The weather forecast for Memorial day weekend wasn't looking to promising for our trip annual trip to Payson but we headed up anyways figuring it never rains constantly in Arizona......

..... boy were we wrong. The rain and hail mixture started a few minutes after pulling into camp and showed no signs of letting up by Thursday evening.

While Thursday was a bust, there were two small windows of sun on Friday which allowed us to move around outside of the motor homes. 

We took a quick hike during one of the breaks in the weather.

The other break was late on Friday afternoon, it looked like the weather had finally blown over so we set out to run the lower section of Skullcrusher.

Halfway thru the trail the clouds reappeared and started dumping large amounts of rain and hail on us so we made a break for camp. The rain was coming down all night and into Saturday morning.  By midday Saturday a small group of 6 rigs headed into Skullcrusher.  The rest of us ran the lower section when the sun came out later that afternoon. Once we finished the lower section we saw Cary's rig sitting at the start of the upper section with what appeared to be yet another broken D60 birfield.  We hiked in and found the group a short ways up the trail with Craig's single seater broken. We managed to cobble together a fix for Craig's rig and got him out while the other 5 rigs continued on.  Several hours after dark I led a rescue party in to check on their status, as usual the trail lived up to it's reputation taking out 5 of the 6 rigs that went in.  We met up with three of the rigs near the end of the trail, Bill's rig was still at the fall with a seized motor.

On the way back to camp Dale's front end fell off causing an electrical short that killed his rig.  We came back with supplies in the morning to recover it, turns out the side posts on his Optima shorted out internally so after moving the wires to the top posts his rig started again.

Wes having some issues on the way down to help with Bill's rig.  While I tried to winch him out I discovered I lost one of my caliper bolts which peeled back the caliper.  This is the second time I have lost one of those bolts so I think some safety wire is in order.

When we finally got down to Bill's rig it was looking like the motor was seized (it is a fairly new 6.0L). the guys eventually got it down off the fall and started working on it.  After jumping the dead battery it would barley turn over and when it did it sounded like their was a spot in the motor rotation that was binding up.  After some repeated starting attempts it finally fired and actually sounded ok.  Now we are wondering if the transmission had somehow hydro locked due to being really low on fluid. 

Ironically the weather was beautiful for the trip home on Sunday afternoon.