Blue Mountain Jam in Mr.Ed's Own Words

This trip hoped to be something a bit different for our club since we were going to do a trail run with The Blue Mountain Jeep Alliance. This past summer they helped put on a Jeep Jamboree on these same trails that we planned to run this weekend. The outlook was bright, as planned we hoped to have a large turnout from both clubs. They said that turnout should be well over 100 rigs with 4 trails to choose from. Well earlier in the week, regretably the owner of the property passed away. As the trucks showed up there was some confusion whether or not the run would take place under these circumstances. After a bit of negotiating by the host club we were able to have the run afterall. The only problem was that their were only 2 trail leaders - making it an 'either or' choice for everyone attening.

Since many of the members of The Blue Mountain Jeep Alliance knew of the potential problem, they didn’t show up to allow for more room. Even still, we had a packed trail with 19 trucks from Long Island Off-Road and 19 from Blue Mountain. It was slow going most of the day, due to the nature of the trail. It tended to have a lot of loops that doubled back on themselves and at many times the front of the line and the rear were meeting. Another situation that slowed our progress was that these trails are on land that is used by horseback and donkey riders. Thus we followed the Tread Lightly guideline and shared the trail with these other riders and we would shut down all the trucks so not to spook the animals. A bit time consuming but appropriate behavior.

The first trail that we ran was called the "Donkey Trail", attributed to sharing the run with the quadrapeds as mentioned earlier. It had the usual tight twisting turns through the trees, with a few spots calling for 3 point turns. The first obstacle is a short creek crossing at which the climb out is off camber slightly to the drivers side. This is where we had our first breakage of the day. Mark in the blue XJ slid on the wet rocks and popped his right rear side window out. When it finally came my turn to try out this obstacle I looked at the off camber spot and felt a little knot appear in my stomach.

Since this was the first trail run for Mr. Ed since the June rollover and since it was also on the first obstacle of the day... as it was in June, I think my slight apprehension was natural. Yes I was feeling a bit on edge about the off camber spot, but once through it I felt o.k. but still have the feeling that I might have too much body lift in Mr.Ed and that the C.G. is a little too high.

Anyhow, back to the trail story...

The next part of the trail is a hill climb with a few rocks thrown in for good measure and a turn at the top of the hill which brings you back down to a walk through the creek bed. Nothing too hard, just a matter of keeping your eyes open and you'll be ok. If you're not paying attention, you're more likely to wack the side of a tree then hit any real large boulders. Since we heard that a horse party would be passing through soon, we decided to shut the trucks down and have lunch at this part of the trail. After lunch we headed for the second trail of the day,"The Shredder".

The Shredder

This trail had a few more twisting areas and a couple more rocky hill climbs to attempt than the first trail. It also had some mud hole spots that offered "go arounds" but were mostly driven straight through. The mud holes had hard bottoms so you didn’t need to "really gun it", unless you like to mess up the side of your truck.

The best part of this trail was the end, with a gully that has a mud pit in the middle section and then a hill climb and a sharp turn to the right on the exit. This is then followed by a drop into a creekbed that has boulders of different sizes and is about 1/4 mile long. You then climb out of this and are basically back in the parking lot of were you started the days run.

Overall it was a good test for Mr.Ed since it was a fairly mild trail but had some good spots. It was a good opportunity for two clubs to meet and see what kind of trail riding that they like to do. I hope that we will be doing more of this and hope to take them on some of our runs. The only problem is that it would have to be limited to a certain number of rigs because of the traffic jams that we experienced on that day.

Well this is Wilbur saying good bye for Mr. Ed.

This is one of the 'lost' trail stories, lost in the demise of 4x44u.com and rescued thanks to the Way Back Machine at http://web.archive.org