A little wheeling on the way to work today...

[slipinkramer]

http://108.42.1.231:43159/images/NF_access_road.3gp

It's a crappy quality video from my Android phone. Don't know if a PC or Mac can read the native Android files. Hope so...

[nickyg]

Nice, where was it?

[slipinkramer]

Its in the National Forest east of Visalia, CA near the town of Badger, CA.

Go to http://maps.google.com

paste: 36°39'47.3"N 118°56'25.8"W into the search bar.

Select satellite in the upper right of the map.

Zoom in with the bar on the left. I was wheeling around that granite slab you should be able to see from the satellite view.

[4.3LXJ]

I have been down that way several times, but unfortunately not with my Jeep

[slipinkramer]

I was on my way to a radio transmitter tower site near there. I had some maintenance work to do there today. The Forest Service just opened the gates to these trails on Tuesday (our government locks us off of our own public land in the wintertime). I figured I would goof off a little bit since it was such a nice day.

[4.3LXJ]

You might as well. One of these days I will be down there and wheel the Dusey Ershom. But not this year.

[Joliet Johnny]

So much better than anything I can do. Best I can do is when the trucks driver block the road and I can go into the very bumpy grass the cars get stuck in cause the shoulder drop is too much for them.

[slipinkramer]

Let's do it! I wheeled Dusy Ershim in 2004 and it was a great trip. It takes 2 to 3 days or even more if you like to hike and fish around the lakes.

[4.3LXJ]

Not sure when I will get around to Dusey, not before next year for sure. However, we will be camping for a week this summer at High Lakes, which is more local to me. You are invited to attend and wheel for a whole week if you want. There are a whole system of trails there from mild to slightly insane. We will be hiking there and looking for Petroglyphs at two of the lakes. Elevation is about 6000 feet, so it will be cooler up there then. Also have a tentative trip to the Rubicon area planned. But I have to get my son's TJ finished first before that one.

[slipinkramer]

Not sure when I will get around to Dusey, not before next year for sure. However, we will be camping for a week this summer at High Lakes, which is more local to me. You are invited to attend and wheel for a whole week if you want. There are a whole system of trails there from mild to slightly insane. We will be hiking there and looking for Petroglyphs at two of the lakes. Elevation is about 6000 feet, so it will be cooler up there then. Also have a tentative trip to the Rubicon area planned. But I have to get my son's TJ finished first before that one.

Where is High Lakes? Actually, I've no clue where the heck in the world you are :D

I'm planning a trip to The Rubicon later this season; likely in August, possibly in September. A friend of mine from the Bay Area is coming in his 2006 LJ Rubicon. He is an accomplished wheeler and we used to assault Moab together 15 years ago.

Perhaps we could all coordinate the dates for The Rubicon. Then you two could surge ahead and conqueror the trail in your real Jeeps, while I scrap along in my grocery getting, soccer-mom-mobile... I'm a Ham operator so I could just call out for help when I grenade a CV joint or smash an aluminum axle pumpkin into little pieces :stars:

[4.3LXJ]

Sept would be good for me on that one. I will have the boy's TJ done by then and hopefully lockers in both ends of it too. High Lakes is an area near Hwy 70 in CA. I am in the Chico area. Here is a link to get you started. This is by no means a complete map.

http://www.friendsofthehighlakes.com/maps.shtml

[slipinkramer]

I had an older RCA FM radio transmitter to repair today; repairing radio stations is what I do. This particular one is located at a remote communications site out east of Bakersfield, CA and there are some dirt roads not to far away in the Sierra Nevada foothills. No challenging wheeling involved today but it's a scenic area this time of year and worthy of a visit. I parked and ate a sack lunch near the water. It was pretty kick-ass.

So here is today's submission to "A Little Wheeling On The Way To Work Today".

[slipinkramer]

OK, so today's submission wasn't on the way to work... But when I got home from work my wife announced that both our teenagers were going to sleepovers at friend's houses.

Realizing suddenly that we were free for a night, we quickly decided to throw a few things in the Jeep and head for one of our favorite backwoods camping spots. It's an hour's drive from home and just outside and below the Kings Canyon National Park. There is about a 2 mile trail in with 4 fun creek crossings. The water crossing can be very challenging and exhilarating, but not this year during our serious west coast drought, they were easy and any rig with 4 wheel low range and a little extra ground clearance could do it.

Attached are two pictures I took from the door of our tent this morning after sunrise and a third picture I took of my Jeep (an evil KJ :P ) parked about 25 yards away.

Little impromptu adventures like this embellish and improve our lives greatly! You just couldn't do it in a regular car.

It's A Jeep Thing, Understand?

[slipinkramer]

Today's mini off road adventure was on the way to a radio tower construction job site in the Coastal mountain range on the West side of the San Joaquin Valley in California. Its on a massive cattle ranch. The ranch is something like 50 miles long and 20 miles wide. That might be as big as some eastern states!

My handheld phone video doesn't do justice to the steepness of the inclines or the size of the rocks but, here are download links in case your'e interested...

Crossing a dry creek bed:

http://n6muk.sytes.net/images/Crossing.avi



Crawling out of a rocky creek bed:

http://n6muk.sytes.net/images/Crawling.avi



The first pic is my Jeep parked by the gate built on the site where the famous outlaw and horse thief Joaquin Murrieta was supposedly shot to death by California Rangers in 1853.

The second and third pics are how a Liberty flexes with all the sway bars still linked.

The forth pic is the end of the trail for that old beefer.