Royal Blue Sand Mines

Last weekend our Jeep club along with ET4WD ventured up to the sand mines at Royal Blue.  According to a couple of friends that were on the trip with us, TVA mined sand out of the top of this mountain to be mixed for concrete for the dams.

The first hill climb turned out to be quite tricky as the rains made everything a muddy mess and we ended up having to winch up one section of the hill.

We stopped just short of the top at the wheelhouse.  This is where they brought the sand down from the top and loaded it into carts for the ride down the mountain.  Here's a picture of the wheelhouse:

Everyone with lockers continued up to the top where there's a small lake and lots of sand. (duh)  :)  Pictures never show it, but it was pretty steep up this last part:

And here's a video as proof that we went up there:



Special thanks to my stunt driver for making me look good.

Merry Christmas

Wow, I've been slacking.  Between the holidays and beer brewing we haven't had much time for jeeping this past month.  There's a new spot I'm dying to check out, but I'll save that for next month after deer season ends.

We did manage to sneak in a ride to Windrock last weekend and it was a blast.  I almost saw a Jeep roll over, I thought I got stuck, and I did get stuck a couple of times.  Here's an obstacle on trail 21:

And here's Jason attempting it:

There is a lot of awesome scenery at Windrock:

And lastly, here's Jeff negotiating the creek.  Please ignore the idiot cameraman pointing at a rock.  ;)

Post Turkey Ride

Black Friday presented an opportunity to get up at 4am, fight the shopping zombie hordes, and try to score some crap from the local malls. We here at IronJeep said nay, we will not conform. We went wheeling in the Jeep! Our first stop was Royal Blue for some mild rock crawling:

Next on our agenda was a little known area called Eagle Bluff overlooking the sprawling metropolis that isn't Lafollette:

For our grand finale we headed up to the upper end of Royal Blue to check out a trail at the Hatfield Knob elk viewing tower.  We rode down Overlook Trail which lived up to it's name:

And lastly here are a couple videos from the Royal Blue trail we started on:




The second one was taken by my co-pilot and step son Brandon who was in for the turkey day festivities.  Sorry it's sideways he's an IronJeep rookie:




* - No harm either real or imagined came to any Knoxville area Jeep clubs in the making of this blog post.

A ride I did with the East TN 4wd Club

This was a great ride, with the ET4WD.ORG guys doing  the cascades at Windrock.

This was way out of my league. :)

Windrock

We headed up to Windrock this weekend and had a blast Jeeping up and down the mountain.  There are tons of awesome trails to ride up there, we managed to hit 3 of them despite the rain.

Trail 13

The InJeep camera continues to perform way better than the driver.  We've had it set up for a few rides now and I have to say it's been flawless:

The camera operator leaves much to be desired as I left it on through lunch and filled a quarter of the SD card with me munching Fritos.  :)  This video ends abruptly due to the card filling up:

Petros

We found a few trails in the Petros area this weekend.  Nothing too exciting except some cool views and a back way into Windrock. :)

Oh and deer muzzleloader season started so it was way too crowded on the trails to do much exploring. :(  I can't wait til deer season ends to take the Jeep back up here and check this place out thoroughly.

I'm not sure what that white stuff's called, but it was everywhere up there. 

Pickett State Forest II

Here are a couple more pics and a video from last weekend's Jeep trip to Pickett.  The Wagon Gap Overlook was amazing:

 

I also finally got around to uploading another video: