My second visit (23.NOV.1997):

Eric Welch joined me with his white '93 F*rd Bronco, newly lifted and sporting new 33x12.50 A/Ts for a fall visit to the park. The drive over Mt. Hamilton was mostly in the clouds and the wet roads gave my rear locker fits. In the sharp corners, it wasn't dry enough to unlock the diff. fully nor wet enough to let it lock it up fully. Most of the climb was spent waiting for the inside tire to decide how fast it wanted to go.

Anyway, the skies cleared as we neared The Junction and aside from two dirt bikes, we had the park to ourselves

Recent rains had soaked in and cleared the dust. The creek bed had water flowing in it and there were a few nice mud puddles. After a trip to the top of the hill, on the main road across the creek, to warm up, we stopped and played in the mud a bit. There were three main puddles, so I chose to go through the little one first.

Looks can be deceiving and this one turned out to be the deepest and trickiest of the three. The return trip was even tougher as there is a 3-4' steep climb out of the water that is heavily rutted. My M/Ts performed flawlessly, Eric needed a bit of his 5.8L V8 power to get out. My differential skid plates were stuffed with thick adobe.

The biggest puddle was deeper but had a flat bottom. Water/mud goo was up over the hubs and kind of fun to blast through. I guess the shot I took of Eric flying through didn't come out. I was impressed with the BFG M/Ts, I was able to crawl through the mud without spinning.

Next, it was off to the creek to try to wash off some of that mud. There was a nice flow of water and this time I decided to explore farther upstream than I did before. This shot is several hundred yards (or more) upstream from my earlier picture. I was leading and went through a deep section of water, that was to the top of the 33" tires, and around the corner, saw some serious boulder action. Eric was at his limit, too, so he turned around and shot this picture as I was backing out.

Next, I led the trail to the left, finally getting to the gates on the west end of the park. The track along the fence looked do-able so I hung to the high side to avoid the ruts at the bottom of the gully then up the opposite side. Eric's wider track caused him to drop his left rear wheel into the rut. He thought he had broken down, but I got ahold of him on the CB and he drove out the bottom safely.

Dropping down the spine of the ridge, the trail seems to have been chewed up since my last visit. I got down safely, but Eric was having some trouble with his rear brakes locking up (his Bronco has an automatic). He had his driver's side front wheel on a rock and the rear had slid out to the right. I got him to back up and straighten out and he made it down safely. These pictures do not do this hill justice. Going down, you are standing upright on the floorboards!

It was getting late, so we made a quick trip back to the the plateau near the entrance. There were three progressively steeper tracks up this hill, so we did the first two up and down with little trouble.

I tried the third and steepest track. Near the top, the softer dirt to the left caused me to loose traction. I saw my clinometer pegged solidly at the 35 degree mark as I backed down. Not wanting this hill to get the better of me, I pointed the front tires at the rocky outcrop to the right (visible halfway between my right front tire and the bottom of the image) and punched it. With the slope, the front tires bounced over the rocks easily, but had trouble getting a bite up above. I think it would have helped to work the brakes a bit to modulate the front TrueTrac, but I wasn't thinking of that at the time! Anyway, I did get enough grip to pull the rear end over the 2' rock face and crested the hill!

After that, it was time to head home. The drive home was uneventful and the mud was easily dispatched with $3.50 at the local car wash. Thanks to Eric, who shot these digital photos. He may have some more posted on his web page.

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.