Breaking in my rover - a day trip to sloquet

[yuppa]

So my wife wanted to go to some hot springs, we decided on sloquet hot springs.

After doing my research, there is two ways in.. the hard way and the easy way.. Of course we took the hard way.

My friend in his Jeep and me in my rover, we set off along the dusty forestry road. We saw one Land Rover, a nice disco - green, that was headed out. Traffic in general was very minimal.

The first 30-40k was very uneventful, just dusty and a little bumpy in the washboard areas. We came to a shallow stream only a few centimeters deep and that seemed to be the cutoff point. After that the trail got progressivly worse.

Now, I am a novice rover owner and novice 4x4'r.. I guess I wasn't expecing the road to disintegrate so much!
We came to a hill, that was mostly rocks and ruts and pretty steep to boot.. my differential was locked and i was in 4high, gear 1.
we crawled up the hill slowly and I tried to pick the best lines keeping aware of where my tires were at all times.. I must admit I was pretty nervous at this point, here is where my noobish shows.. my spare tire is too small, I mean to replace but I have not yet.. Now i was very concerned about popping or slashing a tire and being stranded there and my concetration on the road was 100%
The hill seemed to never end.. we were making good progress, but to my alarm the engine heat was rising fast.. and i was going slow, not revving the engine or spinning tires..
I don't know who posted this tip, but I cranked the heat on full blast and noticed an immediate decrease in engine temp.. by the time we made it to the top and let it sit about a minute, it was back to normal temp.
A quick check of the tires and engine for leaks or anything else alarming and we were back on our way..
another big hill, this time no problems at all.. as we stopped to gawk at a viewpoint we were passed by another convoy ( I think it was a jimmy and a pathfinder lol)
after the big waterfall, it was smooth sailing all the way to the hot springs, which were, btw, fantastic! -it took us 4 hours to get to the hotsprings.
the service site was clean and looked well maintained, the hot springs were clean and an absolute pleasure to lounge in, we didn't want to leave.

we know how foolish we were to have done that trail without proper spare tire, so we chose the easy route back.. Other then a bit dusty, we made it home by 1am..
It was a much longer trip then I anticipated, the rover preformed as good as I could have hoped.

I want to come up to the whipsaw july 5th with the rover landers if I can for my next trip.

anyways thats my story and it was fun.

[DaveB]

Good to hear you got your Rover out into the hills. You might want to consider putting the truck in low range next time as that is likely what caused it to start heating up. In high range, even in low gear your engine would likely be overworking itself, but you have 4 low range gears, most of which are lower than 1st gear high range, and in these gears your truck doesn't have to work nearly as hard to accomplish the same thing.

Hopefully you can join us for the Whipsaw. We'll be meeting on July 5th at the Granite Creek campsite for a 10 AM departure. This is about 2 km from Coalmont on the west side of the river. Coalmont is about 20 km northwest of Princeton if you haven't been there before.

And, yes, you should try to get a spare that is at least within an inch or so diameter of your other tires.

cheers, Dave