Tuesday, Woody and the Whale were invited by an old friend from NAXJA, Derek Krantz, to join him running Flat Iron Mesa as that trail was not on Easter Jeep's calendar for today. Also joining us was Jay and his wife Christine, Gary our trail leader and Justin, Derek's passenger. Speaking of passenger, Rollins was my passenger today. His rig suffered some carnage at Area BFE yesterday, cracking the axle side trackbar mount. He left Woody at Moab 4x4 Outpost for repair and rode along with me.
We met up at the Chevron station at 8:30AM where I found Rollins crawling under his rig looking for the source of some unwanted noise. After dropping his rig off, we drove down to the trailhead and aired down.
Rollins walked through much of the trail looking for critters. He did find a few. You've got to see the photo of the steer. We went down Tilt A Whirl, up Tilt A Whirl and back down again. We headed over to the Hatch Wash overlook for lunch where we found a snake. Justin turned into a kid and just had to play with it. Mikey got some great close-up pics of it.
Then we headed over to Easter Egg Hill, where we all went through. Yes... even me. Man, it's good to have great spotters. Better to have them at the really narrow spot in the trail just pas East Egg Hill. If you miss there, you drop hundreds of feet straight down into the canyon.
We finished the trail early and headed back into town. We decided to do over to Potato Salad Hill to watch to crazies play. I dropped Rollins up at the top of the hill as an old Ford pick with tractor tires was making an attempt up the left side of the hill. I drove down to the bottom of the hill looking for a parking spot, just in time to see the Ford lose it and roll three and a half times into the hole. The truck had no cage and the roof collapsed the first time it hit the passenger side. As luck would have it, Rollins was recording video as the truck rolled, so we can see the first couple of turns before the truck disappears behind the boulder. The driver was hurt, how badly we don't know. The sheriffs arrived within 3 minutes, followed by EMTs and rescue squad. By the time sheriffs got to the scene, onlookers had hooked three winches onto crushed truck, pulled it onto its side and extricated the driver through the sunroof.
Honestly, this was not the type of carnage we wanted to see.
After seeing so much beef on the hoof today, we wanted to eat some beef, so we had dinner at Buck's Steak House. (I'm not going to make that mistake again!) Finally, we finished the evening off with a slide show of all our photos back in Chez Whale.
All the photos here:
http://s2.photobucket.com/albums/y33/andysteiner/off%20road/EasterJeep%20Safari%202006/Flat%20Iron%20Mesa/
Jay and Derek
Sniffin' some butt... sniffin' some butt...
Tilt A Whirl
That's an imposing front end.
Derek stuffing it.
This is either the Three Stooges or the Marx Brothers wearing Chinese hats
Easter Egg Hill
The aftermath.
Rollins has much better photos. Make sure you look at his.
Crowd watching.
Signing off from Moab,
It's all about The Wood...
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i mean, we go out and only see birds and lizards and you get, what were those, water buffalo? and snakes? i think i've only seen like 5 wild snakes in my entire life!