| Today was a bit of an overcast day, and there was a good chance of rain. My buddy Sam wanted to get together and do something though, so we went out to Indian Creek to ride around some. Sam doesn’t have an ATV, yet. So somehow he talked me into letting him try mine out. He followed me out in his truck to Indian Creek to the first stream crossing, where Bin and I had done the Stream Riding last weekend. We took a few videos, so I made a small video from them all. I didn’t get it on video, but the water was higher than last weekend, and I juuuust about drowned the Rubicon twice. It never bogged or sputtered, but the water had to be very close to the intake level. I even had it completely floating for a couple seconds in some spots. It was really fun, and I can see myself adding a small snorkel to it later on. |
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| After that we moved on to about the middle of Indian Creek, where there’s a section of mud holes, and we took turns riding my ATV from there. This is a fun section, you can get though it all rather easy, as long as you don’t hit the largest hole. Just something about sending the mud flying, great fun. | ||
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| Sam commented on how he saw me on only 2 or 3 wheels at times. I told him that really wasn’t hard to do, you need to try not to do that most the time. Then there’s those times when you do try to get alittle 2 wheel action. Now, don’t try this at home kids. I am not that good at it yet, this was the first time I actually focused on trying to get it way over on two wheels. I have been wanting to do this now that I have gotten more familiar with the handling of the Rubicon. This is good practice I think, it can give you a great feel of the ATVs balance points. | ||
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| Getting it up on 3 wheels is actually quite easy. I find that half the time you are on 3 wheels while your riding alittle hard. I was happy to find that it took a bit more than I thought to get it up on 2 wheels, at least on level ground. Here is the best shot we got of some 2 wheel action. I could have gotten it alot higher, but I wasn’t going to press my luck. | ||
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| After a couple more rides it was getting dark, and starting to drizzle. Just when we were going to head back home, we see a cars headlights off in the distance. My first thoughts are, ahhhhh damnit! Seconds later, I hear the sound of tiny little car tires spinning in the mud. Yep, they are stuck. Now, as you can probably tell by some of the photos, and the previous Trip Reports about others getting stuck, this is not a place you want to bring a car. Most people wont take their trucks in this place. It is an actual road, and even have a sign where it connects to the main road. But you don’t get 100 yards down this “road” before realizing this is going to get very bad. They had to go through a few mud holes the size of their car to get to the point where they got stuck. Luckily, those holes are mainly water, with a rocky bottom. A few minutes later we heard two girls yelling out, “Hey 4 wheeler guys! Can you come over here a second? So we headed over to survey the situation. It wasn’t as bad as we had expected, they were not grounded out, just sitting there spinning. I couldn’t resist the chance to see what my new Venom 3500x winch could do. I had only put it on a few weeks ago, and never really tested it under load yet. Unfortunately, the free spool release wouldn’t work. The knob wouldn’t move at all. I will have to look into this later, but that was rather disappointing. So I just powered the cable out, and hooked it up to the car, and gave it alittle tug. At first, it pulled my ATV toward it a bit, but I just bared don’t on the front brake even more, and tried again. I ended up moving about a foot, then the car slowly slide up out of the hole. After it moved about 10 inches the car was starting to get out under its own power, so I stopped the winch and backed up the ATV, giving just alittle pull on the cable as the car came up out of the hole completely. Other than the free spool not working, I was quite impressed with the power the winch had, and even more impressed that the ATV maintained the traction needed to pull the car. I know, where are the pics right? Well, by the time they got stuck, it was pouring down the rain, and there was lighting lighting up the night sky. We were more concerned with getting the girls on their way home, so we could do the same. By the time I got back the truck to load the ATV, I was completely drenched. It was raining so hard on the way back, that I couldn’t breath through my nose, I would inhale water. I was completely miserable, but at the same time, I was having a blast! I had installed a 35W HID 3200 lumen light in the Rubicon last week, and this was my first real nighttime test of it. I was very grateful that I had it, it did a hell of a job lighting up everything in front of me. Even through the rain, it had no troubles. I need to adjust it just alittle higher, so it shines further down the rode. I will also have to rig up a secondary switch, so that I can turn off the top HID light, and have the two bottom front lights still on. I passed two cars on the way back, and I could clearly see each drivers face, both had the same look on their face. “Oh My God I’m Blind!” |
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