The drive home Sunday night from a weekend camping adventure can be a long one. Most likely you're tired, dirty, and just want to sleep in you own bed.
To keep myself from falling asleep motivated, I usually listen to some good tunes, drink (regrettably) an energy drink and take in the scenery. More often than not the scenery involves checking out other cars on the road. You can make a game out if to see what they did that weekend by the type of vehicle is is and the condition it's in.
Fortunately the Jeep was available this past weekend. I took out the rear seat, packed in my gear along with my dog, then headed north to the desert. I met up with Sr. Multimedia Editor John Adolph in his Toyota Land Cruiser (which you've probably seen in other places on this site) in the city Mojave.
Our plan was to hike up to the top of the Five Finger Mountains. To make the most of our weekend, not only were we going to hike to the top of the Five Fingers, but we decided to roll in a trip to yonder valley. Best way of doing it with minimal fuss in our opinion was to parking a vehicle on each side.
We drove out to the opposite side of the mountains to set up camp so that we'd only have to make one trip in the morning. To get to our finishing point, we had to drive over some easy cheese fire roads. Eventually we had to navigate over some nastier bits where 4WD and some clearance were a must. The deeply scored ruts we had to traverse were no problem for our Jeep. At our destination we found a nice alcove in the rocky hillside to set up camp.
Come sunrise, we got ready to head out. Leaving John's Toyota behind at the end point, we took our long term Jeep around hill to the beginning of our hike. Streams, rocks, deeply scarred roads and steep hills along the way were not a problem for our Jeep. After a bit of searching, we found a suitable spot to start our cross country hill climb.
Our hike was a tough one, but it was a great feeling of accomplishment when we cooled our feet in the stream of yonder valley. By the end of the day, I was dirty, tired and hungry. After packing up camp I turned south for home.
Somewhere on the 14 during that journey south, I passed a filthy FJ Cruiser. As I looked over, the guy smiled and gave me a thumbs up. Looks like he had a great weekend adventuring too. To me, the spray of mud and dirt is an unspoken bond between like minded folks. Having this Jeep in our long term fleet has been an absolute joy. It's my ticket to anytime adventure.
Scott Jacobs, Sr. Mgr, Photography
duck87 says:
05:45 AM, 01/31/12
Badge of honor? Most cars in the snowbelt look like that right now!
hybris says:
06:19 AM, 01/31/12
+1 duck87
powell_jr says:
06:22 AM, 01/31/12
Great post. This makes me miss my 1999 TJ everytime I see it. Don't worry about the lift. Keep doing this kind of stuff.
arm51 says:
06:34 AM, 01/31/12
Great post, but one niggling issue...the pictures overlap the text above them just enough to make the text unreadable. I checked in both IE and Firefox with the same issue. A little bit of padding between the text and pictures may solve this problem.
aggiemo says:
03:55 PM, 01/31/12
Hey, when are you guys gonna lift that thing?
carchatter1 says:
08:43 PM, 01/31/12
Awesome post. Makes me wish I still lived in Southern Colorado near the Sangre DeCristo mountains. We would take our 98 Wrangler out to the Great Sand Dunes Park and all sorts of mountain passes all the time.....Sigh. Enjoy that car while you can!!!