January 12, 2007

First time to Tellico

I drove up to the Georgia cruisers home to meet up with Josh, the Georgia Cruisers President, and then caravan up to Tellico. It was a long trip driving up to Murphy first and then to the pay booth. We tried to call some people from the entrance of trail 2 but had no luck and just kept going to the state line camp site. The camp site, says Josh, has changed. It used to be just an open field and now it has actual bays with picnic tables, a fire ring and is gravel covered.  While it was daylight still we set up a tent and unloaded our trucks. We tried to set up a fire but it didn’t get going before we decided to do a night run. We ran trails 4, 6 and 5.

There were some gnarly passes that made us get out of our trucks but nothing that Josh or me had trouble with. No problems, just good fun ride at night.

The next day we got ready to go find the others that were supposed to come and ended up waiting for over two hours. Josh stayed at the camp site while I drove to the pay booth in search of more trucks. While Josh was waiting at the camp site an FJ cruiser driven by Bill joined us. When we finally decided to hit the trails two other LC trucks reached us. We started going up the trail 4 loop in the opposite way as we did the night before. (Bridge construction first.)  The FJ cruiser gave us a good show as the owner drove close to tipping the truck over twice.

At the first water crossing we stop for food and for a little touristy walk to a waterfall  downstream, while Josh replaced a Birfiled… or so we thought. We checked out the waterfall, took a couple of pictures it was a nice trek to the site. When we got back we found Josh putting the birfield back with nothing broken… it looked like he had a sticky locking hub.

Later on we took trail 8 loop. Ben, with an LC FJ60 started having fueling problems and we ended up replacing a fuel pump. Then we found a huge oil leak from the valve cover that turned out to be a pinched gasket picked up tools, some trash and the oil spill. We finished trail 8 at night fall. When we were getting closer to the waterfall Josh ran out of gas. It is always fun to try to siphon fuel out of a hose from another truck in the middle of the night. After some jokes and at around 7 pm. We got going again. The idea was for me to go back to camp and to bring the gas can but it was not necessary. We drove back to the camp site, said our good byes and proceeded to pack up.

It was an excellent time, too bad we didn’t meet with the rest of the Georgia cruiser members that went later in the day. 

Oscar Florez

VP Georgia Cruisers