ZOOKIMELT 2004

ZookiMelt 2004 was held at the Badlands Off-Road park in Attica Indiana. The Badlands is a huge park with everything to offer with tall steep pebble-stone hills,  winding trails with steep off-camber hill climbs, and some of the most fun rock gardens which were no joke. Body damage was common and there was breakage everywhere. This is the location of many of the rock crawling events and competitions every year.

Here one of the guys in the RPM 4X4 club (www.rpm4x4.com) came down the first steep rocky section on the pink trail. With a rock wall on one side and a huge boulder on the other they barely escaped body damage. 

Purgatory is the hardest trail at the Badlands. This section was tight and angered the tree huggers!

Purgatory was really no joke! This section is much harder and steeper than it looks and with the wet ground I was never able to get all the way up to the top of the rocky mountain side. We played "slip & slide" alot this weekend!

On the back side of Purgatory we stopped and watched a few of the tube buggies playing and saw this guy almost flip over into the lake. 

The green and orange tube buggy was able to winch him out without incident.

Minutes later the same guy was crawling up a VERY steep rock garden in the quarry and took a bad line.....you can see what happened! There were several rollovers this weekend and the slick wet ground from Friday nights heavy rains had a lot to do with it.

A helpful group of guys immediately ran over to his aid. He was fine, but the vehicle lost a plexi-glass windshield and fiberglass windshield frame plus he had a dented up hood. 
 

Even the beginning of the Rock Rage course was hard and a few competitors never made it past the first few rocks without breakage......

Here I am on top of the rocks until I slipped sideways into a LARGE crevice..... 

All crossed up and sideways in a hole I backed up as much as I could in 3-wheel drive trying to get off the course.

This Mazda Rotary powered orange and silver Zuk extracted me out of the Rock Rage course after the drivers side front inner cage of the birfield broke.

Crossed up in the beginning of the rock course this guy gave it hell.....burning some rubber to the crowds delight!


But 31's and HUGE rocks don't mix! Hopelessly stuck with lots of rocker damage he signals to get pulled out.

This built yellow Zuk on 36's making the Rock Rage competition look easy.

The back side of the Rock Rage course......the down hill is steeper than it looks!

This Silver Zuk got into some really DEEP mud on the Orange Trail after the heavy rains the night before. We went through Orange trail the same day, but fortunately didn't take the same path through the stinky goo!

Loaded and heading home after one heck of a great fun filled weekend! Thanks for the tow Greg! 

More photo's to come as I get time to post them.

ZUWHARRIE 2001

Spring 2001 Trail Ride at Uwharrie National Forrest. Black stock Zuk owned by Jason Gnatowsky and the white one is owned by Sean DeVinney.

We had well over a hundred Samurai's at the Zuwharrie trail ride.Here we are getting ready to hit the trails.

There were alot of nice sized boulders to climb. Here you can see my missing link shackles are opening up allowing me to flex out the suspension.

Here is Mike Whitfield wheeling with his daughter. On the trail you could ocassionally hear her saying "YEEEEEEHAAAWW". I think she enjoyed herself!

Another flexy Zuk and a pic of the infamous Billy-Bob who was showing his hind parts. You cannot really see it in the pic, but Billy Bob is sporting a pair of purple mohawks!

Poor guy with a full size Chevy Blazer got high centered on a rock. Billy Bob hooked up to him and pulled him backwards to keep him from puncturing his gas tank.

This is Dale's well-built Samurai making it look easy. this is actually a  steep hill that a few guys almost rolled over on. One guy played tree tag...hitting the tree not once, but three times. The good news is that the tree on the left kept them from rolling completely over.

Here is Billy Edgar who made it right up the rocky hill without much problem, even though he was driving on a set of worn out 33" Mickey Thompson's Baja belted tires. 

Here is Billy again in his Tonka Toy which was dubbed ZAP-ZUKI because he lives next door to a  power station and since he is a radar tech in the Navy. The guy is practically glowing!

Here we are stopping for a break and talking to a few guys on 4-wheelers.

There is only one set of mud holes at Uwharrie and we found them.  I had to stop in the middle and shift into 4wd. They were a bit deeper than I had thought and there was no getting through them without 4wd!

This hole was a bit harder to get out of than I had thought!

Another shot showing how big this pit was.

As you can see I did not have a locker in the front! One front wheel was spinning on the way out of the pit.

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