Pictures from Bud Canyon (Reno)

[Dirty Harry]

We few of us got together to run Bud Canyon up on Peavine Mountain last night. I got there about 6:45 and met up at the with Mark and Jerry in their Scrambler and TJ, respectively. I was without my rig but Mark was kind enough to offer me a ride. Tim showed up in his Land Cruisermog beast moments later and we headed to the mouth of the canyon to meet up with a few others.

At the mouth of Bud Canyon we met up with Matt in his TJ, who was there to run the canyon for the second night in a row. Aaron soon arrived with his V8 CJ-7 and Corey with his Toyota pickup. Mike also joined us but decided to ride with Tim since he had done minor damage to his TJ in Bud Canyon the night before. We were soon on our way, though the canyon starts out unassuming enough as just a small wash. The first real obstacle is the demolished car, which Tim had fun ramping on. As the canyon continues is gets narrower and the walls get higher. Most of the canyon floor is made up of smooth bowling ball sized rocks, but there are a number of shelves and boulders along the way to keep things interesting. I hiked the majority of the trail while taking pictures and picking up cans. The amount of beer cans I found was disappointing, but we left the canyon cleaner than we found it.

The only real issues we encountered were Corey’s clutch and Aaron’s rich running small block asphyxiating everyone waiting behind him. Corey has open diffs in his pickup and was having trouble getting his transfer case into low range. He also did not have a chance to air down his tires before we started running the canyon. These combined factors required him to slip the clutch a lot on the larger obstacles. By the time we got towards the top of the canyon and the largest rock shelves, the clutch was almost done for. It took a while to assess the situation, lower Corey’s tire pressure, and stack some rocks, but eventually he made it out with some help from Matt. The biggest challenge was that Corey was only the second vehicle in line and the canyon was too narrow for anyone to get around him. Jerry was running drag and attempted an alternate route out of the canyon in order to circle around and extract the Toyota, but a punctured sidewall slowed him down. By 10:30 the hubs were unlocked and we were looking down the hill at the downtown lights as we headed home for the evening. It is cool to have wheeling close enough that you can go for the evening after work.

More pictures here. Unfortunately the sun went down before most of the fun occurred, so the pictures do not tell the whole story.