[lupinsea]

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Evan's Creek ORV Area
April 18, 2009

Headed down to Evan's Creek with my club this weekend. It was a good day for wheel'n with nice sunny weather. Yet, at the upper elevations of Evan's Creek there was still several feet of snow on the ground. The first trail we did, the 102, is normally a snap, just a road bed with puddles. But with a few feet snow, those puddles end up causing some significant ditches and holes. Getting in and out of the puddles can get challengine and the route gets plenty lumpy. Despite my 16" of belly clearance I got hung up a few times and needed a pull out myself. This was a trail that normally takes 5-7 minutes and instead took almost 2 hrs.

Afterwards we headed up the 311 which was covered in snow, too. The 311 heads up hill along a ridge line to a Mt. Rainier overlook. Surprisingly, we did pretty well with the steep up hills. The only winching necessary was when one of the guys snapped a front driveshaft but that was after we got to the top of the climb.

The biggest problems were when we reached the Evan's Creek campground. Don't know why but we had 4 rigs stuck in the camp ground parking lot. One guy wandered off down the "gravel drive" (that was under 6 ft of snow) and got high-centered on his axle tubes. The guy sent to pull him out got a broken windshield when the tow-strap broke (and it was just the loose end of the tow strap, no shackle). Then a Cherokee got stuck (burried up to the axles) and the rig that was trying to yank him out spun his tires and dug himselft down to the axles, too. BTW, this was a mere 70 ft from the other two rigs and happening at the same time. So a (let's see now) 5th rig needed to come over and winch the 4th guy out of his tire holes. Once he was out the Cherokee set up a winch and pulled himself forward . . . peeling a tire bead off a wheel in the process.

Fun day.

On the 102, the easy by-pass trail.




Zoe wondering where the other Jeeps are.




A YJ lumbering over the lumpy snow covered 102 trail.




Getting the tow strap out to yank the YJ over something.





Some forward movement without any winching or pulling.





A waterhole in the snow on the 102 (the by-pass trail).





Climbing up the 311 trail. Some of the areas that ran the edges of a hill side gave pause.





I had fun following this guy as he churned up the snow for me. Despite
that, I didn't have much difficulty following on the 311. This is at the top
of the big hill climb just before the Mt. Rainier lookout.





Lunch with a view. Mt. Rainier look great with the flanking
foothills covered in snow on this sunny day.





George taking a tow strap back to Don who in turn will be
heading over to Cal who was stuck about 200 ft away.





Deep snow, about 6 ft deep. Cool to think we were mostly floating on top of it.






A circus of winching. It was almost comical.





Gotta watch these things. . . my back tire started sliding off the crown
of the road and it just sucked the back end of my Jeep right down into the ditch.





Took less than 5 minutes to get my rig out of this stuck. Gotta love winches.

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[GrimJeeper91]

Looks like fun. Great pics as usual...

[Douglas S.]

Great pics and writeup, do you have any vids of this one?

[Jeffro06]

Beautiful views. Great pics!

[IGotADisneyJeep]

Jay,

I'm sure you got to be happy that was not a steep drop Ahhhhh.
and how are your dual True Tracs working on your jeep? I'm sure you Love them like I do with mine They Rock!

Be Cool,
Michael

[lupinsea]

Originally Posted by Douglas S.

Great pics and writeup, do you have any vids of this one?

Working on it.

The toughest part is finding royalty free music since youtube is now able to scan and block audio if it thinks there is a copyright on it. And (not surpringly?) the free, common use music out there generally is somewhat sucky. And it just seems wrong not to have some kind of music sound track.

I'm also having to greatly watch the length of movie. My last one of Walker Valley was ~3:30 which resulted in a 1.33 GB file size. . . over youtube's limit of 1GB. The HD video is awesome but it sucks up resources and bandwidth.

Originally Posted by IGotADisneyJeep

'm sure you got to be happy that was not a steep drop Ahhhhh.
and how are your dual True Tracs working on your jeep? I'm sure you Love them like I do with mine They Rock!

Still loving the Truetracs after having them installed for the last 4+ years.

My only issue is ground clearance. If my axles get hung up on something like the snow or mud berms between the tire ruts then I'll spin my tires and go nowhere.

For the wheel'n I do I'd get the Truetracs again.



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[grogie]

Wow... when they say don't go wheeling alone, in this case it sounded like you almost needed even more Jeeps!

Thanks for the write-up and photos as I've always enjoyed your posts! Looked like fun!

[lupinsea]

Ok, finally posted the video. Check it out here.

If you can watch it in HD for a very clear, crisp, smooth video then click the center of the little youtube screen below once the video starts to play to open a new youtube.com window and click the "HD" buttom in the lower right of the video screen.


[YT]PsuH5ILx0RQ[/YT]




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[Douglas S.]

Your videos are some of the best jeep videos I have ever seen. Awesome work!

[lupinsea]

Thanks. I try to edit them down to just the more interesting parts and blend it all together smoothly. I have another video I'm working on for another run. Total video raw footage was about 25 minutes (and 3.6 GB) that I've done some rough passes to edit it down to a chunk less than 6 minutes. I'll post it up before too long, maybe a week.

Having a good digital camera with image stabilized lense and HD video recording capabilities doesn't hurt either.

You should see the video on my end 1280x720 at 30 fps looks REALLY good. But man, does it eat up the hard drive. My new video project is 7.5 GB.