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 Jeepin.com Hot Springs Run 2005 by Jason West |
The weekend of June 4th marked our second annual Jeepin.com Hot Springs Run to the Superlift ORV Park in Hot Springs, AR. I don't think we'll do it again the middle of the summer though -- wow was it hot and humid! But despite the heat and humidity, I think everyone had a great time, I know I did.
We had a pretty good turn out again this year with about 11 rigs and close to 30 people in attendance. We had some folks fly and drive in from the east cost (NC, VA, and MA), some local Arkansas folks, and a couple of rigs made it down from Missouri. And of course we had a crew from here in Texas as well. We had taken our XJ last year so we thought we would take our TJ this year, but we weren't able to get some new modifcations done in time (4.88's and a rear ARB) and there were going to be lots of folks needing seats, so we took the XJ back out again.
Billy Mountjoy (aka: "redtj" on our forum) from the Little Rock Crawlers volunteered to lead trails for us all weekend since no one else in our group was really that familiar with the park. Billy did a great job and took us on some awesome trails. Thanks Billy!
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We ran a lot trails that we hadn't run before (this was only our second time to the park though) and we finally found the trails with rocks that I'd seen pictures of. We ran Sardine Ravine (which is adopted by Billy), Buckhorn North, the Gorge, Canopener, and some other trails I can't think of right now that were 2-diamond. A couple of folks also split off at one point to run Slammer and the Ultimate Adventure trail.
Most everyone arrived in Hot Springs on thursday, so we all headed out to the ORV Park late friday morning to start wheeling some trails. Friday turned out to be a short day for our rig though, because we "broke" about two hours into the morning. I was crossing a log on a relatively tame section of Buckhorn North (I think that was the trail) when my front end went "pop" after going over the log and stopped spinning. My friend behind me said he thought I'd broken a hub because my front right tire wasn't spinning, but my ARB was locked and I was looking out my window at the front left tire which also wasn't spinning... we could see the front driveshaft spinning, but the axle shafts weren't which was definitely not a good sign. Nothing was grinding though, which was an odd sign... Thinking that I'd either snapped the pinion or grenaded the ARB, we took the nearest out, unlocked my hubs (I've got a Warn hub kit on my D30), and headed back to the KOA to access the carnage while the rest of our group went on to enjoy some off-camber action on Sardine Ravine.
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Back at the KOA we loaded up on the trailer and pulled the front diff cover. We were greeted by 10 ring gear bolts in a neat little pile below the ring gear! I'd bought the axle used with the gears (4.56) and ARB already installed, and somehow 8 ring gear bolts had managed to back out and 2 sheared off! How I didn't manage to suck any of the bolts up into the gears and destroy everything is beyond me, but I sure got lucky on this one! After a few hours of calling around for parts we finally found a set of ring gear bolts at Scot King's place just down the road from the park. Scot is a great guy and works closely with the ORV Park leading trail runs and helping with events. Thanks for the bolts Scot! With our ring gear securely back in place, we were ready to hit the trails again on saturday.
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