Charouleau Gap Continued and the Last Weenie Roast.

Notice: All the pictures with a date stamp on them are Sue's

Charouleau Gap Continued.

Leaving the step we crossed the creek again.

We drove by a cave on the left side of the trail and Sue spotted a large squirrel at the entrance.

The squirrel was gone by the time we came by.

Another Interesting spot.

We continued bouncing along and came to another interesting couple boulders in the trail.

Denis climbed over the obstacle ok. Then it was my turn.

I got some nice left wheel air on this one.

The Elevator Shaft.

The next obstacle is called the Elevator Shaft. It is steeper than it looks in the photos.

We looked at it for a while and decided that if we stayed on the right side on the rocks it wouldn't be to bad.
Once Denis remembered to turn his lockers on he made it look easy.

Here is Sue's view.

Next was my turn.

It was a lot easier than it looked.

The Trail Goes On.

After the Elevator Shaft. the trail went up

and down several steep hills.

While coming down one of these steep hills Patti spotted a couple deer running through the cactus.

One of them stopped to pose.

Confusing Directions.

We came to a gate and went through it.

Our trail book only mentioned one gate on the trail and said that after the gate we would come to a paved road. There was no pavement here and it was a couple more miles of rough trail and three more gates to go through before we got to the pavement.

Once on the pavement we aired up and headed for home.

A Clicking Noise in the Jeep.

As we were going over all the rocks and boulders on the trail I kept hearing a clicking noise coming from the front of the jeep. I looked the front end over when we stopped for lunch but didn't notice any thing out of the ordinary.
When we got back to the RV park I checked the front suspension out again and noticed that the lower control arm looked like it had been moving as there was a shiny area around the attaching bolt and washer. I was very tired so I decided to tighten it in the morning.
Around 9:15 this morning I stopped working on the blog and got out my tools and crawled under the jeep to see what I could do. It turned out that both control arms were loose.  I used my longest breaker bar and tightened all the bolts up as tight as I could get them. When we get back to Quartzsite I will go over all the bolts on the suspension, front and rear.

The Last Weenie Roast.

It was a great ride on Thursday but long and fatiguing. I talked with Denis and we decided that instead of taking another long rough ride on Friday we would just go to the Gila River for a weenie roast.

Denis, Sue, Lise and Frank showed up at our place around 10:30 and we headed for the river. We went out Florence-Kelvin Road to Cochran Road.

We stopped at the staging area to air down.

We were heading for the beach where Patti and I tried to have lunch a couple of weeks ago.
While we were airing down several ATV's headed out the road toward the river.
Unfortunately they beat us to our planned beach. So we had to go to plan "B"
We drove under the railroad trestle.

And went on to our second choice beach.

There was no one there so we settled in, lit a fire and sat round for the rest of the day visiting and burning hot dogs.

Around 2:00 we headed back to the staging area, aired the tires back up and said our goodbye's to our Canadian friends with promises to keep in touch and see each other next fall. They are going back to Canada after a short trip to Tombstone AZ.

It was a good relaxing day but with a bitter sweet ending. We will miss our friends until the Fall.