Holy Cross 8/20/11

A couple of us camped out near the trail head on Friday night, and a couple others met up with us Saturday morning for our Holy Cross trail run. In the group this week was Chuck, Chad, Brett, and a handful of XJ boys from NAXJA. Ryan rode along with his brother Chad accpeting the fact that his rig would never survive this trip.

We hit the trail at 10am and had no problems to speak of. At the first major obstacle, most of the boys took the left side wall climb except for Brett who doesn't have lockers. After a couple smashes on the rock sliders, we continued on to French Creek. When we arrive, we were surprised to only see a small group of Samis in front of us. As soon as they cleared, we took our shot at the creek. The first few XJ guys made it up and across with pretty limited effort, and then the next few had some major problems. One guy came down on his exhaust and somehow smashed his downsteam O2 sensor which started giving the Jeep bad readings and caused it to lose significant power. He took a strap, but it still took some time to get him out.

Brett took the far left line and with wet tires and no lockers, was unable to make it out of the creek. We hooked up his winch, but for some reason it wouldn't pull load. We turned a guy around from up top and used his winch to drag Brett out. It was now Chuck's turn, and he got up and out of the creek, but still had to get over the boulder at the shore. Turns out, Chuck hadn't gotten enough damage last week, so he decided to tag one of the rocks on his exit with the passenger door.

Once we got to the city, we waited for the other groups behind us to come up. We started our way down and about half way, Brett realized he had destroyed a u joint. We continued on since the cap remained and we knew we could limp the JK back to our camp. Once again, we had a rough time at the creek. Everyone had a tough time getting out, and Brett was pinned between some big rocks at one point. We took out his winch line again with no hope, but magically it started working this time. Everyone was hung up at some point on our way across the creek. We finally managed to get everyone across and out to the main road. We started the u joint repair by the fire about 9:45pm. Took us awhile to break that joint out, but Brett was on his way back to Denver about 11pm.

It was a super long day for sure.

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