West Virginia recap.

[94Dodge Truggy]

Well here it is so pay attention cuz I am only writing this once! Friday afternoon Brody Jacobs with his stretched wrangler XXL and truggy headed out for the 5 hour drive to Swiss West Virginia.

We arrived at our friends house (Pat and his lovely wife) at about 10pm. We checked out Pats offroad shop which he works at part time and teaches at a local school with his better half full time. We woke up and met some of the local gang from the area and checked out their rigs. There were heavily modified wranglers, and cherokees sporting dana 60's and ford 9 inch axles with small blocks and atlas t-cases backing them up. A late 70's bronco that was big and bad and a samurai with an owner who was well aquainted with the skinny pedal.

That samurai was probably mistaken for a chain saw 2 towns away a time or 2 on the trail runs when he was beating it silly! (very entertaining) We hit the swiss trails covering double whamy, the creeks, and a couple of other trails before reaching EL DIABLO. (a toyota wrung the rear driveshaft early on) El Diablo is a long hill climb that twists and turns upward for what seemed like a mile. The locals have not been up it in a while due to its poor condition and have made a bypass to avoid it. At this point we had been wheeling from 10:30am till 8pm. Brody and I were the only ones to climb it and it took us another 2 or so hours to do so. Brody had to winch up 3 times and I had to resort to the cable once. Some sections had washouts deep enough to roll you down the mountain. Other areas had trees and rocks (big rocks) to stop your forward momentum. We both punnished our rigs and never gave up till we finally made it to the top.

At one point both of our rigs were smoking so badly due to the degree in which they had been put on that we had to turn them off to see where we were headed. We teetered on our back tires and at one point I was on my passenger side tire only with a tree holding the roof of the truggy from going over backwards down the mountain! Dink Davis and his wife (who loves wheeling more than I do I think) helped guide us up El Diablo and lent a hand in fixing Brodys rear driveshaft when he stretched a u-bolt strap that held the lower u-joint in. We put a spare in and fixed it in no time flat in the darkness of the night. The top of the climb was met with a sigh of relief! We arrived back at home base at around 11:30pm.

Sunday morning I was greeted with breakfast from the Davis family from biscuit world, and let me tell ya they were some seriously great biscuits! We headed out to a place that was an hour and a half further south off of 64 to a private land owners wicked creek bed. I have never been to such a rock crawling mecca of nasty rocks, waterfalls, deep water and beautiful scenery ever! The place was incredible. (the land owner gave me permission to come and ride whenever I liked and said he never saw such a good show as what we had put on) 8 vehicles came in and 4 made it out with 4 wheel drive still powering them. Pats jeep with the misses behind the wheel were making short work on the rocks until they broke an outer shaft in the dana 60 front axle. 2 others had steering box failures and 2 more had also broken their front axles. ( Built dana 30's)

The creek went forever and we only covered a portion of it in 7 hours. Negotiating logs, climbing boulders the size of a house and trying not to get hung up on the diffs or the belly of the rigs wore everyone out! Then we had to hit it home. 6 hours on the road and a leftover deer that I ran over and the journey was completed.

Brodys rig had some extensive work done by Terry from TKH fab and let me tell ya it worked awesome! The rear suspension had just been redone since the benifit show and flex it did! We beat and punnished and flogged the crap out of our rigs and all that went wrong the whole weekend was a u-bolt strap on Brodys wrangler. Big thanks to the Davis family for showing us such a good time! THANKS! THANKS! THANKS! awesome.

Pat and his wife took us in and gave us our own seperate rooms in their beautiful home to sleep in and fed us too! A nice warm bed and shower made it perfect! Not used to getting a good nights sleep and waking up clean the next day while wheeling! Thank you so much for making me feel at home! Looking forward to going down maybe in the spring next year and again in september.

A better recap with good detail can be heard at the next meeting and I am still working on those pics.;)