Black Canyon Creek Trail

We met at Nora Jean’s Coffee Café at 7:30 for breakfast.

After breakfast we headed north to Senator Highway. We followed Senator Highway to the turnoff for the first trail of the day.
Here we stopped to air down the tires.

While I was hooking the deflator to the rear drivers side tire stem, I noticed that the bolt that holds the track bar to the axel had worked its way about 3/4 of the way out.

Oh Oh! Can’t go anywhere until that’s fixed.
I crawled under the jeep and with a little help was able to get the bolt back in place.

Dennis K came up with a nut for the bolt and in a short time we were ready to go.

This trail makes a loop through the mountains and is pretty steep and rocky.

We go up over some steep rutted grades…

and down into some deep canyons.

At the bottom, we drive in a wash  for a while, then back up the mountain again.

This continues on and on, going in and out of Canyons and bad spots.

The trail just keeps going.

The First Obstacle.

We came around a corner and saw the other jeeps stopped on the road ahead. People were out of their jeeps and walking the road.

We stopped a ways back and waited to see what was going on. As it turned out there was a bad spot on the trail that required a little guidance.

Everyone got through easily with Dennis’ guidance.

Obstacle Number Two.

We continued along the trail to the next bad spot.

And it was a bad one.

This particular obstacle had a very high pucker factor as it is a very tippy spot with a ledge to climb at the peak of the tippiness.

The first two jeeps got through with good spotting but they dug the down side of the spot even deeper. Which made it even more tippy.

Here is Bill our leader going through the spot.

Dennis M follows.

By the time Dennis K went through we had to strap his jeep. We tied a tow strap to the top of the jeeps roll bar and we hung on to try and keep the jeep from reaching the rollover point.

Eventually Dennis had to use his front lockers to get up the step.

Then it was Tom’s turn. Tom Is not really a risk taker so he opted to let Dennis M drive his jeep.

We used the same procedure as with the rest but by now the downhill side of the spot was even deeper so Rick climbed on the Rock guard and acted as a counter weight.

Tom’s Jeep was across. Now it was my turn.

We hook up the strap,

Rick climbed aboard…

and off we go.

The jeeps left front tire is off the ground at this point.

All Right!! We all made it through without rolling off into the canyon.

We continued along the trail going up…

and down…

and around and around.

Take a Break.

We dropped down into a nice wide wash with some shade so we stopped here for a break.

It wasn’t far from here back to I-17 so after a break we headed for the highway and the next Trail.

I’ll tell you all about that tomorrow.