Club Challenge
Run Reports

Rubicon Trail:

The Rubicon trail is one of our all time favorites. We do it several times a year. Our last Rubicon run we had was an eventful one. At 11 am we left Sacramento except we didn't make it very far when one of our Jeeps in the club started over heating which we decided it was a lose radiator hose, but no that would be too easy, about 5 miles down the road it over heated again. We let it cool off and tried going again but ran into the same problem, so we stopped in Placerville and got a few items at Safeway which included a couple of bags of ice and put them in front of the radiator to help keep it cool. Then everything was OK for the time being. We stopped at Icehouse and topped off with gas and went on down to Loon Lake and set up camp for the night.

The next morning we woke up early and grabbed a quick bite and some coffee and hot chocolate and headed out on the trail. The Little Sluice was a lot of fun we got to see two rollovers (no one from our club) a Jeep and a Toyota, boy that was a sight. When it was our turn to go through we all made it just fine until the last one through an early model Bronco, who broke his front axle and then slid into a rock which put a dent in the side of it from front-end to rear tail light. Needless to say we ended up pulling him out. After we got him out of the way he started working on it and we had lunch.

While we were eating another guy in our club noticed he was leaking transmission fluid, after a quick inspection they found a few of the bolts between the transmission and transfer case adapter had stripped out. Since a few of the bolts were still holding we decided to vise grip it together and keep on going down the trail. We got to the Middle Sluice and found that a Toyota had broken down in the middle of the Sluice and could’t move out of the way or wouldn't. So we back tracked and went around.

We arrived at Buck Island when the Jeep with the transmission leaking problem broke a front axle and in the process ripped the spindle off the steering knuckle, tire and all, it was quite the sight. Since the steering knuckle was stripped we welded the spindle on minus the brakes, luckily we had a plug for the brake line and we had the Jeep mobile by the time it was getting dark. While he was fixing his Jeep the Bronco had found someone selling Bronco parts of course for a price and it just so happened that they had the front axle we needed we bought it for $250.00, what a deal.

We ended up setting up camp at Buck Island to finish fixing vehicles. We had a great dinner though Bar-B-Que. duck with all the fixings. The next morning we had a slow morning because of the late night we had prior. Although once we got on the trail we didn't have any real problems except on Cadillac Hill the Jeep with only three axles had to be pulled up by the Bronco. We finished the rest of the trail and got home about 7:30 PM.

Usually our club does not have this many problems but sometimes lady luck is not on your side.

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