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Jeep-SLC Members Compete in the Team Trophy Challenge 2005Team Trophy Challenge 4x4 Event (http://www.teamtrophychallenge.com/)The Jeep-SLC list had 4 member go to the Team Trophy Challenge in Portland OR. this year. Here is a summary of the events as they unfolded from the Jeep Lists point of view: Here's the initial report from Russ Fullmer: Whale... the team is off to Oregon. http://www.teamtrophychallenge.com/ And the first update Ted Anderson got from the team: At 6:30 last night. 575 miles for Brett with no break downs/Flats/Overheating/Rod knock/Lost trailer/ran out of gas/Field sobriety checks/speeding tickets that's amazing. One thing he said is there Freaks up there. Can't pump your own gas. And the speed limit is 65 mph it's driving him nuts cause they actually GO 65 not like Utah 10 over. I think the reason their having no problems is EZ and Marc are with him and the Freakshow in home.
Ted Reports more information:
Then Bart Jacobs replies:
This is EZ's final write up of the main events:
IT WAS AWESOME!!!
Combine a long day of mixed wheeling, hiking through dense forests, searching for hidden flags, using a GPS and map and compass, and working together on vehicle related tasks and you get the Team Trophy Challenge. Set in the VERY densely forested mountains of western Oregon, the TTC is in its 13th season. Our team of four experienced 'wheelers and outdoorsmen--Myself, Glenn Wakefield, Brett Davis, and Marc Bryson--set out to make a name for itself by being the only team that entered this year from a state other than Oregon or Washington. And make a name we did, but not for the reasons we thought!
The TTC is essentially a race to complete a pre-designed course as quickly as possible in the time allotted. And the time given isn't near enough! Teams start in random order and are given a packet of directions for the rest of the day and given about one minute to read them over before starting. Then we were off, following the most crazy mixed up directions in a forest with more trail forks and turn off's than I have ever seen before! It was very easy to get turned around, and we were mixed up on many occasions. After 30 minutes of driving we came across our first task...pull each other's vehicles with a tow strap around a coned off course, and then switch vehicles and do it again. We hit a few cones, to say the least. After the first task is when we got the most mixed up with the directions. After a couple hours of wandering we decided to abort and skip ahead to the next set of directions. We arrived at a really kewl steep uphill road, or what was once a road....now complete with red clay steps interspersed with big slippery rocks and a BIG car sized boulder that you had to pivot around on the uphill side, off camber of course. It was a winch hill and graded on our score card as such. We went up it quickly without skipping a beat, using our new winches. We did it much faster than the team in front of us, who had to do a multi anchor pull due to poor positioning at the beginning (they couldn't get their Toyota truck far enough up the hill to take the pull in the right direction.)
The next section was a "more difficult" trail that was a very tight
twisty muddy road through the trees and over roots, rocks, and more mud
for good measure. it was fun, but long. It seemed like it wasn't
going to end. We came across our next task: T ball. Three baseballs
are placed on tees in precarious locations in a large gravel pit, not a
bit unlike the barrow pits found in the 5 mile pass area. We did very
well at this event. I drove around the course and retrieved the balls
with my navigator, Marc, and then we gave the balls to Brett and Glenn
and they put them back. At this point it was raining again and
continued raining until about 8:30 p.m..
Soon we arrived at 7-up hill. Imagine a wet and muddy Potato Salad hill. Many rigs were lined up waiting to go up it, and no one was even bothering to try to drive it. It was winch session number 2. We used Barney the purple jeep to pull up our winch cable, so as soon as Brett was up, we immediately started winching off his vehicle. At the top of 7-up was another task. This time we had to show our mechanical know how: A stick punctured a radiator and we had to show how to repair it on the trail, a timed event. We quickly grabbed some needle nose pliers and started crimping the tubes. We completed this one pretty fast!
After the radiator repair we ran another black diamond difficult rated trail, which was really a lot of fun. It had a lot of large rocks covered with slick mud to go up. It took generous throttle, and thanks to Glenns spotting we were up in no time. We crested the top to watch competitors behind us arrive at the bottom and have trouble ascending the first ledge. Fun stuff!
During the 7-up episode we we able to figure out how we went wrong on the second section. We headed straight for a trail called Roger's Road, which was like driving through the jungles of Burma! There were tree branches crossing the trail from all directions, and foot deep oatmeal like mud that was being splashed all over everything. Brett and Glenn had a particularly interesting time in Barney, who was door less and topless and the windshield washers gave up the ghost about an hour before that. This was a timed event...we had to go about 3 miles at 13.2 mph average. The problem was, it was almost impossible to maintain even 7 or 8 mph!! The road was like a bunch of Z's and W's all strung together, and there were DEEP waterbars every 100 feet that you had to slow down for in a big way or you'd end up launching yourself into the next hill. Glenn and Brett had a hard time seeing out of their windshield since the inside had as much mud on it as the outside! Not far from the start, I noticed a nasty vibration, and then my rear drive line let loose. A u-joint cap worked its way loose. This caused us to basically fubar that task, as it took 20-30 minutes in the mud and rain to get my spare driveline in. When we got to the top we arrived at our final task...hunt for 9 flags hidden on the mountain. The flags were marked on a topo map they handed us, but only two of them had GPS coordinates. The rest have very vague clues (on the SW side of top). We did very well on this one! it was getting dark and we found the last one in another jungles of Barneo-like trail in pitch black. When we arrived back at camp, we intended to try our luck at the stretcher carry, but that was when the rear axle in Leroy had had enough! The cast center section broke away and the right side tube came out and down on the ground. Marc radioed to Glenn and Brett, "we've got a little problem here...we're broke". They asked how bad, and I replied "game over." I was very lucky in that it happened 100 yards from camp on a graded road where I could get my trailer backed up right to it.
The breakage caused us not to finish. We missed the night exercise, which was a time speed distance rally in the dark with more of the famous lousy vague directions. Despite the problems and my unapprieciativeness with the lousy weather, we had a great time and (speaking for myself) can't wait to go back and do it again next year. It turns out we scored well on most of the tasks we completed and found 13 of 16 flags!! Check it out at www.teamtrophychallenge.com
Here is Brett's Description of Russ's purple Jeep he drove. Without taking anything away from Leroy (God rest his axle) I've got to say that Russ has built a very capable and durable jeep in Barney. It climbs, it handles, it flexes. I was worried that with 4.10's that it wasn't geared low enough for 35's but I ended up climbing most stuff in 2nd and 3rd, with 1st saved for the really bad stuff. The 258 with the Howell TBI just grunts down to about 2 rpm or something and pulls and pulls and pulls. No hiccups at all. Remember the slide-down-the-hill scene in Romancing the Stone? Picture climbing that, and you're supposed to average 13.2 mph!!! And it's raining and there's more mud on the inside of the windshield (flipped up from the rear tires) than the outside and the windshield wipers aren't working It was reported that the Team was doing very well before the little mishap.
we were in 5th place late Saturday when one of the jeeps experienced catastrophic rear diff breakage, tube broke out of the housing I believe.
Brett's comments on the event and the breakage:
Dunno if it was 5th place, but we were probably in the top 5 for the runoff on Sunday. We were doing as well as any of the teams that ended up competing for the top spot. Hard to say though if we would have placed.
7ish mpg avg 70-80 mph on the way up and back. EZ got 10ish. One blown trailer tire, no other mishaps. On the way up we should have filled unpin east OR and we were running low...and up ahead we saw Marc and EZ pulled over, putting in gas from the gas cans; they'd made the same mistake. 5 gallons later, we were on our way.
Pictures Provided by EZ.
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