Saturday, June 8, 2013

Exploring 3 Rock Trail

Today my driver was going to meet with a group of friends to go up and check out a trail they've been telling him about.  Naturally, he invited a few of his friends as well to have fun with us!  However, it ended up that nobody showed up except two of the friends he invited and so nobody was sure where exactly the trail was.

So just a pair of Jeep Cherokee's (both on 35" tires) and what were we to do? (My driver tells me I should be calling them XJ's, after their model designation.  I suppose I shall appease him for now.)


Here I am posing on the windshield of my drivers XJ.  The one with "safety orange" accent's is his buddy, Matt's XJ.
Not to be deterred, the two Jeep Cherokee's...er, sorry...XJ's ventured forth in the general direction and found some cool places to pull off the road, some of them nice and secluded (almost all of them dead ends after about 100 feet, though).

After some more driving around and looking for the trail, we spotted a promising one and decided to see how far it went.

First, we squeezed under some downed trees.  Matt, with his tire on his roof rack, had to squeeze a bit more than we did with it mounted on the rear bumper.
We found some great ruts to flex out on and had some fun taking pictures of that! (What can we say? we love showing off our vehicles!)








We went further along and found another challenging rut to cross.  My driver's vehicle has a locker in the front axle and didn't even flinch going through it.  This means that when he is in 4WD, both of his front wheels will turn at the exact same rate, even if one is in the air.  Matt, however, did not have any lockers and this is what happens. :)



What was that pop, you ask?  Well ,we looked underneath to see what it could have been and found this:


Well, he forgot to disconnect his sway bar this entire time!  That means all the stress of the vehicle trying to flex ended up bending the sway bar mount on his axle and the bushing in his sway bar link popped out!  I decided to go over and do what I do best to help...supervise from the bumper!


After making sure the other side was disconnected and everything was tied off out of the way, we continued on in the trail.

There were a lot of side trails we could have taken but we stuck to the main one while we explored (making a mental note to come back and try all the things we skipped or missed later).

Up, up, up we went!  The trail just kept on going until we reached a clearing and saw the gorgeous view!

Of course, we can't miss a shot of me with that beautiful backdrop!

We continued on a little further until we reached the top and found out we were on the right trail afterall (judging from the three big piles of rock at the top).  What awesome timing too, since it was time for lunch and a bit of grub.

Matt checked to make sure his engine was cooling off after the long uphill.

A pair of XJ's, enjoying the view of the mountains.


This is where I decided to chill while my driver and his passengers got lunch ready.

After lunch, we decided it was time to head home...my driver still needed to mow the lawn and get laundry done so down we went.

What a great way to start the day and this trail is only about 30 minutes away from our house!  We will definitely have to come back and check it out some more.


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