jeepin.jason

Today was the shortest and easiest trail we’d signed up for, and since Jennifer figured she’d probably be bored after yesterday’s challenging trails, she opted to stay in town with her folks and explore Las Cruces while I went out by myself to run trails. The trails today were indeed relatively easy, but there were a few fun challenging spots to play on.

Once again the order of the day was dropping down ledges, and once again I hit the crap out of my RE control arm drop brackets and C4×4 rear bumper corners. There were a few nice little ledge climbs too, but nothing like what we encountered yesterday. Unfortuantely since I was driving solo, I didn’t get a single pic of my rig today, though I did get some good pics of our buddy Rick in his XJ.

Aside from a very slight bow in one of my RE LCA’s from yesterday, the constant abuse really hasn’t done any damage to the drop brackets or bumper, it just kinda gets old smacking down on them at every big drop off. Funny thing is, it’s never really been an issue in the terrain we normally wheel in east Texas and southwestern Arkansas. But then there aren’t many ledge drop-offs in those areas.

Most of the folks in our group today were relatively inexperienced, so there was lots of spotting, and it was somewhat amusing to see people get nervous on the offcamber parts. Reminded me a lot of when I was just getting into offroading. Things did get a bit exciting when two old FJ40’s nearly rolled taking a bad line down an offcamber ledge. What I couldn’t figure out was why the second FJ40, which was right behind the first one, tried to take the exact same line that nearly put the first one rubber side up.

Even though the day was short (by 3PM we were aired up and on our way back to our hotels) and easy for the most part, I did have fun. It was a nice relaxing trail run that moved just quick enough to keep me from being bored (I’m usually just happy being outdoors on the trails, whether they’re hard or not), and it was a good ending trail run for the trip. Today’s photos have been uploaded to flickr.