Jeep Safari 2010!

I have been so excited to put these pictures up, but I had such a hard time picking which ones to use! We had such a fun time down in at Jeep Safari. Jeeping is one of my favorite things to go do. It is funny how things like that will sneak up on you! But seriously....sometimes I think about my first time out on Hell's Revenge and how freaked out I was the entire time. Now it feels like Hell's Revenge is just a baby trail. Down in Moab they rate the trails 1-5. 1 being the easiest and 5 being the hardest. I think that Hell's is like a 3 or 4, but it doesn't seem too hard because there is an easy way around almost anything (But Ryan's jeep doesn't take the easy way around anything! It eats trails like Hell's for breakfast!). Anyway....so this year we started out on friday with a pretty easy trail. Here are the pictures.





Pretty neat eh? It actually was kind of a boring trail because there weren't very many obstacles. Oh well. The next day totally made up for it!

So on Saturday we went out on a trail called Rusty Nail. This freaking trail was crazy! We started out pretty early in the morning, and with the entire trail being like 3 miles round trip, we thought we would be done in no time. Boy, were we wrong! On the first little obstacle, Ryan wanted to try out his new equipment on the front end. He approached the obstacle, started going up, but stopped when he got caught on a ledge. Making the crucial error of the day, he tried turning his wheels just a bit to get a better angle. CRACK....BOW! His freaking front end broke. And it just happened to be one of those things that you cannot even drive on. Tyler had to put pressure on the outside of the wheel while Ryan backed up and parked out of the way so the wheel wouldn't come off. Luckily, it was a part that could be welded back on, so we called Papa Stubbs to bring us the welder and we sat down to wait.







So Papa Stubbs took just a bit longer than we thought he would to bring us the welder. We just hung out and watched jeeps on a few of the close-by obstacles for a few hours. But he did finally come and we were so excited! They had to use the cutting torch to get the piece off, grind off the old weld and then Papa Bear welded the piece back on. He called it a gorilla weld. Ugly as all get-out, but strong enough to do anything! We were finally back on the trail!

So as we are headed out the the "hard" part of the trail, we met some old guys with these super awesome, nicely built rigs that were coming back out. We asked if they had finished the trail. They said they had turned around at the 1st obstacle. They were kind of suprised that we were heading in. They asked if anyone in our group had a winch. We didn't. They asked if anyone was locked up front and rear. No one is. They asked if anyone had 35s or bigger for our tires. Nope. And finally they asked if anyone had a long-arm kit. Ryan's almost did. It was currently sitting at home on our front porch since the freaking UPS guy didn't deliver it on time. Anyway...you wanna know what happened next? Those stinking old guys in their super built rigs got on their CB radios and started to laugh at us! They were telling each other how dumb we were for even trying! So now we had something to prove. Later in the day I started to wonder if we should have turned around like the old guys advised. Oh well...

So here are a lot of the pictures from the day.


This one is of Kep driving on the first "big" obstacle. He did a really good job. Tyler and Ryan guided him up. Let me tell ya-a good guide makes all the difference in the world and I am pretty sure that Tyler is the best in the world. Seriously. That kid can get anything up anything.


This is one of Andy going up this huge obstacle. The old log goes pretty good eh? It is kind of funny because instead of a fuel injector, it has a carburetor so if it gets on an angle, Andy only has 1 shot to make it up or down. Otherwise, it will either have the engine flooded or not be able to get any gas and it will just die.

This was the scariest obstacle of the entire day. Doesn't look to bad yet...


This is fun...you have to have a little paint transfer on your right side to avoid tipping and rolling off this:


That is about 200 foot drop down the middle of a huge canyon/ravine thing. It is freaky.


And this is the golden crack. It was kinda cool to watch them get accross.

Andy punched the gas and this happened:


Now check out this flex! It will be even better when Ryan gets his new front end and long arm kit on!


I didn't get many pictures after these. It started to get dark, so we started to head out. Unfortunetly, Andy's jeep broke down a few times between here and the end of the trail (blast that carburetor!) and we didn't get done until almost 11:00 pm. Ryan and I had little Karlee and Haley in our rig and they were so good all day! They even had a farting contest while Andy was broken down! It was disguisting! Anyway...they fell asleep as we were headed out, so I had to crawl in the back seat and hold their little heads to avoid whiplash. Hence, no more pictures of the trail. All in all, it was a super fun Jeep Safari. I am already aching to go back down and test out the long arm kit and new springs. Hopefully soon!
So this is my last picture to post. Kep took this for us:) Ahhh! I love it! And I love my sexy man!