The 2011 KOH race snuck up fast for all of us.  I know I could have used a couple more shake down runs after only getting in 3 since completing it at the start of the year.  The previous weekend I managed to get my trailer back in shape with new tires and paint and most of the week leading up to the departure date was spent getting stuff ready for the week in the desert. Saturday morning finally arrived and thankfully the winds from the previous week were nowhere to be found. Sister and brother-in-law arrived Friday with Dan planning on going with the first part of the trip and the girls following later in the week.  If you saw the pictures from my Alaska wheeling adventures last year they were made possible by Dan who let us use his shop truck to and showed us some trails.

Our group met at a local Ihop on the way out of town.  The first official carnage occurred in Chad's motor home (hereby known as the "Mallard").  Pat's tools are never far from hand and he fixed the broken hinge replacing Chad's duct tape repair.

The "Are we there yet?" calls came over the race radios roughly 60 miles outside of town.  We made good time to the border and our convoy was getting relatively great gas mileage as we kept the speeds down to around 65mph.  Once we hit the Nanny stated we had to drop down to 55.

We finally caught sight of the lakebed late in the afternoon and located our pit area in Hammertown just as our pit tent was going up. We unloaded and took a quick ride out to the sand dunes in the Razors Chad brought before settling in for the night.

The next morning we all decided to go warm up on something easy so we headed out to run Chocolate Thunder (I am not making that up). A few of the Undertakers who had arrived early also tagged along.

This was one of the trail in the race so Jack was using it to feel out the rig in the rocks since he had just added some bypass shocks out back and bigger coilovers up front.

The trail is actually pretty short with a few large boulders to climb over. Hammertown can be seen in the distance.

Jack headed back to camp after the trail and we lost Pat somewhere between Chocolate Thunder and Wrecking Ball.  After some backtracking with no signs of Pat we turned around and did a quick run up Wrecking ball.

I let Dan drive us back to get a feel for the buggy on the dirt roads, took this picture as we rounded the sand dunes northeast of Hammertown.

We caught up with Jack and Scott as they were heading out for the first round of shock tuning.

The rear suspension really wasn't moving much at all.

The larger whoops tossed the rig airborne.  After a few runs it was decided all the valving in the rear coilovers needed to be remove so the bypass shocks would do all the work. The rest of the evening was spent running shocks back and forth to the shock gurus at ADS.  I did some tuning and adjustments on my ORI's as well but I'll cover that later in my next project update.

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