There is a special place in our back yard (Mendocino National Forest), that my better half likes to visit, but with the 2018 fires, she has been hesitant to revisit. Today, we departed on a journey to see what we could see. It was an emotional day. Rumor had it
@Thunderhead was camping where we were going, so we paid a visit, and continued our exploring. Sorry for no pictures, as it was too sad to see the devastation of our national forest due to the 2018 fires, so we just explored on, taking some FSR's we haven't taken before. The Jeep, as well as my co-pilot, was a trooper. Temps were a bit warm, being in the low 90's. We were optimistic the higher elevations would give some relief, but you never know what to get up these parts, so it was nice to have the AC blowing cool air on us for the day, top down and all. The trails were dry and dusty, and by the end of the day, we were covered in a baby powder of dust. The jeep got rode hard and put away dry and dusty.
A few things to note about the Jeep today, the Trutrac is awesome! We tackled a lot of dirt switchback FSR's and I aggressively throttled them to see how the traction handled them. I had way more control than I did with the factory Traclok, so I'm pleased with that. With the front sway bar disco'd, the Ranchos seemed a bit lazy. The roads were not very well maintained, so there were a lot of washouts and sporty sections that took some negotiating to get thru. I aired down to 14 psi at the start of the trail, but I felt like we got beat up more than we should have. Hope Blaine doesn't read this. I have not been kind to the RS5000X shocks, so I will have to check on them to see what state they are in before giving judgement. I know now that if I were to get an AR up front, the Ranchos would be too soft, so I need to find a shock would work well with the AR.
