Posted 7 months ago at 12:17 pm. 0 comments
After a serious bout of inactivity on the blog I decided to put up our latest Jeeping trip and pictures. Last Saturday we paid a visit to American Fork Canyon with Jamie, her step dad, and myself. This canyon is gorgeous! The temperature was about 47 up in the canyon and we even ran into a bit of snow fall while eating lunch but it was very enjoyable (completely different from our 5 mile pass trips that have hardly any greenery and where it sticks to the higher end of the temperature scale).
We drove up to Silver Lake and did some geocaches and explored a few small trails but we didn’t have time to get fruther up into the canyon where the good 4×4 trails are, maybe next time.
This was also the first real trip for our new GPS unit (the Garmin Colorado 300) and we put it through its pases. Thus far it has been a pretty good unit (canyon reception was a little bit rough but I expect that with any unit) and the geocaching features are amazing!
Posted 1 year, 2 months ago at 10:12 pm. 0 comments
So Saturday afternoon we managed to get out and do some wheelin on the Jeep’s new tires. We decided to explore the mountain that’s just west of Utah Lake. The weather was perfect and the trail was cake up to the summit of the mountain. Gorgeous views from the top (even with the inversion in the valley below). We hit up a few geocaches and then decide to start down the southern end of the mountain, I’d scoped out the trail to follow on the way down ahead of time and it seemed well traveled and should have proved pretty uneventful… well somewhere along the way we got a little off track and ended up following a trail that had the rockiest terrain I’ve ever seen in my life.
The good news is the new tires preformed like champs, no punctures (and I was pretty surprised, some narly rock gardens). We made it down to the easy dirt roads that lead back to the main road just as the sun had dipped behind the horizon. On our way back to the road we drove past a few muddy spots and I couldn’t pass the opportunity up to drive through some mud to finish a great day. Can’t wait until my new bumper and winch arrive for this winter.
Posted 1 year, 2 months ago at 6:25 pm. 0 comments
Well I finally decided to get some new tires on the Jeep, from little 28.8ish inch tires to some nice 32″ mudders. I was originally going to buy some Goodyear Wrangler MT/R but after searching around I couldn’t find them anywhere (a lot of shops mentioned that due to hunting season and the popularity of the tires). I decided to go with some Pro Comp Mud Terrain tires, they have some decent reviews and have a buy 3 get 1 for free deal.
I had them installed on Friday and I’ve done a little driving but no wheeling yet, maybe next weekend they’ll get some good use.
Posted 1 year, 2 months ago at 10:37 pm. 0 comments
The weekend before last we took a trip out to Catalina (just off the coast of LA) for some snorkeling and scuba. It was a pretty fun weekend, even though we were only gone for 1 day (we left early AM on Saturday and came back late on Sunday) it seemed like a long period of time had passed. We packed quite a bit into that little trip and I’d love to do it again. If you’ve never been to Catalina I’d highly recommend paying a visit, even if for only a few days. Visiting the island was like visiting another country, all of the buildings have an old feel to them and there must only be around 20 cars on the entire island (at least thats all we saw) but there’s multitudes of golf carts. The people were very friendly and the weather was perfect.
We had a few disposable water proof cameras that we took when we hit the water and got some pretty cool shots. Some of my favorite were taken while feeding the fish and snorkeling just above divers bubbles.
Posted 1 year, 3 months ago at 2:36 pm. 0 comments
Alrighty, Xmech is back in action after moving hosts around. Until now I’ve had a free ride when it comes to my hosting, I’ve always been able to piggy back on a box. Times have now changed and I’m finally paying for my own hosting (shocking I know). I’ve done a little looking around and decided to try out hostmonster because they have quite an attractive plan for a relatively cheap price (and it appears they have good customer service and snappy page load times).
Now onto some new gadget news… I’ve recently become a mac convert (I picked up my macbook pro in December) so naturally I was paying close attention to the apple September 2007 media event. As the conference went on and the new iPods were mentioned I was thinking “oh yeah thats cool thats cool”, and then apple dropped the bombshell, 8gb iPhones will be sold for $399 (a $200 price drop). Shortly after reading this I was in my Jeep on my way up to the apple store to pick up one of these new toys. I’d been debating about picking one up for the last few weeks and had decided that $599 was just too much money to drop on a phone but with the drop, totally reasonable. Now those whom live in Salt Lake know how quickly the weather can change and during the last few days we’d seen some decent rain showers blow through. Still not wanting admit that summer is slipping away my Jeep top and doors remain in my apartment and I enjoy driving around town without them. As I set out from the office toward the apple store (only a few miles and freeway for 95% of the trip) the weather didn’t look too bad, I couldn’t have been more wrong… by the time I pulled into the parking garage near the store the interior of my Jeep (and myself) were soaking wet. My ride back to the office was much better (I was lucky enough to catch a spot in between rain showers) and by the time I got to the office parking garage I was mostly dry again. All in all the trip up was completely worth it, I love my iPhone.
Posted 1 year, 4 months ago at 5:53 pm. 0 comments
Today we took the Jeep down to 5 mile pass to try out the Rattlesnake trail to knock out a series of geocaches and enjoy some 4 wheeling. For the most part the trail wasn’t too rough, very fun at times and at other times the trail required a huge amount of concentration. The hardest spot on the trail is dubbed “Carnage Corner” (check out the picture feed below for a picture that shows a huge rock cropping out from the left of the picture). The goecache mentioned that there’s a high chance for body damage here and sure enough I received some. In order to fit through here you have to climb over a portion of rock out cropping and then maneuver your way around this large rock, well the first time I attempted it I ended up sliding into the rock and smashing up my front right bumper and almost tearing off the wheel well cover. I repositioned and we tried again with much better results. It was a fun trail and I highly recommend it (if I was able to do it in my stock X then I’m sure most people won’t have much trouble with it). Later in the day we were driving around in the mountains visiting a few geocachinges and enjoying the views and suddenly I heard a “pssshhhhh” coming from my left rear tire. I leaned out and noticed it was on its way to being flat, so no problem, I’ve got a spare I’ll just go down to a more level spot and we can switch it out. As soon as I turned around I heard an even louder “pssshhhh” coming from the front left tire. Now we’re in trouble, I had no way of fixing multiple flats and we were about 4 miles up into the mountain. I managed to get down the trails about a mile before my tires were almost completely flat. After looking around and preparing to hike down to the parking lot to find someone with an air compressor we managed to flag down 2 dirt bikers and caught a ride with them back down to the parking, then I hitched a ride with an atv’er after we had tied his air compressor to the atv and we went back up to the Jeep. When we arrived there was a land rover parked next to the Jeep (we’d seen the land rover earlier in the day and checked to see if they were out geocaching), they had some tire plugs so we were able to fix one of the flats, fill it with air and change the other tire to my spare. After limping back down to the parking we aired up the rest of the way and headed home. All in all we had a blast and I learned a few lessons about being prepared for all kinds of trouble before we head back out.
