This winter's snow run drew a much bigger crowd than last year. Something like 15 rigs showed up in Angels Camp Saturday morning. Present were members of both the Gettin'Off and Bounty Runners 4WD clubs out of the Bay Area as well as the norther California Land Rover club (including a local resident in an awesome Defender 101) and a number of independents. Owing to the large group size, folks split up into two main groups. Most of the Rover contingent headed up to tackle the Ramsey trail, while the rest ventured a bit higher to find some deeper snow. We managed to get to the Gettin'Off Adopt-A-Trail and most of us decided to try to bust through the snow berm and give it a try.
Scott
and George took turns and soon had a nice ramp up and over the berm
onto the untracked snow beyond. Here, Tom Boyd pilots Das Beast
up and over the berm. One Bronco suffered a punctured rear diff, so
stayed back to attend to the lack of gear oil. Several other rigs
headed back down to Ramsey to try their luck in the snow down lower.
It soon became apparent that the deep snow was going to make for some tough going. As I had the best surface area to weight ratio, I aired down my 33x15.50 Swampers to 2.5 psi and skirted around everyone else to try and break trail. With the uphill slope and deep, soft snow it was tough going. I stopped and let more air out, dropping off the bottom of my digital air gauge (goes from 2.5 then 0.0), so I think I was running between 1 and 2 psi. For stretches, I could get up on top of the surface then would break through, especially when the road turned or the grade increased.
Finally
we reached a stretch of soft snow that I just couldn't get on top of
and we stopped for lunch. In back, Leo was having trouble in the first
parts of the trail so turned around and left. Tom was also finding the
heavy Das Beast wallowing in the deep stuff and his 35" Mud
Terrains were digging deep ruts for Hogan in his Cherokee w/ stock
tires following him.
We
all managed to get turned around (although Tom thought he should test
his winch out just to make sure it worked). While waiting for Tom to
get turned around, I played around a bit with the crawler gears. I
found, to my amazement, that in my lowest gear, at idle, the truck
would just crawl right over the deepest snow. (Click here for a QuickTime video
clip of my Snow Crawler in action). Apparently, if you go slow
enough to let the snow pack under the tires, you can float up on top
with ease. I was halfway tempted to head back to the end of the trail
and push on.
Note: A few months after this trip, I found out my rear Detroit locker was malfunctioning. One side was in good shape but the other side would sporadically lock and unlock. This probably explained the trouble I was having in the snow, as I would be going along fine then all of a sudden the back end would sink into the snow. It was probably the locker misbehaving.
After returning to Hwy. 4, we aired up a bit and headed back down the road to check out the trail formerly known as Ramsey. We got to the main turn-off area just in time to meet the Rovers to coming back up. After playing in the snow for about half an hour, Terry and Kevin showed up. They had just caught the Rover group at the last obstacle and had to spend some time winching Kevin's Defender 90 out of a high centered situation. Both groups made it all the way down to the river. After a bit more fun in the snow, we all headed back up the trail, aired up and headed home.
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