On Thursday, April 14th, we started our 3 day drive from Ohio to Moab, Utah. It was myself and my new spotter Jason Layne. We left Ohio at 5am and arrived in Topeka, KS around 8pm. The next day, we drove from Topeka to Denver. We finished the trip on Saturday and arrived in Moab at around 3pm.

The drive out was pretty uneventful. We did see some Jeepers pulled off the side of the road in Colorado. We stopped and found out he ran out of diesel fuel. He had been waiting on AAA for 2 hours before we got there. We offered to go to the next exit and get him some fuel. It turned out, that exit was out of gas at every station. We went to the next one, and their electric was out in the whole town, which meant, no gas here either. We ended up having to go 4 exits up to find fuel, about 15 miles! When we came back, we put 10 gallons of diesel in their truck and off we all were.

We arrived in Moab, unpacked and decided to hit a trail. We picked Hells Revenge. This trail has awesome scenery, excellent obstacles…everything! This was a great first trail to break in the rig…or so I thought LOL

We made it to Hells Highway, the big hot tub obstacle on Hells Revenge. I looked at it for a bit and was thinking about attempting it. After looking at it and hearing others cheer me on, I decided to try it. Big mistake! I had about 4 attempts on it, almost making it out and it was the last attempt that did me in. I was literally a couple feet from clearing this obstacle when my front end bounced and that was it. Flopped the rig on its driver side inside the bowl…and broke a lot of parts. We had to have a winch line from the top pulling the jeep over, and then we had a tow strap on the back, pulling the jeep off the wall of the bowl, to get it level.
We ended up twisting the radiator, lost the mounts to keep the grille straight, tweaked the grille, got oil in the motor, so we had to pull the spark plugs and blow the oil out and smashed some steering lines. We had 2 other jeeps with us, so we took one all the way back to the trail head to get all of our spare parts and fluids.
By the time we got back to the jeep, it was dark. So we had to do all of the repairs in the dark, at least enough to get the jeep off of the trails. By the time we got off of the trail, it was past midnight!

It’s now day 2 in Moab and we have spent most of the day trying to fix the jeep and find parts. We found the GM steering line we need at a parts store in Grand Junction, CO, which is about 2 hours away. They can have the line for us today, instead of Tuesday, like the local parts stores in Moab told me. So, it looks like we’re going to make the drive to Grand Junction so we can continue to wheel this week.

Tomorrow we are joining 4Wheel Parts on their vendor run on Metal Masher. Stay tuned for the write up of that ride.