkswagen enthusiast who brought his family to see the car show and take a tour on the restored bus.
When he talks about his buses, Ottinger talks about breakdowns. When the ignition points went out in a Monument Basin, a pencil eraser held together a broken spring and got a bus full of tourists back to town.
“I’d never seen another vehicle down there at Monument Basin in all the times I’d been going there, so I didn’t think anybody was going to come [help],” Ottinger said.
Another time, he used a scavenged bullet cartridge and the jackhammer he kept in the back of the bus to stabilize a broken axle so he could drive home.
He describes a kind of self-reliance and creativity that was necessary in the remote areas of the desert where he guided and explored, places where people were rare and help was unlikely.
The restored tour bus is one of eight vintage Volkswagen buses that Ottinger still owns, relics from his early tour guiding days.
“Those buses are now the ultra-desirable ones,” according to Willey. He said that Ottinger’s buses are well known in the Volkswagen community.
“We’ve known about Lin’s bus collection hiding in the warehouse forever … He has eight of them. It’s unheard of,” Willey said.
The buses sat stacked in a loft in Ottinger’s warehouse for many years, away from the eyes of hopeful buyers, although their existence was no secret. Before being put in storage, the vehicles were parked outside the Rock Shop for many years.
“’Course everybody wants to buy them and steal parts off of them,” said John Jones, owner of Kustom Coach Werks.
Jones was curious about the vehicles as a Volkswagen expert rather than as a prospective buyer. Ottinger “wouldn’t let anybody see them. So I thought if I reach out and offer to do some work for him, he’d let us check out his buses,” Jones said.
Although he has been offered $100,000 for every one of his eight buses, Ottinger has refused to sell and does not take kindly to offers.
“If they were for sale, I would have sold them,” he said.
By Rose Egelhoff
The Times-Independent