Ruts

El Nino is coming!

Holy shit y’all.  It feels like two weeks since my last post.  Life has been so crazy.  Since we got back from Colorado, I’ve been on two wheeling trips with AZWJ, one trip with NAU4x4, driven to the Sierras, supported Nona at a Soulstice run, torn out a muffler, shredded a transmission mount, torn out and replaced rusted spring perches, gone to SEMA for the first time, detonated a half shaft, and lost the heater (as soon as it got cold, of course…).  And yet, inexplicably, I still managed to come up with a couple cheap ideas to share.  In due course.

On top of all of that, there was a surprise lightning round of lay-offs at work that pretty much nuked any motivation I might have had for bloggering.  I’m happy to say now, however, that I survived this round of layoffs and will be around Flagstaff for at least another year to regale you with my tales of woe and broke Jeep-ness.

Let’s begin.

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Pyeatt Draw – May 24 2015

I don’t usually get to run two big trails in two consecutive months, so this is a bit of a treat.  I met up with the AZWJ group for another run before it gets too hot down off of my mountain.  Just outside Payson is a really cool trail called, you guessed it, Pyeatt Draw.  It’s not a difficult trail by most standards, but definitely leave the RAV4 at home for this one…  It’s a river wash bottom with a good mix of bouldering and shelf climbs (my favorite!) so that you can pretty much create your own adventure.

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Ajax Mine – April 18 2015

Somehow, I’ve become an admin for yet another online group.  It’s a Facebook group focused on WJs in Arizona.  This one seems to be focused around posting up awesome pictures and going on trail runs around the state.  I know, I live a tough life.

For our inaugural run, we decided on the Ajax Mine trail between Florence Junction and Superior, Arizona.  It’s rated as a difficult trail, but there’s a road that can be taken to bypass the tougher obstacles as it weaves in and out of the wash that constitutes the majority of the trail.

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Smasher Canyon – 7 Feb 2015

The off road club that I’m running with right now, NAU4x4, made a day trip to run Smasher Canyon in Cottonwood, AZ.  We did as much research as we could before the trip, but in the end we weren’t really sure what kind of trail we were in for.  Because of the unknown difficulty of the trail, we limited the trip to vehicles that were armored up and had at least a 33 inch tire (mine are only 32, but I’ve got quite a bit of armor underneath my Jeep, and I really had to use all of it, as you’ll see).

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