Busting open Red Elephant Hill 6/1/13

We met at the "old" Burger King in Dumont, (which is closed now by the way) and had a really nice showing from Patrol 14 and 12. We passed on over to the trail head and aired down there. The start of Red Elephant was very dry and dusty. We had no issues till we reached the one main rock obstacle. This obstacle now has a slight bypass on the right side, which is a good thing because the main part is very dug out now. Morgan was the first through, and even he had a bit of an issue with his 42'' tires. He was quickly through though and next came Ryan who fell off his line and then continued on the gas till he spun 90 degrees on the trail while hung up on his belly pan.

Next came Tom Moretti from Patrol 12. After seeing me get hung up down the center line, Tom tried the far left... which made for some great pics!

The best option for Tom was to continue forward, and to ensure he stayed tire side down we hooked up a couple tow straps to his rig. One to the roll bar, the second to his slider. And then came the man power!

The quote of the day comes from Tom, "I just wanted to thank everyone for strapping me up and holding me down." lol.

Pretty uneventfully after this as everyone else besides Ben decided to take the right side by pass.

 

 

Once we reached the North facing slope, we finally ran into some snow. We quickly reached fresh snow that no one else had tried busting yet. Being a little off camber, we had to shovel it out a bit to get everyone through. Look at all those folks digging!

 



After only a few drifts, we were able to break trail all the way to Bill Moore Lake trail via 171.3C. Once on Bill Moore, we stopped for lunch before attempting to break up some larger drifts higher up.

After lunch the patrol 12 guys headed down and we decided to keep heading up. We ran into some fairly large drifts, but after a little digging, some winching, and some patience, we were able to break trail another mile to the open clearing at the top of the ridge. This turned out to be 3 miles from the ATV staging area. We turned around and called it a day.