| John walks a smallish ledge farther up the trail... |  |
| ...while Adam spots. On a side note, everyone from Austin independently commented that Adam had a bit of a Lance Armstrong vibe going, but he said no one had mentioned it before. |  |
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| Neither of us made this fall... |  |
| ...even with a bit of stacking. You can see Adam working under the truck in these pics. |  |
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| After we completed Patz we collected the other guy's trucks at the trail head and Sean showed Adam, John and me around some of the unimproved desert roads. One section was a clay shelf road that was wet, slick as snot, and angled toward the downhill side. I started across it and my spool/Detroit combo started shooting me toward the edge faster than I was moving forward. I connected my winch to a big rock on the uphill side and John put a strap on the back. He was on slick ground as well so he turned on his front locker... |  |
| ...which combined with hauling my butt back with the wheels turned took out a birf. It was getting dark and everyone had their fill of near death experiences for the night so we went to eat then to the motel to fix John's axle. |  |
| John got the axle out in no time... |  |
| ...and also made short work of assembling the new birfield with everyone's help.
Here you can see that John, Adam, and Sean are competing for Most Interesting Stain on the Shoulder of a Trail Coat. |  |
| Here John manipulates the clip while Adam drives the axle into the new Birfield. The rub came when he looked into the axle tube to see that the broken birf had somehow welded the seal into the housing, destroying it and mangling the seal surface in the process. |  |
| The next morning started incredibly foggy and John decided to bag the ride-along wheeling and head home. Having put Frank on a rented trailer after only 3 hours of wheeling on a previous Clayton trip I felt for him. Once we got to the start of Broad Canyon the sky had cleared, but there was still mud in some places. |  |
| David made the first big climb of the day getting some mad flex in the process. |  |
| Adam took a crack at it next... |  |
| ...with limited success. He still made it a lot farther than I did! I'm sticking with the story that David pre-slimed it! Ha ha! |  |