Report Written by Alan Staiman

VA4WDA Members Only Run at Gore:

So a quick wrap up on my 4-wheeling weekend. Friday started off nasty and rainy so I just went to work and decided to leave Saturday morning.

Got to The cove, got the Jeep out of the trailer and got signed up just in time for a driver meeting. I joined a group of 3 other Jeep CJs  (2 Cj7 and 1 CJ8)!!. We led a 9 rig ride to V trail..and got stopped due to another group already being there with a broken down vehicle. I then led us over to a connector that let us onto some good trails called Six A and Horseshoe. We came down after a lot of good rock crawling and decided to take a break for lunch.

It had been raining all morning and I got tired of the rain falling on on me over the side of the top. So I cut up some cardboard and installed rain gutters on the Jeep. So of course it didn't rain the rest of the day.

We met up again and headed out to try and do a connector Trail across Death Valley and make it up to Upper Road.  The plan was to then go upper road to Castle from Castle to Trickle.. Up Trickle then Up Wahoo and that should have been a good day. So of course reality started to intervene. The trail turned out to be a little bit harder than we expected and we broke the drive shaft in the Cherokee. We got him turned around three of the CJs went on and I said I will meet you with the rest of the group. After we got the Cherokee down. well we ran into the Toyota which is broken down on the first Trail. We helped him get his spindle and axle back together so he could drive down to main camp. We left the Cherokee in camp and then the rest of the group started out running down Middle Road getting towards Trickle. At that point we saw the other group early going up Wahoo because well it had been a while. I stopped to take a look at one really deep hole that should have been a nice drive and drive out but now had about 8 feet of water in it.   I went to start up my Jeep after that stop and  well that was it.. the starter on my CJ7 died. I was able to bump start it and then back it up to a spot on the hill and pulled off to the side. I grab Teah Puppy and hopped into a Ford pickup truck running a nice so Mustang  5.0 V8 and I was going to ride trickle with him. That was not to be as his engine decided it was no longer going to run at all. We tried everything..It had spark, it had fuel pressure,  It just was not going to run so we turned him around and started to tow him back out. I bump started my... Jeep knowing that I could not stall it at all for the rest of the uphill run out. I ran in 4 low and second gear to keep the rpms up. I overheated but not too badly and finally got to the main road. We all made down and got to dinner only 30 mins late. I drove the Jeep into the trailer and that was it for my weekend.

We all got to the Bar-B-Q dinner provided by VA4WDA and had a good meal.  I decided there was no reason to stay so I headed home.  

The weather was not overly nice on Saturday but it did make for more challenging wheeling.

I had a great time, got to see a lot of old friends and best of all go wheeling in a group where the CJ's outnumbered any other model of jeep! (Not since the late 90s had I been on that kind of a trail ride :).