Forest Fest is an event put on by Inland Empire 4 Wheelrs at Big Bear every June on Father’s Day weekend. Camp is based out of the Snow Valley parking lot. We met up with some members of Geared 4 Fun Four Wheel drive Club on Saturday morning and headed for Holcomb Creek (Trail 3N93). It’s rated difficult, and it’s a favorite in the area for many people. We traveled this trail from west to east. It has a couple of fun rock gardens, one at each end. This was the maiden voyage for the recently put together Willys and unfortunately it had a few mechanical issues along the way. The first problem was the Jeep was overheating. Just past the first rock garden I had to pull over to let the engine cool off. The mechanical fan had no shroud and it just wasn’t up to the task in the summer heat. A little bit farther down the trail it became apparent that I my alternator was wired incorrectly, so I ended up with a dead battery. The guys in the group helped me rewire the alternator and gave me jump starts as needed. Third on the hit list, and the most problematic, was my steering shaft coupler popped off of the power steering box. It seems that the Jeep was flexing a bit more than it was used to and without a collapsible shaft, something had to give. Getting it back on and keeping it on proved challenging. It turns out the coupler was the wrong size for that steering box but the previous owner had “made” it fit. Something I never noticed.
|
|
|
|
| Angela | Steve and Tracy | Me & Sheri |
|---|
A ratchet strap was used to keep it from coming apart again, but that limited my turning ability to about half a turn of the wheel. So for every turn in the road I was doing five and six point turns to get lined up and stay on the trail. Anyway, we finally made it to the end of the trail. Some people in the group went ahead and brought back a flat bed trailer for me to get us back to camp since there was no way I could drive the Willys on the highway in this condition. I wish I would’ve had time to do more test runs with the Jeep before Forest Fest so I wouldn’t have had to put the whole group through all of that, but they were good sports and really helped me out a lot.
