ECBR '14, P.1

The annual Bronco Roundup, at Rausch Creek!

Hers the obligatory group-photo pic from Friday morning:

Me Ox & Darrel lining up for the trailride

​Such a nice, clean, unbroken windshield:

Heading into the park:

This is where it got ugly.  From here we moved on to Crawler's Ridge, and Ox broke his rig.  Seems the bolts that hold the passenger side steering arm onto the knuckle sheared off, and he lost all of his steering:

What youre looking at here, is what happens when two massive Grade 8.8 bolts break, and the Mog steering arm comes off the passenger knuckle. Because both the tierod & draglink attach to it, it left Ox with basically no steering at all.
I left to go get a trailer while several others from FSB stayed behind to help ox get up, turned around, and then back down off the obstacle, so we could extract him. They built this crazy contraption out of a come-along, several short chains & some straps to sort-of get it steering again, atleast enough to get it maneuvered down the bypass, after it got winched up & off the obstacle.
During that time I unhooked my trailer from the tow-rig, hitched it to the back of my bronco via a home-brew hitch I built for moving the trailer around the yard, and then drug it all the way back to the scene of the incident:

​During my trip out & back the rest of them were hard at work getting him turned around, so I could back up into the trail and we could load him up at the bottom of the bypass/exit:

From there we towed him all the way out of the park, over to the emergency exit near Route 209

Here we unloaded his truck, and drove back to the parking lot in mine, where we jumped in Ox's tow rig and came back for his bronco. I left my bronco hitched to the trailer in Rausch's lot overnight as me & ox were planning on coming back Saturday to go wheelin again anyway with my rig.

460 for the win, it honestly did not care at all that ox's rig was on the trailer behind me. It was pretty awesome to see.
It took us 5 hours to extract his bronco and get back to camp which was half-decent I thought considering the situation, but it meant we missed dinner Friday night since we didn't get back until after 8.

---