February 2004 - Die Hard

Trail Rating - 5.0

Photos submitted by Chris Villarreal

This is a challenging trail with no bypasses and a lot of potential for part breakage.  Bring those spares.  The group in front of us broke a couple D60 axle parts and our group broke a rear driveshaft and a front chromoly Toyota axle.  We all chose to do a field repair rather than try to drag the disabled rigs out due to the size of the rocks.

(Click for larger images)

A nice notch to straddle.

I got hung up pretty good in this spot on my first attempt.  We inverted one of the front shackles while winching my rig back off the rocks.  Stay high and to the left to get thru here.

Mark tried driving up the notch while Pat took the line I took.

Traction is really good.  Combine that with really large boulders and near vertical climbs and that's the recipe for component breakage.

While I was coming thru the spot Pat's rig is in the first picture, we heard a loud bang from the rear end of my rig.  It was acting and sounding just like a ring and pinion failure.  I could drive forward but when the drivetrain loaded up there was a loud ratcheting noise and the rear wheels would stop moving.  I noticed a funny looking spot of bare metal on my driveshaft but the ring and pinion scenario sounded more likely.  I pulled off to the side to let Mark by so he could be my winch anchor point. 

Heading further up the trail we noticed the splined sleeve that should have been inside of the driveshaft tube was backing out.  Apparently it would spin and then grab, making the same kind of sound a broken Ring and pinion would.  Mark broke out his portable wire feed welder and laid two sets of beads down on the broken section.  That fixed it. 

A critter Mike found while we were waiting for trail repairs to be done on a rig further up the trail.

The last section is a really big boulder crawl.  It was getting pretty late at this point so we didn't try any optional lines.  We got to this point, maybe 30 feet from the end and Mark popped something in his front end.  We thought for sure it was a birfield but upon pulling it apart the superbirf looked ok but the Allpro chromoly axle shaft was broken.  While Mark was breaking his axle, Pat was getting his rig wedged in real good so he couldn't go forward or back :)  So he helped Mark replace the front axle and a couple of us took my high lift and started moving Pat's truck around to get the rear shackle to clear the rock behind him so he could back up.

It was dark by the time we got moving again.