Eastern US Nationals # 2 Dayton, TN

The weekend of May 12-13th marked WeRock rock crawling competition #2 for the Eastern Series. This event was held at a new location that no competitors had been to before: Sequatchie, TN; a town located on the border of Alabama, Tennessee and Georgia. We left Thursday night, stayed in Kentucky overnight, and arrived for tech inspection on Friday night, finishing just in time before it started to storm. We loaded the Jeep on the trailer and headed to the hotel and then to dinner.

Saturday morning, we arrived at the competition site, got our running order and made it up the side of the mountain to our first course. We all had to drive through trails to get to our courses, so all of our tires were caked with mud. That having been said, no one in my group even made it through the second set of gates due to a lack of traction. We scored a 38 on this obstacle and timed out.

On course 2, the 2 rigs ahead of me finished this course, so I knew it could be done. As we lined up to go through the first set of cones, I heard the words I did not want to hear from my spotter, "We cut a tire." We tried to keep moving, but because the front passenger tire went completely flat, we kept sliding out of the gate. So we were done before it even started, scoring a 40. We headed back to the pits to find out the tire had a slice in the sidewall. We swapped out the tire for a brand new one and we were back to our 3rd course in no time.

Course 3 I knew no one in the morning had finished it, so that told me it was going to be tough. We had to get the Jeep up a rock face, turn down while sideways on top of this rock face and then up a hill climb. We made it on top of the rock face, but as we turned the Jeep downhill, I felt it get tippy. At this point, we only had 30 seconds left and it wasn't worth a potential roll over when we probably weren’t going to finish the course anyway. So we timed out with scored a 39 and moved on to our fourth and final course for Saturday.

This course was hard for the morning stock guys because of their tires being caked with mud. By the time we got there, everything had dried up. We maneuvered through this course with ease until we went through the 3rd set of cones. As we were coming off a rock face, I heard hissing noise. Unbelievably, the tire we just changed had gotten a cut in the sidewall! Luckily for us, we were almost done with the course. We finished it as best as we could and ended up with a score of a 14. Now we were in a situation - we only had 2 spare tires. We changed one earlier and were installing the last one now. If we cut another tire on Sunday, we were done. We removed the flat tire, installed the beadlock onto the new tire and went back to the hotel for the day.

Sunday morning, we found out we were in 7th place, out of 14 competitors. I also found out, there were only 30 points separating where I was in 7th to 1st place, which was a pretty good indication of how the courses were on Saturday for the majority of the stock class. To make it to the shootout, we had to be in the top 6 places, so no pressure right?

We made the climb back up the mountain to our first course. They rotated the running order on day 2, so we were second to run. The first competitor on obstacle 1 made it look interesting, so we decided to take our own line and make it look easier. We maneuvered through this course with no problems, took one cone and finished with a score of 10. On course 2, we saw a few of the stock guys finish it, so we knew it could be done. We made it through the first set of gates and headed to the last one before we could finish. The last gate on this course was on a side hill, with a big rock to the passenger side. As much as we tried, we could not get 3 tires through the gate to qualify and we timed out with a score of 38.

Course 3 looked easy enough for us. We watched the other competitors do it and came up with a strategy about how we were going to go about running it. As we started, we had to get up a rock face. It took us some time, but thanks to the skinny pedal, we made it up. As we headed through to gate number 2, we cleared it and headed in reverse down the same rock face to clear gate 3. By this time, we only had seconds to finish it. I had the Jeep in full throttle heading to the finish gates and timed out just as my back 2 tires went through! If only we had a half a second more. We were very disappointed with that but there was nothing we could do about it.

We headed to our fourth and final course. This course had a bonus line, and at this point, if we wanted to stay alive for the shootout, we were planning on taking it. Bonus gates took an extra 10 points off of your course score if you completed it. We were able to finish this course with no problem and we took the bonus. We finished the course with a personal best score of minus 7.

For the weekend, we ended up finishing in 11th place, out of 14 competitors. Our next competition is scheduled for June 8-10th in Jellico, TN.