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!