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Deer Valley Sep06 Moab Aug06
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Frank Raines OHV - March 2006 |
The original plan had been to go to Cow Mountain. But due to all the rain
over the last couple weeks Cow Mountain was closed by the BLM. Heading out in the morning we
were wondering if we would run into the same problem at Frank Raines. Our South Bay
caravan arrived around 9:00 and met up with the group that had come from up north and
the ones that had camped overnight at the park. We had another great turnout with 4 H3's,
4 H2's and 6 H1's.
The park spans across several canyons and consists of a lot of ridge trails, hill
climbs, and several creeks. It is a mixed use area so we were sharing the trails with a
bunch of quads and dirtbikes. But luckily, we were the only group of trucks out there
that day. With all the recent rains, it was pretty muddy and there was a fair amount of
water in the creeks.
Once we all gathered up and said our hellos we headed out to one of the bigger
creeks near the staging area. We went about a half mile up the creek until we ran into a big
obstacle consisting of a big boulder and rock ledge. With more than a dozen trucks, and
some without rocker protection, we decided it was best to turn around. We got all the
trucks turned around and headed back towards the staging area.
From there we headed down another trail near the front of the park which had a
couple shallow water crossings and some small hill climbs. We then climbed up to a
small plateau that overlooked the entrance and creek we had just run. We could see the main
hill that led up to the rest of park from there. It had been really slick earlier that
morning but looked to be drying out. So we headed up the trail and found a great area with
some deep pools of muddy water with some little hills on the other side. We took turns
running through the mud and took a bunch of great
and video.
Everyone was getting hungry so we headed back down to the staging area for
lunch. After lunch we headed back up the main trail again and went looking for some hill
climbs. We found one hill that was a nice climb but wasn't going to be passable at the top
for all the trucks we had. It made for an interesting moment trying to back down the
hill, though. We decided to head over to the other side of the park and try to find a
ridge trail up to the top of the hill.
We talked with a guy on a dirtbike and he directed us toward the trail that
would take us up to the top. We took the easy, but narrow,
trail up until it dead-ended at a gate. We stopped to take
in the scenery including Mt. Hamilton in the distance. The
damage from the fairly recent fire in the area was also very
evident from up there. We did a little more exploring and
took some more runs through the mud and then headed back
down to the bottom and called it a day.
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