So we made it back to Redding, CA from the Rubicon Trail yesterday afternoon. We started the trail at Loon Lake at 4:30 pm on Friday and made it back to paved road at 1:00 pm on Sunday near Lake Tahoe. It was definitely more challenging terrain than I thought. The first 8.5 miles are pure slow speed obstacles, almost every part of the trail is covered in 2-3ft boulders. It's the perfect amount of challenge for a truck on 35's with lockers. After about 8.5 miles the trail has been improved and you can finish miles 8.5 to 22 in a few hours.
We did all the major obstacles, we made it up soup bowl, up Little Sluice, down Big Sluice, and up Cadillac hill. I have video of soup bowl and some of Little Sluice and Cadillac hill that I'll be posting later. I really didn't have much of a problem with the named obstacles though, the trails between the obstacles seemed like more of a challenge than the named ones. Friday it was raining so it made getting up the slab almost impossible, the ledges are almost the exact distance apart to make it where you have to climb them both at the same time with my wheelbase.
The Bronco has a few new dents and both my ox u-joints decided it was time to let go. The brand new driver side inner chromo shaft spread the ears on the yoke about a 1/2 mile in and the cap on the u-joint on the passenger side came out about a 1/4 mile after Little Sluice and started banging around the ball joints. I wasn't really hammering on it though either time, I think it was just time for them to come apart. We also knocked the air fitting off the front axle for the ARB but was lucky enough to have a few threads still sticking out to get it back working. Overall the Bronco did good and I had enough spare parts to keep it going. The dana 44 has had so many problems though, I'm definitely thinking about an upgrade.
Other than Friday afternoon the weather was just about perfect. During the day it got to about 60 and down to the upper 30's at night. It was a little cool. There wasn't too much traffic but a couple rigs came by and asked if we needed anything every time we were stopped fixing something.
One of the hardest parts is that there is very little signage showing where the trail is, the slabs have reflectors showing the center of the trail about every 50 ft but it was still really hard to tell where the actual trail was and where people were just playing around. It was also hard to tell what was the bypass and what was the real trail, we did our best to stay on the actual trail using maps and GPS.
Here's some pics, my brother took them with a film camera but Rite-aid ended up messing up one roll developing it so some are a little off:
Coming up Soup Bowl
Little Sluice
We did all the major obstacles, we made it up soup bowl, up Little Sluice, down Big Sluice, and up Cadillac hill. I have video of soup bowl and some of Little Sluice and Cadillac hill that I'll be posting later. I really didn't have much of a problem with the named obstacles though, the trails between the obstacles seemed like more of a challenge than the named ones. Friday it was raining so it made getting up the slab almost impossible, the ledges are almost the exact distance apart to make it where you have to climb them both at the same time with my wheelbase.
The Bronco has a few new dents and both my ox u-joints decided it was time to let go. The brand new driver side inner chromo shaft spread the ears on the yoke about a 1/2 mile in and the cap on the u-joint on the passenger side came out about a 1/4 mile after Little Sluice and started banging around the ball joints. I wasn't really hammering on it though either time, I think it was just time for them to come apart. We also knocked the air fitting off the front axle for the ARB but was lucky enough to have a few threads still sticking out to get it back working. Overall the Bronco did good and I had enough spare parts to keep it going. The dana 44 has had so many problems though, I'm definitely thinking about an upgrade.
Other than Friday afternoon the weather was just about perfect. During the day it got to about 60 and down to the upper 30's at night. It was a little cool. There wasn't too much traffic but a couple rigs came by and asked if we needed anything every time we were stopped fixing something.
One of the hardest parts is that there is very little signage showing where the trail is, the slabs have reflectors showing the center of the trail about every 50 ft but it was still really hard to tell where the actual trail was and where people were just playing around. It was also hard to tell what was the bypass and what was the real trail, we did our best to stay on the actual trail using maps and GPS.
Here's some pics, my brother took them with a film camera but Rite-aid ended up messing up one roll developing it so some are a little off:
Coming up Soup Bowl
Little Sluice
