This was an unofficial club trail ride. It was Tim (Buster Stewart) with his green JKU, Tom (Concrete Charlie) with his black JKU, Tim's friend Jeff with his YJ on 34" Swampers, and me with Karen and Rugby in the CJ. The parking lot was crowded, but the trails weren't. Jeff managed to get the YJ started -- apparently the choke wasn't working and it didn't want to fire up in the chilly morning air -- and we started out down K and through the blue cut-across on C, then down the hill on Pole Line and turned left on B, then ran all the way out to 22 (blue-black) on the South Property. I found a big descent and almost did a handstand going down it, the others wisely took the bypass. We picked up 21 (green) at the end of 22, ran into a traffic jam at the end of 21 and took a left above Lake Christy, circled around Roxy's Way (blue) and wound up at the top of Lake Christy, went up and down a couple of the east side approaches to Lake Christy (black), then broke for lunch.
After lunch, we circled around S-4 to the Quarry, but it was mobbed as usual, so we went down and did the blue-black portion of Snakebite, then Tim and I did Camel Back (black). We forgot about the Quarry and headed back to the East Property to do Tatas, which now takes about an hour on a good day. We did some of the black bits in Tatas then headed out, but ran up behind a large guided group that I think was from Southern Delaware Jeep Club. We griped over the CB about the hold-up, then I proceeded to drop my front diff behind one rock and my left rear in front of another and had to be bumped back up with Jeff's winch. I think my rear E-Locker may not have been pulling in reverse -- next time around it's Ox Lockers with a full mechanical engage! We never did catch back up with the big group.
By the time we got out of Tatas, it was after 4:00 and we headed back to the parking lot. Karen took 2,500 photographs -- enough so you can watch old Slowpoke crawling in slow motion if that's your idea of fun. We are culling them down and will post the best of them on this thread asap. Thanks to Tim, Tom and Jeff for a great day. The weather was perfect -- 59 and sunny all day, and the only trail damage was Tim's tailpipe extension that got knocked off on Camel Back and, with Jeff's YJ making it back to the parking lot, no breakage. Hope to see all of you on the 26th at Anthracite!