Visitor:
A group of 8 trucks (+1 late arrival) from the Toy4x4 and OffRoad mailing lists gathered Saturday morning at the park for a day in the mud.
We began the day with a little hill climb to warm up. Randy's YJ about to lift a tire and check out the radical toe-in on Ryan's Toyota pickup (flexing tie rods?).
After a stop at the mud hole for a group picture, we headed for the top of the hill, I took the steeper ridge route, which three of us had done easily on Jan. 2nd. There was a much smaller rut on top and the soild was a lot drier then.
It was a bit greasy at the crest of this 30° hill and as I tried to straddle the rut at the top, my right rear didn't quite make it. By applying the brakes, I managed to lock up the front TrueTrac enough to pull the truck up about a vehicle length, but with only two wheels driving on the slick, hard clay, I couldn't make any more forward progress. At this point the slope had dropped to 25° and I was tilted over to about 15° (it looked worse than it really was). Even with some bodies on the front bumper, the rut was too deep to get the front tire into. We waited while Diane drove to the top of the ridge and backtracked about 1 mile to where I was. Once a tow strap was hooked up, it took one short tug to pop the front end over so I could drive out.
The irony of the situation was that I had received my new winch the night before, but decided not to try to install it at 8PM in the dark. BTW: The winch*was* installed the very next day.
After driving to the top of the ridge, we took a lunch break during a brief rain shower. Joe, Todd and I took the steeper ridge route down and found that the ranger had filled in the rut with his dozer. Then back down to mud (the rain had washed the trucks clean;-). Diane, Leo and Ryan show us how its done.
Then, we went down the canyon to the lower stream area. and tried to drive back to the campground. A fence across the stream stopped our progress. Here's Joe climbing the steep shale bank out of the stream. I followed him up.
Diane had not filled up on mud yet, so back to the bog. Trying the deeper section where the ruts are, she stalled in the middle. Joe hooked up the the tow strap and pulled her back far enough to clear the exhaust pipe and the engine was re-fired. This time, it stalled farther out, and a heavy cloud of steam came up from under the hood. Todd backed in, hooked up a tow strap and pulled the F-250 halfway up the hill, to dry ground, his new 33x9.50 M/Ts clawing for traction. After cleaning the mud off the air filter and drying the distributor cap, the V8 fired back up.
I took the steeper trail back to the stream, but evidently the main road was very muddy from the rain. Several rigs were in the ditch in front of Leo, and had just gotten unstuck when I took the shot on the left. On the right, you can almost hear Leo say "I hate going downhill!" as his rear wheels try to swap ends with the front.
For our last run, we headed up the creek to wash off the mud and Todd and Joe tried out the rocks upstream. Here is Todd heading up and Joe on the return trip.
Here's some other trip reports from the 1/31/98 OffRoad and Toy4x4 list run:
Some of the photos for this page were taken on a Canon A-1 Hi8 camcorder, the Y/C video output was digitized on an SGI O2 graphics workstation using the built-in media recording tools. The still frames were captured in real-time from the live video input, post-processed with XV. I typically use the "De-speckle/3" filter to clean up the video interlacing, a "Sharpen/50%" to bring out the detail and usually a "Smooth" to remove the jaggies and finally saved in JPEG format with 75% quality factor. The results are not as good as scanning from film, but I don't have to wait for developing. Eric used a digital camera with 640x480 resolution (HiRes mode). He downloaded the images to his PowerMac, put them in a StuffIt archive attached that to an email message and here they are.
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