Blazer Bash 2009

Click on the thumbnails for the full sized picture.

Here are my pictures from Blazer Bash 2009 with Loco Offroad and CK5. We all met up in Flagstaff at Travis's house and drove up to Moab in a group. Here are a couple shots of Brandon's blazer flexing out on my trailer before they hauled it up to Travis's house.

On the way to Moab, Michael thought Travis was going too slow up the hill's and decided to give him a push. I passed the group and pulled over so I could get a video.

The first day we ran Hell's Revenge.

We all took the optional "Hell's Gate" trail too.

Somehow Brandon ran up the exit before anyone got up to take pictures.

Brandon in the Hot Tub (he had to back out :( )

Me on the escalator. I got off the line and had my tie rod twist (from the ram) and it sheered my ARB line off. We spent about 1 hour in a hot hole trying to get the line repaired and the tie rod straight. I ended up with a bent TRE (Travis and I are both converting to Heim's after this trip).

This is just a couple shots of the parking lot from the ORD BBQ Friday evening.

Saturday, we ran the Trifecta (Poison Spider, Golden Spike, Gold Bar Rim). We started out in the early group with 10 rigs including Jeremy, a guy we just happened to bump into at the trail head that asked if he could tag along.

Somehow even though we started in the first group, we made a wrong turn and took a 15 minute detour. During that 15 minutes we were passed by the second group. Before we even realized we got passed Juan bent his front drag link and broke his steering box. While we were making trail repairs on that, our trail leader (Chaddy) realized he had a bad HP power steering line and headed back to the trail head with Juan.

Jason and Travis were the only ones to find the right line to get up "The Crotch"

Here is where I parked for about 2 hours while we welded Jeremy's track bar mount back onto his jeep. At this point we lost another one of our trail members when the brown blazer had to turn around and head home (babysitter).

This is where we stopped when Travis broke his hub lock

Shortly after that Jason blew a cap off of one of his CV joints.

Here is the sunset (still on the trail, started at 8:30)

The final "major" obstacle.

Too much for Michael's Jeep. One of the spider gears in his rear diff disintegrated and poked a hole through the cover. Another trail repair and driveshaft removal and we were back on the trail (with the Jeep in tow behind my blazer).

We finally made it off the trail at 1AM. We had a couple crippled trucks so we limped home at 20mph, dropped off a couple of the more "broken" trucks and headed to Denny's for much needed food.

Sunday, we were supposed to run Pritchett Canyon. Since none of us wanted to get up early enough for that we hung around camp fixing trucks until about 2 and 4 of us went out and ran Moab Rim. It's not the toughest trail in Moab, but it's one of the scariest. There are numerous times you are off camber w/in feet of a 100+ foot drop

There's a nice sand hill at the top that we all played on. I need a lot more horsepower to get to the top of that :). Maybe next year.

Here's a video from one of my passes. My first pass was the best, I made it about 20 feet further than I did in this video (you can see that in the pictures above).

The end of the trail has a nice lookout over Moab.

Here you can see how close you get to the edge. 5 feet of rock and it's a 50+ foot vertical drop down to the asphalt.

Monday was the bonus day! We were planning on running something in area BFE, but since we didn't run Pritchett on Sunday, we ran it on Monday. Travis had flattened his cam again, so he stayed at camp to work on his tow rig.