Another weekend in Arizona and another great reason to get out and enjoy the weather.  Most of the club camped out on Saturday night with the intention of running a short section of trail on Sunday and then watching some of the Marathon competitors wheel afterwards. We had a few difficulties on the trail on Sunday and didn't get a chance to spectate, more on that in a moment.

Dennis and I arrived around noon on Saturday and went for a quick run up Collateral Damage followed by Lower Terminator (I should have some pictures to post in a few days).  After that we headed back to camp and waited about 3 hours till Jack and Scott showed up just after 4pm.  We headed over Twisted to run thru it before the sun went down.

Believe it or not I have never run Twisted in the new buggy.  The last time thru I still had my yellow buggy and determined that with narrow axles and no front dig capabilities I could not get thru the crack unassisted. The narrow axles still hurt a little but I was able to recover by using just the front end at times to make the turn. Here's a video of my run (approx 3meg).  After this point it got too dark for the video camera to focus well so I didn't get any other usable video.

Dennis was in the same boat since his axles are about the same width. Once that rear drivers side tire falls in things get tough.

On Sunday we headed out to run Hellraiser.  It has been 3 years since our last trip to this trail and at the time we had our doubts you could run one of the sections on this trail.  This time it looked "attemptable" so we gave it a go. This trail is pretty much the definition of technical rock crawling, nothing better than being on the correct line yet still being on the verge of rolling over.

The buggy did pretty good until this point.  I had to winch this off camber waterfall and the cage barely cleared the overhang on the drivers side.  I thought I was home free but the winch point gave way and we had to tie off to a different rock.  The new tie off point was not ideal and I ended up getting the drivers side rear tire wedged under the overhang. 

Scott attempted a rescue by pulling my rig backwards but after a few tries it was clear I wasn't going to go back with the cage dug into the overhanging rock.  I eventually put the rig in front wheel drive and winched/drove until the rear tire squeezed thru the notch. Thank goodness for the 60's!  That is the worst drive train bind I have experienced to date and everything held.

Scott rig had more troubles due to no longer having a good winch point to pull you away from the overhang.  I also think his axle width hurt him a bit since the passenger side front tire was trying to climb as his cage approached the overhang, forcing the cage up into the overhang. It took some creative winching to get his rig free.  Eventually we hooked my winch up to pull him forward, his winch was re-connected to his axle to pull his front end down and Dennis's winch was hooked to the rear of his cage to pull is back end away from the wall and down. After some careful winch orchestrating we finally freed his rig.