Back-road to Crown King...

A few weeks ago Mark called and said that his parents were going to be in town and he wanted to do a Crown King run. That sounded like a reasonable plan so I reached out to the usual suspects and got the band back together. Mark, acting like a complete twat, then called two days before the run and said he was going to do Crown King on Saturday and wanted to run Log Corral on Sunday. I wished him the best of luck.

Fast forward to this morning and the crew met up at the Carefree Hwy McD's. We then tanked up, bought some supplies and headed out. The sun was shinning, the wind was blowing (seriously, there was some real wind today) and the cold front threw a bit of a chill into the air. Once at the air-down spot Jeyr noticed that his CB was sending but not receiving. He checked the plugs and wiring under the seat but things didn't improve. Switching to channel 5 seemed to make the problem go away:

The trail was dusty but scenic. Joe (who was riding shotgun since Peachy was busy working on the new catalog) mentioned that he was amazed at how different the Arizona desert looked on this side of the valley:

As we made our way we saw numerous other groups on the trail:

After an hour or so of the graded trail we finally made it to the first back-road obstacle. It was finally time to put the Short JK into 4WD:

The Jeep easily walked this obstacle but immediately started making a noise. At first Joe and I thought we had torn a piece of the fender flare but it soon became obvious that the front driveshaft grease boot had finally given up the ghost:

While this means that the Short JK will be getting some new Xmas presents this year, it wasn't an immediate problem and we continued on. Jeyr and Dave made it up the hill next:

From here on out the trail was more interesting. While the trail was graded, the obstacles still remained and made for a few fun little challenges. This meant that we got to hit each and every single one of them without taking any of the obstacles:

We finally got to the longer / gnarlier obstacle and I mentioned to everyone that this one would take a bit of spotting. I headed up first and made it about half way before getting stuck:

Fortunately a little spotting by Joe and Jeyr got me up, over and through:

Jeyr made it about half was up before realizing that this was going to be a bit more of a frame smasher than he needed with his long wheelbase. That said, if he was willing to do a bit of bumping and grinding on the rocks he probably could have made it:

Dave pretty much ran up most of the climb until running into the same ledge I had an issue with. After trying to throttle through and then... throttle through some more, he got frustrated and decided to winch:

Fortunately, he was able to anchor to the Short JK and winched right up and over, leaving a few slivers of JKU frame on the rock for posterity's sake.

From here the trail turned more wooded. There were no more obstacles but there we still rocks and ruts to go over and the trail narrowed a bit: