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Did I mention I hate mudding? 'twas before I had to do it (spent too much time fighting it on a mountain bike back in the day). Now that I was forced to, I hate it even more Dust I can tolerate just fine, but mud - hard pass.
Part 1: Schnebly Hill Road. The first trail I ever went to in a 4x4 and not on a mountain bike, so it takes a special place in my heart. This time - the upper part is closed for the winter, so I just went there to remember it a bit. Still, a few photos.
Part 2: Edge of the World. This is where things got more interesting.
Last time I was here, it was a cakewalk, I spent almost all day there exploring the mesa, and decided that I want to see more of it. Since I was nearby anyway, I decided to pick up where I stopped - Edge of the World. The road to it was almost uneventful - it was raining a bit, and in one place the road went underwater and I had to take a dry bypass someone had already created. The bypass turned out to be much softer than I hoped it would be, and I made a mental note that I would have to be extra careful on the way out.
On the way out, we just set the Google Maps navigation (that got us in without a fuss) to home, and started driving. I noticed that it was taking us out by a different road a few seconds after it deviated from the way in, and, being curious, decided to see how it would fare (especially since I had the previous routes mapped in GaiaGPS) - all in all, it might know a road avoiding that soft spot I didn't like, I thought. Alas, the next turn it announced was marked with "PRIVATE PROPERTY - NO TRESPASSING". Oh well.
Driving further. "Take a right here onto Service Road 535". Wait a second, there is no road whatsoever here... All right, driving further. All right, take a sharp right here... Well censored, that road looks abandoned, but fine, let's go. Well, the road becomes wetter and wetter to the point of having standing water everywhere - no go, turning back.
Backtracking, looking at previously captured Gaia tracks; all right, we need to turn left here. Joy, the road looks beautiful, we're rolling nicely, life is good - until the vehicle gets bogged down and stops on a surface that looked absolutely dry. Since I'm extremely careful about not digging my own grave, I back out very, very gently, and in some good time, we're out of the bog. Inspection time. I'll be damned, the soil that looks dry is, fact, a sponge, and it can't even hold my weight, forget the Defender. And it looks like this road is also going downward, which I read as it's only going to get worse. No way forward, time to backtrack again.
As we drive, I get severely reprimanded by my copilot for not having the shovel - guilty as charged, this was my first ever time to get into muddy conditions, and the previous experience with this area gave me the wrong idea that traveling here would be a non-event. Lesson learned, next time I'll be more prepared.
By now, we're about 2 extra hours into the trip. Sunset is imminent. Uneventfully, we get to the spot that I didn't like, and, lo and behold, there's commotion right there. Can't be good. Stopping, approaching the folks, turns out that a whole family that also wanted to see the Edge of the World got stuck on the spot that I was able to negotiate, and spent several hours trying to get out - only to dig their 4x4 truck into the mud up to the axles. And there was another guy that was passing by in a quite capable truck that was trying to pull them out. To add insult to injury, I heard a snap as I was approaching, and it turned out that it was whatever they were trying to use for recovery - looked makeshift, I'll never know what it was, forgot to ask.
Well, things took a turn for the better at that point, since I happened to have a recovery strap, a D-ring, and MaxTrax. It was surprising to see how easily the truck was recovered - another reminder that life is good if you have the right tools (and as I write this I remember the story about the elderly couple that died somewhere in Australia because they got stuck in the sand and couldn't get out; all it took for the recovery team to get their quite capable vehicle out was to air down). The family was so miserable after spending that much time in the rain and having burdened four other people with their recovery that I didn't even think of taking their photo to save them extra embarrassment. They tried to offer money for the rescue, but all of us refused and said "it's now your turn to help someone else you find stuck".
...and it turned out that the road went underwater just a little bit and was quite passable - all three vehicles used it to get out.
Last nature photo in this section - that's how this area looked on Friday. And the map is how Google satellites saw it. The balloon marks the spot the photo was taken from. Reminds me of the phrase my kid once uttered; as soon as we crossed the state line from Arizona to Colorado, he looked out of the window and yelled "Oh look! They have water in their rivers here!"
Live, learn, die stupid. I'm sure I'll forget something critical next time. This time, I only regretted not to have brought extra windshield washer fluid with me, but thankfully I didn't run out of it before I got back on the blacktop.
Something I didn't want to write about above since it would've disrupted the story - both Google Maps and GaiaGPS let me down that day. GMaps, for lack of a better word, simply started hallucinating. I was following directions for a while since they seemed reasonable (having cross-referenced them with Gaia maps), but once I zoomed out I realized that it was simply running me around in circles - look at the route on the photo of the console. And GaiaGPS simply crashed on me twice in two days, the first time, thankfully, capturing the track as "Friday activity", but the next day it just stored a 0 ft 0 min long track after at least four hours on the trail. I have a hunch that it is related to the fact that I used it on AndroidAuto - I never did that before, and never had it crash like this. Well, it also may be a new version - submitting a bug report is on my short list.
I actually feel good about having gone through this misadventure - I saw even more of the mesa, learned a lot about the vehicle, figured out a few must-have items for the next trip, cemented the understanding that tools hallucinate, and learned how to recognize when they do. The two upper tentacles on the map snippet are those extra paths I took before returning to the road I took on the way in.
Oh, by the way, there are three climbers on one of those photos without a vehicle, try to find them
Part 3: A run with AZLRO folks through the Four Peaks Trail and back through the newly restored Apache Trail, in the dry, was a nice contrast
We got over 12" of snow in parts of the greater Cincinnati area over the weekend. On Sunday I took the Defender out, and as always, was thoroughly impressed by just how capable it is.
I was driving through snow drifts that were as high as the bottom of the doors and the Defender plowed through it like it was nothing. The Falken Wildpeaks did a decent job in the snow. Not bad at all, but by no means a proper winter tire. I used various different Terrain Response modes: Grass/Gravel/Snow, Sand, Auto, and my configurable setup. Sand worked the best in the deeper snow, but at times I felt the throttle response was too aggressive. G/G/S was great on the harder-packed snow and roads that were slightly paved. Auto worked pretty well everywhere, but was overly aggressive with the traction control kicking in. Despite that, it did an excellent job.
I had my Configurable TR set to Differentials: Auto, Powertrain: switched between Normal and Responsive, TC: Off-Road, Steering: Heavy, and Dampening: Normal. This mode was really good overall, and I used Configurable and Auto the most.
Low Traction Launch is pure wizardry. Truly an incredibly well-engineered system, and I used it religiously over the weekend. It never failed to impress me on my old 2017 D5, and the Defender is even better. Last year I had a loaner Disco Sport that I got stuck in the snow. I used Low Traction Launch and even though it took a while, it did eventually get itself unstuck.
Here's my 110's small cameo in a friends' YouTube channel. My 16yo son was driving so carefully, too carefully, when we came up to a slippery log at a 45 deg angle across the road that hung us up. It was great fun and a good intro to some mild snow wheeling.
New Year Adventures
Dust I can tolerate just fine, but mud - hard pass.
