While Hull Mountain may not be the dirtiest place I have ever seen, it was in need of a cleanup day. After all, if we don't take care of our own backyard, it may get closed forever. So on May 22nd we wrangled up a few caring folks and gave it a good clean up.

We had a small group of volunteers, but a caring one. There were several people from the the Redwood Off-Road Club up in Eureka. We also had a group of Tacoma guys come up from San Jose, and a couple from Sacramento. We were hoping for a bigger turn out of local guys, but we greatly appreciated the help from the few people that showed up.

Thanks everyone that showed up, I think everyone will appreciate the work you put into the clean up day.

The clean up day itself was an odd one. When Joe and I first arrived, at about 10am the sun was shining and it looked like it was going to be a decent day. By 11am, all that was gone, and instead it was raining, then hail, then sun, then you guessed it, more of the same unpredictable weather. My group actually saw quite a bit of snow as we trekked up the mountain towards the hang glider launch pad. Talk about seeing all the seasons in one day! Wow!

We broke up into three groups and worked our way up and down the mountain concentrating at a few key problem areas. In about 4 hours, our three groups were able to fill a 10' trash trailer with 6' sides to the brim, an 18' car hauler with 2' sides was heaping, and several pickup beds were filled with tires, scrap metal, appliances, bottles and cans, and everything in between. I am still amazed that we collected so much trash, yet, there was still more to be cleaned. At least we got much of it. That makes me feel pretty good at least.

It was a work day, so I didn't take many photos of the crew, but I did manage to get a few towards the end of the day when we were preparing to break for the day. Just look at all that trash! Thanks again everyone that helped with the actual cleanup, or pitched in some cash to help pay for the disposal fees and food for everyone.

I know the only reason most of you are coming here is to see the video. So lets cut to the chase shall we.

My brother Joe, talked me into competing this year at the Surplus City 4th Annual Mud & Crawl event held at the Urban Assault OHV Combat Zone up in Oroville CA.

Joe was my spotter, and I was driving "Wobbly Bob" (that's the name of my Jeep). We have never competed before and have limited experience in the rocks. I had hoped that our first competition would have turned out better than it did, but that would be too easy.

On the first course (C1) I broke my front driver side hub right out of the gate. In the video you can see at about 1:23 while backing up the jeep come to an abrupt halt. Then continues with a slight pop. We were so focused on the course that we failed to notice it. Not knowing the front hub was broken, I tried to climb the concrete obstacle at the third gate and broke my rear passenger side axle shaft (approx. 1:57). Thus ending my first ever event course just four short minutes after it started.

Don't count us out though, we Aplet's are resourceful bastards. We replaced the rear axel shaft with a spare, "jimmy rigged" the front hub into the locked position, reused the old gear oil and went back out in hopes of completing the rest of the courses. Only, we rolled it on gate two. (should have stuck to the plan...)

In our original plan, we were going to winch to the top of the slick rock climb below gate three, but after tapping a bonus cone on gate one, we decided that we wanted to try and keep the 15 points that we would have taken for winching, and instead gun it up the slick rock climb to gate three. Bad idea as you will see in the video. As I start to climb the slick rock the jeep drifts just a bit and my rear tire catches a tree spinning me 90 degrees whirling me into a concrete obstacle at close to full throttle. (approx. 2:54)

What did we learn from this? Pay attention to everything! The spotter can only see so much. Communicate more, and above all. Stick to the plan unless you absolutely must change your strategy!

Here is some footage from our first ever nigh wheeling trip. The footage is not very clear of course, but hopefully you can see enough. In the first scene, I took Traver for a ride up a rocky trail, trying to scare him a little bit (noob) Then Joe took a shot and had very little problems with it. In the last scene starting when the jeep comes into focus from between the trees, this is when Joe spun the caps off his u-joint trying to get un-wedged from between some rocks. Fortunatly we were able to find both caps and all the berrings in the dirt. Something that is nearly impossible to do even in the daylight let alone at night. I put the caps back in place and winched him out from between the rocks and away we went. Pretty fun adventure for one night.

Back In August, we got together with a few friends and took the Jeeps and the Exploder up to Cow Mountain for a weekend camping trip. We wheeled for two full days, and even tried our hand at night wheeling. Talk about different… Try rockcrawling at night. It's a lot of fun and changes the way you look at the terrain completely.

Being that it is now 4 months since that trip, I feel that I should finally get my act together and start cutting together a video. Due to current time constraints this video is from the first day only. I will recut a final version with all the video at a later time.

After the disappointing day up at the Red Mountain 4x4 course and the comedy that ensued, I felt it was my duty to immortalize the moment in a somewhat tongue and cheek and comical video. I tried to cut the video together and make it look like it was something really cool, rather than comedy.