Trail Rides - DJGASTON.COM

Robie drove up to pick up his new Jeep and so we took it out on Saturday to play around. Originally, Clint and I were going to take our rigs and play around... I was going to take the Jeep and Clint would take his truck. He stayed up all night working on it but in the end, it wasn't meant to be, as the front transfer case output seal was leaking very badly and we could not get a replacement. So, Clint was out. I couldn't take my Jeep because of the ongoing fuel pump saga and waiting on parts, so the Jeep was out. I had not driven, let alone started, the big Dodge in probably 4 or 5 months, maybe longer. I decided to go ahead and take it out, even though I knew it would ride like hell on the highway, I had a chance at losing one or both hub assemblies, and that it wouldn't run very well due to a sheered manifold causing the fuel injection to run super rich.
I got up Saturday morning and went out to charge the truck, and tried to open the hood. It wouldn't move. I couldn't figure out what was wrong so I just lifted it up real hard... it flew open, and about 20 pounds of acorns immediately covered my intake and everything in the engine compartment! I was like WTF!!! Then a fawking pack rat comes running out from the under-hood insulation and runs off somewhere. As I'm standing there in total disbelief, I'll be damned if another one didn't come sneaking out too!!! I had two huge packrats living/nesting in between my hood and the insulation mat. They had brought literally enough acorns and nuts to cover that whole hood with about an inch stacked high. There were a ton of them! Well, this gave me an excuse to just rip the insulation mat off the hood. They chewed through my temperature sensor wire, the one that goes to the overhead console. They also chewed through my hood light wires. Luckily, they didn't mess with anything else. So after spending probably 2 hours cleaning that junk out, I was able to fire the truck up and head down to the resort to meet Robie and Mike.
We then took the big Dodge and Robie's Jeep to a place called Crooked Creek, known in the wet months as one of the best smallmouth fisheries in the nation. Right now, it's so dry that ... uhh... well, it's really dry. So we went and played around down there. Normally there is nothing real hard, just some places to crawl around on rock ledges, hit some sweet jumps, etc. But we happened to find one kick ass tributary that was mostly dried up and had a waterfall. It looked hard to climb because of how narrow the creek was, but we managed to drive up it and then go up into the creek a little bit before turning around and coming back out.

Anyway, here are a bunch of pictures. It was a blast!!