2007/10/10 – Saturday – Defense Mine

I got up and headed out to go for a trail ride. But I was still undecided.

Finally I got in line for Defense Mine and of course joined in as part of the trail crew. When I finally got to waterfall zero, I tried it, well I was a little to far to the right and almost rolled the Jeep onto the driver side. Two guys had to keep some additional weight to stop me from going over. I was able to backup and recover before trying again. I finally made it up it – hurray.

The remaining part of the trail to the mine was ok. We ate lunch and now it was time to head back down.

Now a group that wanted to do Cummings Cutoff would be guided up it – well of course I wanted to.

The beginning of the cutoff has a nice hard section to climb up at the beginning. It took me about three different tries. The next hard part required me to use the boulder bars to pivot on but it did require a little finesse and not hitting the wall on the passenger side. The next obstacle had two ways of trying it. I went up the wall without any major problems. Now the last obstacle (waterfall/v-notch) was a major challenge. The first two attempts stopped my progress. The third attempt I climbed the wall on the driver side and while I was still having forward progression I could hear the passenger tail lights being destroyed. Once I completed the cutoff, I parked on the road out – I check the taillight and sure enough it was destroyed.

We had another guy break his rear hubs, so we had to do a lot of work using several jeeps including mine to help winch him up and out.

Once we got everybody out of the cutoff it was time to head back to camp.

When I pulled into camp I can hear air hissing out of one of my tires. So I dropped off my passenger and head for my trailer and put the Jeep onto the trailer.

I headed on over to the main camp and did the usual raffle activities. Eric did win one raffle item. I even won a raffle item.

After the raffle, I stayed around the campfire and had a good time with my other Desert Dawgs club members.

I didn’t get to bed until a little after one – one long day – but good!