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

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 the driver had run out of diesel fuel. He had been waiting on AAA for two 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 the electricity was out in the whole town, which meant no gas there either.  We ended up having to go four exits up to find fuel, or about 15 miles! When we came back, we put 10 gallons of diesel in their truck and we were all off.

We arrived in Moab, unpacked, and decided to hit an offroad 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!

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 four attempts on it, almost making it out, but 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. I 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, losing the mounts to keep the grille straight, tweaking the grille, and getting oil in the motor. So, we had to pull the spark plugs and blow the oil out, and smashed some steering lines. We had two other Jeeps with us, so we took one all the way back to the trailhead 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 needed at a parts store in Grand Junction, Colorado, which is about two hours away. The store 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 4 Wheel Parts on its vendor run on Metal Masher. Stay tuned for the write-up of that ride.