Rick - You would have loved this place. Plenty of challenge for the Pumpkin Explorer. It would have been good for these Jeepers to see the world's premiere Offroad Explorer in action.
It was really good to see Becker69 again and to meet Marty196 and his wife Angie. Mike Gilewitch(Sport Trac owner from Las Cruces) had a good time riding shotgun with Homer the trail leader. We left Mike's very very stock ST 4x4 behind early on. His wife rode most of the time with me. Becker69 told me later that night that she had her eyes closed a few times during my driving of the trail.
As for pictures, yep I've got a few. Plus, Mike Gilewitch emailed me a few too. But, I've got to clear some space in my account, since I don't have my pictures.aquaman.net server up and running right now.
Plenty of mayhem and carnage happened along the trail.
I guess the first carnaged happened to me. I knocked off my passenger's side foglamp very early in the trail going through some ditches.
The next breakage happened to the Jeep everyone was interested in watching. One of the local guys had brought along his newly created Moggler. A Wrangler Jeep with Unimog axles. Well, on one of first twisty objects he tried to climb, he busted off the upper mounts of his rear shock absorbers. Doh! He took off back to town at that point to go back to the store. No more wheeling for him that day.
The next breakage happened at the beginning of Broad Canyon. One of the Jeeps broke his front driveshaft. That guy headed home at that point.
We had started as a group of 5 Jeeps and 5 Explorers, but by the time I got to the entrance of Broad Canyon we were down to 3 Jeeps and 4 Explorers. Mike's ST had been left behind earlier in the wash, it was too stock and too pretty to bring along. But, soon into Broad Canyon we were down to 3 Jeeps and 2 Explorers. Marty196 had wisely decided not to take his Explorer into Broad canyon and left for the rest of the day. Becker69 parked his ST in the entrance and rode along with me.
The next breakage was from the guy with the Red Jeep. He broke his rear driveshaft. Homer broke out his electric welder and made it better.
The next major carnage was on my ST. I was trying to make it up an option obstacle that put a lot of pressure on my left tire just trying to keep it straight. Then the tie-rod on that side gave out and bent almost into a perfect L. I was lucky not to break any fingers or thumbs as my steering wheel whipped to the right when the tie-rod bent. Amazingly enough we were able to bend the tie-rod back into position without it breaking. So, I was back moving on the trail again, just picking the easy lines now. It wasn't too long before I found out another bad side effect of the tie-rod bending. It seems that when the tie-rod bent that it had turned the wheel severely enough to the right to damage the outer driver's side CV joint. It made a nice breaking noise as I was going up a small sandy hill. At least it wasn't the tie-rod breaking.
That thing held the rest of the way on a very rocky creek bed trail. And i was able to make the 800 mile trip home yesterday on it.
I'll post a link when I get pics ready.
