Summer Convention 2000

Report by Stefan Roth

I hope most of you went to our Second Annual Summer Convention at the second quarterly meeting, hosted by the Georgia Bounty Runners. As last year, it was in Blairsville, GA with trail rides all around, including Beasley Knob ORV Area. Rides are everything from easy to super-challenging levels.

It seemed like I was the only one there that had not heard that rain was in the weather forecast. Therefore, I was rather unprepared. No rain gear, no tarps over or under the tent, and so on. Oh well. It was summer, so it wasn’t cold, though the overcast sky held down the temperatures. Night time temperatures in the 50s are great for camping.

Thursday evening was beautiful evening, but the rain started that night. In the morning we all knew that the trails would be SLICK. Blairsville has the reputation that when it’s wet, the trails become extremely slippery. In our club, we have an unwritten rule that we do not ride at Blairsville when it’s rained. Naturally we broke it, again.

With only a few dozen people arriving by Friday morning, a small group of us decided to try trail #233, the hardest at Blairsville. We knew it would be wet, but it wouldn’t get any drier over the weekend and it would be easier to do with only a half dozen vehicles in our group. Well, it was more like a sled ride than anything else. I’ve driven my totally street-stock ’98 Cherokee on the first part of the trail up to a loop that spectators use for parking. That day, our group of well-built vehicles (big tires, lockers f&r, etc) had trouble just getting to that point. After that point, the trail got harder and then it started to rain again. Places we should have just driven up turned into a winch fest. Not only that, but you couldn’t even keep your vehicle stopped in place. When we lost forward momentum, we slid back down and even then couldn’t get going again. We had to back down to a flat spot and try again, but the trail was now wetter and slicker and we couldn’t make it as far. After a few hundred feet of winching, we decided that we could either go on to winch all day or turn around and drive all day somewhere else. We didn’t have a lot of passengers along to pull winch cable, so we winched ourselves back down and drove other trails. Our small group covered quite a few trails on Friday, slinging mud and slipping and sliding all day. It’s been a while since I had gotten so much mud inside the cab.

A good friend of mine on another ride that day was on a steep downhill trail. He said it was so slick that when he got on it, his Cherokee took off like he had floored the gas pedal and lost all control over his speed. At a Y-intersection, he couldn’t turn left or right and his vehicle headed straight into a tree. No damage to driver or tree, but Steve’s Cherokee took front-end damage. We returned to recover the vehicle the next morning. We never could get the electrical system to work correctly. It took five East Tennessee 4WD Club vehicles with huge tires and big V8s strapped end-to-end to drag the dead weight back up the hill. After several hours of field repairs to get it running, Steve was able to drive it out and onto his trailer.

That evening, as we stood in line for the all-you-can-eat dinner, it started to rain (again). Most of us had umbrellas, but the rain stopped after a while and the door prize raffle and Real World Rig awards turned into a fun and humorous event.

Sunday morning, the weather broke and the sun came out to a blue sky. It was fitting end to a great weekend (and allowed us to dry out our camping equipment).

If you missed this year’s event, make sure to go to next year’s event in June 2001. The Saturday night dinner alone is worth the price of admission, but you also get games, door prizes, awards, and of course great trail riding. Plus, the campground sports such luxuries as hot and cold running water (and I am not talking about the rain here), flush toilets, showers and picnic tables. There is also an adjacent river for swimming and tubing.