My first visit (10.AUG.1997):

Imagine my disappointment when I pulled into the park and saw the place packed! There was one (1) trailer in the campground and one (1) F*rd Explorer on the easy trails. When I left I saw one (1) J**p in the parking lot leaving (never saw him on the trail). Anyway, spent about 2 hours there on this first exploratory run, just to get a feel for the area and break-in my new suspension, 5.29 gears and lockers.

Here's the view from the top of main high road. It stops at a locked gate into private property. If you look down between the bumper and the tree, you can see the campground about 1000 vertical feet below. Some of the rougher roads appear to go up about 500 feet above here, although I've not figured out how to get to them yet. The camping area is at about 1500 feet elevation.

Here's one of the spurs off of the main road. I went up and down this one. Its pretty narrow, the brush scrapes both sides of the truck and there is a tight right angle turn at the top. The turn is blind, all you see is sky over the hood as you crest the hill. Its a real rush. I highly recommend going *down* first to get a feel for the route.

Playing around near the creek bed. This is short 20 degree slope to test out the departure angles.

Here's one hill I didn't try my first time out. It has a nasty looking rut on the right side that looks deepest right in between the two trees. They look like they are *real* close together.

A steep rocky section with a few good sized holes. Going up was a bit rough, I hadn't aired-down (still waiting for my on-board compressor to arrive). Going down was fun, caught a glimpse of the clinometer and saw 30 degrees most of the way down. The 48 : 1 crawl ratio is sure nice here, just a little gas to go up and no brakes coming down.

The dry (this time of year) stream bed has a nice rock crawling run. It was getting late so I only did the first section, which requires a sharp left hand turn and steep climb out of the channel. There are enough big rocks to make it interesting. The stream bed appears to continue uphill for quite a distance.

So, after four-wheeling most of the afternoon, I shifted back to 2H and was about to leave. Off to the side was a fairly steep hill, about 100 feet high, with some loose rock over dirt. It was a straight shot up and there was a large flat area on top. I decided to see what 2WD was like. With the new M/Ts and the rear locker I figured it would be a piece of cake. WRONG. About 25 feet up, the rear end starts bouncing and amidst a cloud of dust, I grind to a halt. A quick shift to 4L and the rig crawls up the rest of the hill without slipping a tire. I think it was a toss-up between the lower ratio in 4L and the TrueTrac up front that made the difference.

I didn't disconnect my sway bars right away. One off-camber turn at the bottom of a steep hill convinced me to do so. I also didn't air down, either. I was hoping there was some air up facility there (not!) and I didn't want to rely on the portable air pump I did carry to do the job.

This place is worth return visits. I'd like to see it in the other seasons, and also overnight there. A good summer strategy might be to drive out one evening then hit the trails at sunrise and drive until it heats up. It was fairly warm, probably mid 80's, and a good breeze. On the long grade up to the top, my engine did start to get warm (needle got a bit above 1/2 way). This was my first test of the Black-Magic fan and other than that one time the temp gauge never budged. The fan was also nice when coming to a stop after pulling a steep grade. It keeps running, even if the engine is off to cool things down.

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.