Sunday, May 17th Rock Krawl '98
The next morning my dad and I headed to the meeting spot at 9am. It was another sunny day but cooler with temps 80-85.
The trails we were going to be hitting were in a yet to be opened area called Paragon Adventure Park. It is 15,000 acres of nothing but rock, woods, and mud, with lots of good trails. :-) After getting in our groups we headed for the trails. My group was going to be driving the moderately difficult trails. There were 21 vehicles in my group. They consisted of the trail leader, a Grand Cherokee with 31's, lots of YJ's and TJ's, all with 31's or smaller, two Cherokees, one with 31's (who was nice enough to lend me his hand held CB, I know now that I need one) and one brand new stock one, a stock Ranger, an F150 unlifted with a winch, and two Toyota extra cab PU's, one with 31's and mine with 33's. The trail started off easy driving through an old coal mine, then the rocks showed up, and eventually we hit our first challenge, a hill climb with bigger rocks and loose gravel. :-)
The Grand Cherokee, the F150, the Cherokee with 31's, and my Toyota and the other Toyota made it through no problem :) but alot of the other jeeps and the Ranger either had trouble or just simply decided to bypass the hill. We then hit a much tougher, narrower trail later on which proved that it would take us two hours to get through. Many trucks got stuck repeatedly time and time again through this section. (The second and third pictures shows a bunch of the trucks that already made it through including mine) :-)
The same trucks that made it through the last event made it through here again though, but with some trouble, especially the F150 (a little tight for him). This part consisted of many trees, mud, and rocks (some hidden under the mud). The F150 suffered body damage here as he smashed against a tree. We then stopped for lunch :-) near a spring that was flowing from under one of the mountains.
As we were headed down the mountain after lunch, we found a moron with an old rear wheel drive beater CAR!! who was stuck on the side of the trail. We managed to get him unstuck and drove on by him.
Later, we found a 2-3' deep, 50' long "puddle" that we played in for a little bit, this was no problem for anybody, but it was fun. :-) First picture is a Mazda pickup (my truck was next) then my truck going through it.
We then headed toward another hill which looked like it could be more challenging than the first hill but since we had gotten used to the trails by now no one had a problem here. That Dodge was pretty cool!
The last obstacle was a very steep descent down the side of a mountain. (I would have taken more pictures here but I ran out of film) :-(
This required low range first gear (even though we had it in low range all day) and the use of air conditioning for whoever had it to add to engine compression braking. This was a lot of fun and eveyone made it through without losing control, although the stock new Cherokee suffered rocker panel damage on one of the larger boulders. We then all headed for the end of the trail which ran through a tunnel under route 81 with lots of water which helped to clean off our trucks a little bit. We then said our goodbyes and my dad and I headed for home. I got many comments from Jeepers who were impressed with the performance of my Toyota, they thought I had lockers because I barely ever spun a tire. :-) It was a great weekend, we both had a blast! (I think I turned my 53 year old father on to 4wheeling!) Thanks to Chris Taylor for some of the pictures.
Back to my