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The weekend of May 22-23, kicked off the 2010 WeRock eastern rock crawling competition, at Rausch Creek Off Road Park in PA. The courses at Rausch are either sprayed concrete, natural rock or a combination of the two. We ran 4 courses on Saturday and 4 on Sunday.
Saturday: We were last to run in our group on course C1. We use this as an advantage to see how the competitors ahead of us do, what lines they pick etc to help us when it’s our turn to run. This course started with huge rocks to climb to get through the first set of gates. Once you made it up, you have to turn right to side hill through the second set of gates. We were able to get up the climb with no problems, take our Atlas transfer case out of gear to burn the front end around the rocks, so we would be lined up for the side hill. We made it through the second gate with no problems and headed to the giant concrete mound for gate 3. As we lined the jeep up for the climb, I pulled the Warn winch line in to compress the suspension for a better approach angle. The rig climbed this hill with no problems and no throttle – our Pro Comp tires were sticking to this concrete like glue. One of the modifications we did this winter was re-gear the axles from 4.56 gears to 5.13. WOW – what a difference this made! The rig is like a spider crawling over and up rocks! After we crested the top of the hill, we had a steep downhill to get lined up for. The way the rig was sitting was feeling a bit tippy, so I had to take a back up point and get the right line. We made it to the bottom with 45 seconds left and 2 more gates to get through. We weren’t going to finish this one, so we did everything we could to get through at least one more set of gates so we could get our progress points. We finished this course with a score of 35.
Course C2 was next. The 2 out of 3 competitors ahead of me, rolled their rigs at the end of this course, so it was all I could do to not let my mind race on this. As we started the course, my spotter Aaron asked me to take the front shifter on the Atlas out of gear. As I tried to do this, the shifter lever broke off in my hand! We had put custom levers on, something like hot rod shifters, so I could reach them when I have my harnesses tight. Luckily, it broke after I got the shifter back into 4L so we could finish the course. This course had a lot of side hill climbs, so a lot of off camber situations. We made it to the end of the course where the others had flopped with 2 minutes left. With a little gas up and over the concrete mound, we were able to finish the course with a score of 29.
Course C3 had us climbing up a concrete mount through the first set of gates, then side hill through gates 2 and 3. You can then either take the bonus line down through gate 4 and get -10 or go the normal line through gate 4. At the bottom of gate 4, you had to turn sharp left and climb back onto the top of the mound and climb over the center of it, make an off camber turn to the left and you were done. We had no problems with this course except the rear end sliding and hitting a cone. Score here 18.
Our last course for the day was C4. This was an all natural rock course. This course started out with about a 4 foot climb up a boulder. I had to gas it a bit to get up and over it, which we did with no problem, onto gate 2. Once at the top of the hill, we had to do a rear dig to burn the front end around so we wouldn’t have to use a reverse point. We had an off camber side hill going down through gate 2. As we did this, the rear end slid into the cone. We didn’t have problems with the rest of the course and finished it with 4 seconds to spare. Score on this course 18. We finished the day in 5th place, not far out of 4th.
Sunday: Typically, we would run the same courses we ran the day before but in the opposite direction. Today, we had all new courses set up to run. We were first to run course C1 and of course, it started to rain. The rain made this course very interesting and slick. The first gate was at the top of a double mound of concrete. We tried and tried to make it up this, warming up the Pro Comp tires, trying to get them to grab, when they did, but we used up a lot of our time. We had a side hill through gate 2 and then a straight descend down, with a mound of concrete at the bottom we had to climb up. We got to the bottom and got hung up on our skid plate. We tried to work the rig back and forth to get it unstuck and eventually it worked its way loose, but at this point, we were out of time. Score on this course 37.
Course C2 was next. The entrance and start of this course was a climb up about a 4 foot rock face. Aaron had to stack a ton of rocks for us to get a good start to our climb. Once we made it up and over, we had to come back down the other side, through gate 2. At the bottom of gate 2, back on level ground, I had to burn the front end around so we could be lined up for the hill climb up to the next set of cones. We had to gas it up this climb, since it was wet. Once at the top, we just barely hit the cone. The rest of the course gave us no problems. We were able to finish this course with a score of 8.
We headed over to Course C3 next. No one ahead of us finished this course, so we knew it was going to be interesting. The lines on this course was crazy. We had to go up through the first set of gates and side hill through gate 2. But with the courses being wet, this hill was fighting us. We made it through the first 3 gates and timed out. Score on this course was 37.
We started our run on Course C4. This was an all natural rock course. No one ahead of us was able to finish this course either, so our strategy was to try to run as clean as possible. We made it through the first 2 gates with no problem. Gate 3 was on top of a 4 foot rock ledge that every competitor ahead of us had to gas it up and over and took out the cone in the process. Aaron stacked a path of rocks for me and once the rig started the climb I smashed on the gas and we cleared the climb – we didn’t hit either cone. However, after the launch, the landing put one of our steering lines into the fan and we were done.
We found out we were 23 points out of 4th place and there was going to be a shoot-out bonus course. We fixed the steering line and were able to run the bonus course so we could catch 4th place. We made the first climb and heard snap – broken outer axle shaft! We tried to finish the course anyways and ended up flopping it on the driver side. We finished the competition in 4th place and have a lot of work to do before the next event.
Click here to view all of the pictures from this event.