Tahuya Mar 2005

At Tahuya, I broke the front spring hanger off Moosenstein’s frame on my left rear spring. (Yeah – I always seem to break stuff on the easy runs.)

This year, most of the holes have been filled in by trail use, so it was pretty much a 2WD day for me (part of it 2WD rear, some 2WD front) – but interesting anyway.

Sad to say – the Molies were nothing, and I don’t know what the story is with whatever is supposed to be a killer hill climb there. If it was in the south loop – I didn’t see anything hardly even worth 4WD, let alone needing a winch. (Maybe that’s over in the closed north area they’re logging.)

They do have a nice little big-dog worthy rock crawl area set up on the south loop, and I think that’s what might have done in the hanger – I may have dropped down on a rock pretty hard. Oh well – that’s wheeling.

Dirtball, Dan-O – and Auto-M, God bless her, all tried a little rock crawling as well. Danny got all twisted up in one set of rocks, and managed to tearapart his exhaust system at the manifold – so things sounded REALLY RASPY heading back into the trailhead.

Ilene got to have her maiden voyage towing Mudtilda in her extended cab diesel Dodge Ram – which has pretty much been now christened as “Large Marge, the Love Barge.” Don’t know what beef Mudtilda had with Ilene, but when getting her driveline disconnected for the tow home, Mudtilda was good enough to whack Ilene on the noggin with the end of that driveline before it got zip tied out of the way. (Maybe Ilene forgot to warm her hands up first – who knows?)

Dirtball was having some problems with either spark or fuel, and had just enough RPMs left to coughingly make his way up onto the trailer.

Attendees were Ilene, Mary, Dan-O, Dirtball, Vaughn, me, and my buddy Bill came along for the ride. We also picked up another 2 Jeeps of some newbies at the trailhead who didn’t want to go out alone, and they did pretty well. Of course, Tahuya is a great place for beginners to cut their teeth.

As the day went on, it started to rain like crazy – we left the trailhead with a few raindrops splashing down, came back to find ALL of our tow rigs (parked side by side) sitting in an emerging pond 4 to 6 inches deep and filling fast. We did the minimum to get everything fastened down, and then headed to a Mexican restaurant for some hot food and to dry out a bit. As always – a wet day wheeling, beats a dry day doing almost anything else.

Moose