2014-05-24 (Sat): T-33a - night run, tree clearing
Max and I met in Lyons with a plan to travel Miller Rock in the afternoon's waning daylight then head up to Rock Creek for a night run. Earlier, (as I recall) he met someone who was on the T-33a trail. They said the gate was open but that there was a tree across the trail. As it's sprintime, I had the chainsaw equipment packed and was interested in clearing a tree.
We changed plans and drove up to Camp Dick and parked along the highway to air down. The first of the rain drops started to fall. Max noted, at his left-front wheel, that the breather from his front diff was expelling a reasonable amount of diff fluid. We inspected the pinion seal and axle seals. Only the driver's side axle seal showed signs of leakage - but it was quite minor. Opening the diff to inspect fluid, we found the fluid to be just up to the bottom of the axle tubes (where I believe it should be). We didn't notice any bubbles in the fluid (mixed water) so we decided to keep rolling. The cause for the expelled fluid???
By the time we started up the trail (7pm), headlights were in order due to the heavy clouds spitting rain and lightning. We went up T-33a from the Camp Dick / southern end. At 7:25pm we came to the tree and decided to clear it vs. turn around. Rain was light / trivial to moderate. We were moving again at 8:29pm and traveled up the trail until we hit another trail closing tree. I think we passed by the walking path to the crash site, but I'm not sure.
Back at the T-33a spur, we turned right/west to look for the "meadows" I had once visited (where my avatar pic is from). We didn't find it, though we did travel through some meadow area that is heavily posted & cabled "off limits". The trail, for significant sections, was like driving in a 4' deep trench. Toss in running water and some snow - nice adversity.
We made it back to the trail head at 10:30pm. Trail time - 3.5 hours (1 hour to clear the tree in there) for 6.3 round trip trail miles. That calculates to 2.5 MPH averaged. That seems about right for the evening.
Not too many pictures - it was dark and raining, but here are a few:
Cue the Blues Brother's "sunglasses" segment:
"It's 106 miles to Chicago, we got a full tank of gas, half a packet of cigarettes, it's dark and we're wearing sunglasses... HIT IT!"
Max's light bar was daylight. My camera decided to not use flash for the image:
Max, here's a map of our track from last night overlayed with a track from my prior visit in 2012. On the 2012 visit there was a nice meadow, that we tried to find last night. We missed the turn. At the bottom of the page at the link are photos of the meadow from the 2012 visit. We recalled the "swap" area with the aspen trees - the turn off was near that area.
www.JimWilliamson.net/automobile/2012-06-03--trail--bunce-t33a/
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