Day Six
Alarm clocks were becoming extremely annoying by this point. Awake but far from energized, we met at the local breakfast hangout (Sonya's, if you're in the area) to get a little direction from our trail leader Harold Off.
Harold led us on the Waterfalls trail, and many of us learned that we had to hit some of the obstacles with just a bit of momentum. The Farmington Bump, it's called. This made for some scary situations.
Call us wimps, but we heeded Harold's wise suggestion and bypassed the first 100 yards of the trail, which are the toughest. Anyone who didn't have enough by the end of the day could come back here to play.
Right after Trenton repaired a wobbled-out axle U-joint, he climbed up an uncomfortable sidehill. A winch cable was pulled and Trenton changed his shorts. When we reached the end of the trail almost everyone was up to heading back to the first obstacles. If you can imagine a steep waterfall carved into sandstone with a few rocks and trees thrown in for good measure then you'll have a good idea of what this trail looks like. There are only two obstacles here; the first is a six-foot vertical cliff. That alone wouldn't be too bad, but you have to drive onto a ledge just big enough for a Bronco and then make a hard left turn up this cliff. And there's plenty of loose dirt to throw around and slide on. The second waterfall climbs about 50 feet and changes directions three times. Cool.
Cole claimed he wasn't interested in doing it, but after a little prodding from John he was in the driver seat hitting the first cliff. The suspension on Tom's Bronco stretched to mind-boggling limits, and he went all the way through the 100-yard trail. Sam showed us why he built his CJ-7 the way he did and made quick work of both obstacles. Sam also let Cole drive a short section of the trail in his Jeep, causing the tires on Cole's imaginary flatfender to grow. Dan made it to the top of the waterfall only to spit out a rear driveshaft. For some reason we couldn't get Dan's winch to work (we later found out that a three-prong remote doesn't work with Warn's new five-prong plug) so local Phil Collard winched him up. John and Dan repaired the driveshaft while the others traversed the falls and helped an unprepared Toyota (not with our group) out of trouble. Tom had tried to make a second pass on the waterfall only to break an axle U-joint on the first section. He turned around and we all headed back to town.
The Toyotas on this Adventure impressed all of us. The combination of wheelbase, width, ground clearance, and gearing worked great. We started referring to Steve's 4Runner as the Snap-On truck because of the incredible number of tools he had. | 
Phil Collard showed us a rather risky alternate that only fellow local Anthony Montoya was up to trying. If you could scale the slick sandstone, you had to carry some power at the top and hope the vehicle didn't slide to either side. We decided we still had one more day of highway and one more trail to do instead. | 
Trent got it over with and was our first breakage in Farmington. He's found the weak link in his Blazer and has complete front axleshafts stacked up like cordwood. |