Instead throwing a birthday party I decided to have a wheeling party.  Some members of our clubs and camped out over the weekend and invited a few extra wheelers to run some trails on Saturday.

Every fall the tarantulas head migrate south, we saw several of them on the way in to the camping area Friday evening. This one even did some laps around our fire ring. 

First up on Saturday was a trail called Biohazard.  The first section is a non-stop boulder crawl.  I was really glad I went with the 42" tires here.

The notch pictured in the second picture looked like it would be really hard to traverse but we found a perfect line that allowed you to crawl right thru it.

Larry coming up the notch.

Remains from the last wheelers thru?

The main obstacle is this crack.  I was pretty amazed when my buggy easily crawled all the way to the top but in the last picture you can see the rocks that cause a lot of grief as you get hung up on the front differential. It is also real easy to pinch the drivers side rear tire if you are not paying attention.  I jockeyed around a bit and eventually drove the obstacle. There was a bypass on the right.

Brian was up next and his rear steer came in handy at this spot.

He made it thru without too much trouble.

Barry got to the same point I did and then started to work at skirting his front differential around the rocks up front.

At one point he bumped the gas which was followed by a loud bang.  We were all stunned to see his shock had blasted a hole thru his hood!  We initially tried to remove the shock and strap the frame to the axle but the bump stop collapsed under the load and which allowed his front driveshaft to rub on the lower links eventually breaking the front driveshaft.  We were finally forced to leave the rig.  

Biohazard was pretty tough on the rigs.  Besides Barry's breakage, Scott destroyed some of the caps on his u-joint and Dennins damaged one of the links on his buggy.  Back at camp Barry made a few phone calls and by 6pm Cary Hancock showed up with a mobile shop on wheels.  They headed out to start working on Barry's buggy while we planned to hit S&M before meeting up with them to see if they needed any more help.

We ran S&M because Scott and Larry wanted a another crack at climbing the wall unassisted. Scott was up first and on his second attempt he permanently bent his lower aluminum link.  I have never been a big fan of using aluminum as links (especially the lowers) and this reinforced my position especially considering how easily the link bent.  Here's some video when the damage occurred.

Here are some still pictures of the carnage. I was up next, here's some video of Jack telling me to hit it a little harder:  Then some video of a good run.  Jack made a great run at it, I messed up when filming so I didn't catch it on video but he hung on the face pinning the tires for about a minute before zooming up.  It seems there was a small lip up at the that he kept hitting his front diff on.  Larry was up next, his nice and low buggy made easy work of the climb.  Last up was Craig and he eventually broke a D44 stub shaft so we left his rig with Scott's and continued on.

Larry tried the last fall and darn near made it on his first attempt.  We are all pretty sure you have to have water in the front tires to make this one so we'll be back to test that theory after the Truckin Nationals in October.  After running S&M we found Barry and his pit crew nearly done with the repairs on his buggy.  They made tabs and re-attached the shock that broke off and reinforced the other side which had started to rip after the first one let go.  There was a moment of hysterical laughter when we discovered someone had accidentally relieved themselves on the u-bolts for Barry's front driveshaft, it was pretty dark out there :)  All in all everyone had a great time.