DaveB
Long Jeep Fan
- Location
- Holladay, Utah
While doing Gold Bar and part of Golden Spike last Friday we got to witness how not to get a large group of people over the Gold Bar drop off. While I was waiting for my brothers to show up at the trail head a very large group of Land Cruisers came by. It was a mix of all years of Cruisers from the old style to the newest. There must have been a Cruiser convention going on as well as a classic Bronco convention. Once my brothers showed up I let one of my nephews drive the Commando and we headed up the trail. At the top of Gold bar the Cruiser group was having lunch and I was able to chat with a couple of them who had some very nice old classic Cruisers. One of the old cruisers had a nice Vortec V8 in it with ARBs, nice tires and looked like a fun rig. I wondered how well they would do as a group trying to get back up the big drop as a good portion of the Cruisers were stock rigs. Well after a bit we decided to head on out for dinner. When we got to the drop off the Cruiser group was stuck trying to get one of the open diff newer Cruisers up the wall. It should have been obvious to the trail boss and spotter that this rig was never going to get up the wall but they just kept on trying. The spotter's method for getting them up the wall was an emphatic give it more gas. I wouldn't want to look under that thing after all of the hard metal hits it took trying to fly up the wall. Finally after more than half an hour of beating it up they winched it up. The next rig to go up was the old classic Cruiser with the V8. He engaged the ARBs and gave it a try. Again the spotter told him to gun it. Every time he gunned it he would hit the large boulder at the base of the wall and bounce off. The V8 also made the tires spin too soon and he would just spin out even with lockers. After about 15 minutes of bashing this rig up the hill a bunch of other people started to tell the driver how to get up. With half a dozen spotters telling the poor guy what to do the trail leader got pissed off and told everyone to shut up and listen to the one spotter. Again the spotter told the guy he just needed to go faster which of course didn't work. At that point the trail leader finally asked us if we wanted to go around the group and of course we jumped at the opportunity since they still had 5 stock rigs to get up the hill. My brother and I spent a couple of minutes to fix the rock pile mess at the bottom of the hill and then took our try at the wall. We had three Jeeps. My brother was first in his LJ I lined him up on the obstacle and he walked right up without even chirping a tire. My nephew was next in my Commando and again I lined him up and reminded him to keep the momentum up once he started but not overdo the throttle. He also walked right up the wall without any issue. The last jeep was my nephews XJ that only has a rear locker and he too walked right up. We didn't stick around to see if the group spotter saw what we did differently so that he could help the other remaining rigs up the wall. The lessons we learned from watching this group are first have one spotter but make sure he knows what he is doing, second more gas is not always the best way, and third don't take newby drivers with stock rigs where they don't belong.
