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1998 "Easter Jeep Safari"
April 5, 1998 - Larry Harvey and I departed Fortuna about 9 AM and headed to Sacramento pulling the Jeep and trailer with my Dodge Dakota. We spent the night at Jeff’s house in Rescue, which is next to Cameron Park.
April 6
We left Sacramento about 7AM and headed down I-5 to Lost Hills, where we turned off the Interstate and headed for Barstow, from Barstow we took I-15 as far as Baker, where we spent the night. We encountered a few showers throughout the day, but no really bad weather. We did take the time to visit Calico Ghost Town near Bakersfield.
April 7 Left Baker about 8 AM and went through the corner of Nevada, Arizona and into Utah. Weather great so far! After passing St. George, Utah, we took a side trip to Zion National Park, where we started getting some light rain. We still managed to get in a 2-mile hike on one of the hiking trails. After backtracking to I-5, we continued up the road to Cedar City, where it was snowing! We ate dinner in Cedar City and decided to push on to Beaver. A short ways out of Cedar City, the light snow turned to heavy hail. We went through a ½ mile stretch, where we counted at least 4 cars off the road and rolled. Police and rescue units were all over the place, so we continued on (very slow). Now, it started snowing heavy as we went over a summit, we were making fresh tracks in the snow, using 4-wheel drive, we continued on to Beaver where we grabbed the first motel we ran across, didn’t even ask the price! It was still snowing.
April 8 Got up to a winter wonderland of snow, had coffee and hit the road. Snow was everywhere, but the road was clear for about 15 miles and it started snowing again. 4-wheel drive and 25 MPH was about all we could manage, luckily, this was for only 10 miles and it cleared up again. At Richfield, I decided not to gas up, thinking there would be something further down the road, so we headed for Green River, which was 120 miles away with a 7900’ summit to go over. We continued on, looking for a gas station. The low fuel light came on with 35 miles to Green River, not a building in sight as far as you could see but we made it to Green River with the fuel gage so far below empty, you couldn’t see it. After fueling up and helping some young guys find a way to put transmission fluid in their Cherokee, we cruised on into to Moab, which was alive with activity and 4-wheel drive vehicles. We checked into our motel, where there was a message from Carl Brandt. We had unpacked and unloaded the Jeep, when Carl and Bryan drove up, so we drove out to Lion’s Back and watched a few rigs come down the rock.
Carl said he absolutely was not going to do it, I had drove it 2 years ago and had no desire to push my luck, but Bryan and I decided to walk part way up it. That was about as scary as driving it! Carl and Larry stayed on the ground and filmed us. We then went to McStiff’s for dinner, drove out to the Manufacture’s Display and talked to the owner of a Jeep who had rolled it on double whammy today. We decided where to meet for breakfast and headed for our motels.
April 9 Met Carl and Bryan at the Golden Stake for breakfast at 7 AM, went out to the Registration Center and picked up our registration packages, had a lunch packed at Hogi Yogi’s and headed our to the line-up point for "Poison Spider Mesa" trail. After signing the release of liability forms and looking over all the vehicles in the run, the group of 60 vehicles headed out of town at 9 AM. This was a 4.0 trail with beautiful scenery and some wicked ledges, a nasty wedgie (a "V" notch which some vehicles slipped into, causing some sheet metal arraignment) most of the tough spots had a bypass, but we took the hard routes, which was the reason for going. At one almost vertical ledge of about 5 foot, my tires would not hook up and after two tries, I took a less vertical route. Carl made it up on the second try, so I had to live with that the rest of the day! Probably 90% of the rigs didn’t make it. A longer wheelbase was the advantage here. After getting back to town about 5 PM, we went to dinner, ran out to the Manufacture’s display for awhile, then headed for our motels. Beautiful scenery and beautiful weather all day.
April 10 Met Carl and Bryan for breakfast had a lunch packed and went to the trail line up for Gold Bar Rim. Our trail leader was driving a Hummer. I was 3rd in line, Carl was 4th. My preference is to be in the front part of the group, which normally has 25 to 50 rigs, depending on the trail difficulty. This turned out to be one of the more beautiful runs, with enough obstacles to make it interesting and fairly difficult for some of the more stock rigs. We did have a stock Ramcharger get in a situation that took almost 45 minutes to extract him. Action Photos were out in force taking plenty of photos. They had the negatives in town later that night for you to review and see if you want to buy them. We heard on the CB Radio that a rig had rolled on the Kane Creek Canyon Trail and they were calling for a helicopter, so it must have been serious. It was a nice warm day (77 degrees). We got back to town about 4 PM, so we decided to make a tour through the Arches National Park, we got back into Moab about 8 PM, had dinner and retired to the motel.
Our scheduled run today was "Hey Joe Canyon" which is a 3.5 rated trail. Carl had talked to Meach, who said it was so easy we would be bored. We decided not to go on it, but we would line up and leave town in the parade of 4x4 rigs. This was Big Saturday; in which main street of Moab is closed and all the rigs leave town headed for their respective runs. Larry stationed himself on the North end of town and set up his camcorder to record all the rigs departing town. Carl and I lined up at the back of the "Hey Joe Canyon" run, after telling the trip leader that we would be pulling out. We left town with over a thousand other 4x4’s, drove out of town about a mile, pulled out of the line-up, waited for about 500 rigs to pass, then went back to town and picked up Larry. After picking out some photos from Action Photo’s and T-shirt shopping, Larry and I split company with Carl and Bryan who were going to load up and head for California. We went back to the Motel, got the truck and drove the Castle Valley, LaSal mountain loop. This is a beautiful 70-mile loop, which took us back up into the snow where we did a lot of 4-wheeling in the snow. After getting back to town, we drove out the Dead Horse Point for some more sight seeing. After dinner, we went back to the Motel, loaded the Jeep on the trailer and got everything ready to leave in the morning. Temp today was 78 degrees.
April 12 We departed Moab about 8 AM and headed for Salt Lake City. We hit heavy snow before we got to Provo, then heavy rain all through Salt Lake City, after that, it was mostly dry and cold. We had dinner in Elko, NV, then continued on to Winnemucca, where we spent the night. We found out later that Carl and Bryan had spent last night here.
April 13 Got up to cold weather and reports that it was snowing in Reno. We pulled into Reno a
couple of hours later and it was snowing! We continued up the road to Susanville, where we
decided to take route 44 to Redding. As we started up the summit to the Snowmobile Park,
we encountered the heaviest snow we had run into; it was almost a complete whiteout with
no tracks in the snow, and no traffic! This worried me because I thought they might have
closed the road, with me in the middle. We eventually caught up with a snowplow that had
pulled out of a side road, with one car following the plow. When the guy in the
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