January Timber Tamer Run
The plan was to go to Denny Creek and run that road up to the top or as deep in the snow as we could get..It didn’t quite turn out that way.. So read on…
I woke before the alarm went off and thought I would just lay there till it went off. Sure enough I dozed and then the nasty sound of an alarm making me swing my arm aimlessly toward that god awful sound.
I got up and got moving trying to be quiet as Casey decided to stay home and watch our old dog
I succeeded in getting someone to ride shotgun with me today and had to get out the door on time to pick him up.
I got to My friends house just about on time and Jerry my old school buddy was ready to go. We even had a few minutes to check out his CJ7 he was redoing from the frame up and it was looking good.
Back on the road towards North Bend we picked up Cosmine in his Blue jeep. Jerry and I chatted and got caught up and then all of a sudden Jerry was saying isn’t this the exit? I looked up and saw North Bend and took the exit… But then realized it was one exit early… Opps? Well instead of making a Tamer Turn this early in the day we just followed the main road into downtown and made our way to the Chevron to top off fuel and head over to Safeway parking lot pretty much on time.
Others were already there and we saw John Vandergrift, Chris and Ashley but no one else? And what happened to Cosmine. I parked and got out and then saw a hint of Cosmine’s blue jeep parked waay over in another area.. It looked like others were over there as well. We jumped in our rigs to join the others and found Terry (Shag), Rick Mareno and daughter, Joe was there with Shawn riding shotgun, Jeff Mars in his red jeep, Steve Armentrout with Rudy in his beefed up jeep.
We chatted a bit and some went in and used restroom and by 10:15 rolled around we decided to head out onto the freeway and get up to the trail head.
Up onto the on ramp to I-90 I hear Rick on the radio. He got caught by the light and would be bringin up the rear… I assured him he would have no problem catching up cause I was leading the pack in my Samurai and it is not a very fast rig, lol.
It didn’t take long for Rick to catch up and we formed a long line. We got up to the exit and got over to Denny Creek only to see a big fat “Road Closed” sign. So I got on radio to go over the overpass and there at Tinkham rd another Big “Road Closed” sign.
We got out and figure why not ry Stampede pass area? It wasnt too far from us at this point so off we went. We rolled into a HUGE parking lot, actually two of them and almost full too. It was a Sno park area and it was getting used. As we putted thru we spotted a ranger and stopped him and asked where we could wheel in some deep snow. He told us the places we already tried and then maybe Spanaway? We thanked him for hs time and putted up to park and get out and come up with another game plan. Cause this was not working at all…
We all decided to make the long drive back over to hiway 2 and try getting up into Jacks pass. As we talked about it the ranger came back through and told us we could not park in the Sno-park as we didn’t have Sno-park passes. WE all jumped back in and back to North Bend.
On the way back we figured it would be good to stop back at Safeway in Northbend for lunch and potty break and it worked out good for timing..
With Bio break done, Rick and daughter decided to call it and head home so we lost them in the group.
I headed thru North bend and made a wrong turn and missed the highway to Fall City and had four rigs behind me. The other four rigs went the correct way and my Shotgun rider Jerry gave my navigation to next right to get us back on track. I guess you could call this a TamerTurn. We got to the intersection and saw the other four rigs go by and got in behind them as soon as we could.
With another nice little ride going thru Fall City, Carnation and Duvall, we lost Terry (Shag) In Duvall I believe. We finally got up to the Start up/Sultan round a bout and Chevron and we all wanted to fuel up.
I think it was between 2 and 3 by the time we got pulled off onto Beckler River rd. We ran up the road a ways and saw some guys in samurai, and built up Tracker and asked if there was snow up there..they assured us at Jacks pass there was snow. We traveled up a bit farther and started getting into some deeper ruts. I figured a good time to pull off road and air down..But I couldn’t get out of the ruts so we all aired down right in middle of road.
We finally got into some deeper snow and at one point we saw John get sucked into the wet ditch with his driver side. Cosmine was right there and backed up and he gave John a tug, then another tug.. we couldn’t get John out of the ruts. We finally shortened up the strap went opposite corners and we got John up and out of the ruts and ditch.
Onward we went…
Now it has been probably about 15 years since I was at Jacks pass, but its pretty obvious if you know it is a 5 way intersection. And sure enough we were there. And the snow was packing nicely although heavy.
I ran out into the intersection trying to find the deepest snow and sure enough kind of fell into a hole. I dropped down into low range and crawled out nicely. Cosmine was following me and he got stuck as he was trying to make his own tracks. Next was Jeff Mars. He got his lil red jeep out into the deep snow and had it turtled with tires spinning freely in short time. Chris and Ashley had stopped right at beginning of intersection, and Joe wanted to get out into the snow so he went to go around Chris and fell down into what appeared to be a coverd ditch on the edge and got stuck.
I was still crawling myself out of the deep snow when I saw Joes stuck and spinning wheels. I didn’t realize that Steve in his beefed up rig had already hooked to Joe and was attempting to pull him backwards and out.
I cant remember seeing it but I know John got stuck in his jeep at one point I think maybe trying to help Jeff get out? Chris got maneuvered into place to help John and he winched himself out.
I got myself out of the deep snow and had to laughingly tell my friend Jerry I get these guys up here into the snow and then get em all stuck..LOL
I got out to help pull some cable and start getting everyone mobile again.
With Steve workin with Joe I knew Joe would be unstuck shortly.
We got John into position to yank on Cosmine with a winch while we also got Chris positioned to yank out Jeff with his winch. We had tried tugging but the snow offered no traction at all, so winching was best choice.
We winched one at a time and we got every one unstuck and sitting on top of the snow. That is when Steve decided to power around the big intersection area with his beefed up jeep. It was cool to watch and his rig sounded good, at least the first two donuts he did. Then there was a sound..kind of clicking noise. He did another round then stopped to check it out. Sure enough he had blown his left front axle u joint. It was getting close to 5pm now and we figured we had had enough for the day.. So we headed down. It was pretty uneventful and Steve was able to go slow and in 3 wheel drive he had no problems.
We did have to stop where John had gone into the ditch to try to recover a mud flap he had torn off backing into the bank the first couple tries of getting unstuck. We found it in short order and went on down to a good paved area to air back up and headed home.
I think everyone had a good time despite all the road trip time.
I want to apologize for a run that kind of went haywire and also need to thank you all for showing up and putting up with the wild roadtrip we went thru.
All in all we put roughly 250 miles on our rigs going from one trail area to another to another. We finally found some snow and got stuck..Hehe your not wheeling till you get stuck, right? LOL
Thank you all for your patience and good spirits as well as ideas and directions..It took all of us to get thru the day and finally end up with a good , or at least a partial good run.
Sorry for the late report and the typos.
Gary M
TT256
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