Mr.Ed Bumps His Head on the Lower Hudson Valley Trails

Mr.ED lands on his head but gets up and finishs the trail...... That's right, I picked the wrong line on the first obstacle of the day at the Lower Hudson Valley Trail outing and ended up rolling Mr.ED. Thankfully, noone was hurt because the Smittybilt cage/rollbar did it's job along with the 3pt. shoulder belts. My passenger and I were hanging upside down when it came to rest, and after turning the motor off, we undid the belts told everyone over the cb that we went over and crawled out of the Bronco.

You can see that there's quite a lot of large rock on these trails, and of course, proper tire placement can make a big difference. Though the rollover was the "highlight" of the day taking over 2 hours to get it uprighted, the rest of the trail ride was great with many obstacles providing both easier and harder options allowing for you the driver to make the choice.

There are a number of good rock climbs along this trail and the best one is called the wall. It's a granite face that varies from about 20 degrees to about 40 degrees depending on where you attack it from. Glenn in the Bronco 2 walked right up the hardest part and only slipped a tire or two at the very begining. He did it the best of all those who made it. The others to make it where John in the green Explorer, and Evan in a CJ-7.

ROLL OVER UPDATE

As we moved the scattered tools ect. out of the way and took a couple of pictures of the bronco, we then accessed how to upright the rig with the least amount of body damage. We had at one point 3 winches going to pull up on one end while keeping the other end stable. As far as body damage goes it has a few scrapes along the sides here and there and a dent on the drivers side rear by the taillight.

The flares are shot as is the Kayline softtop which I had up at the time. The doors and the windshield also took most of the impact. The windshield frame took the impact at the corners and it caused it to buckle at the lower drivers side corner. The door frames for the window glass are also bent up pretty bad,but luckily a friend in my club has his old doors off his that will now reside on my truck.

The really weird thing about the whole rollover is that on the way to the trail I had a feeling that I was going to roll the truck over at this obstacle. I picked the wrong line and went high and was off camber and the passengers side tires slid off the rock face I was on, and dropped about 1' - this caused the truck to want to go over. I tried whipping the wheel down hill and turning into the roll and hoped that just the nose would get stuck in the crevace ... but it didn't work. I just held onto the steering wheel and watched as we went over. It does happen in slow motion.

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