Met up with Mark Friday afternoon and followed him down, arrived around 10:30-11ish. K9keeper had gotten there ahead of us, we unloaded, chatted a little bit, and called it a night. Woke up early Saturday morning and started prepping. We had a few RC stragglers show up, 3 TJs and a Bronco. Right as he was unloaded, Vince, one of the guys in a silver TJ noticed that his heim on the driver's side upper was broken. A quick fix and test on the comp course to make sure all was well and we were off. We started off on trail 6 and 1C working our way over to 5. Coming down 5, Vince's issues continued with a flat front right. We got that sorted and met at the bottom of the hill climb at 5 and had a quick lunch. Vince, not wanting to deal with more issues parted ways and we continued on. We continued on through CV and Walk in the Park, Mark got into some twisted stuff at the end of Walk in the Park. After that, Bill in the Bronco decided he had had enough and took off. Went on through O and trail 8. I, being only on 31s, was starting to get frustrated by this point with my small tire size, but was still making it through everything with only a few hang ups that I needed help getting off of. Went on through trail 4. Approaching Yellow Jacket I got hung up and the bolt holding the bracket for the E-Brake cable had sheered off, quick fix with many zip ties to get the cables up out of the way and we carried on. Continued through Yellow Jacket where I slid sideways off a rock and took out my passenger side tail light. Finished the rest of trail 4 with no issues. We soldiered on through trail 2 and worked up to crawler ridge. With everyone taking some of the harder lines that I didn't even attempt in August, I got brave and tried a few of them to test out to see the improvement of my recent long arm upgrade and increased belly clearance. While I know it helped, I was still hindered by small tires and lack of a front locker, and after some slope modification from my comrades, I was able to get up them. We took a short break and watched some full size chevys not understand that they need to get a tire on a rock to climb over it and not just throttle through things. We went back down the bit we had just done to hit crawler ridge from the bottom. I pulled to the side to let Mark go in front of me and got into some branches that I hadn't noticed, taking out one of my Hella 500s and some grille slats. After playing around on the ridge for a bit, it was getting late, so we made our way back to camp. We had been watching the weather for Sunday through out the day and seeing no improvement in the forecast, decided that we probably wouldn't wheel the next day and we all decided to pack up quickly and head home. A short trip but fun and enjoyable none the less.
