Day 4, Tuesday:
Muddy bottoms at General Sam's, Huntsville, Texas
The next stop on our Texas tour was General Sam's Off-Road Wilderness park outside of Huntsville. It was only our second trail day of the trip and Pw wasn't going to make it easy for any of us. The name of the game was mud, and not that dry stuff that falls off tires. No, we're talking grab your spoons cause it's a sloppy milkshake mud that will be filling your floorboards and gumming up your radiators. Now let's not put the mud buggy before the horse. First, a little bit about General Sam's. This 700-plus-acre park has over 40 miles of trails with everything from steep climbs and ragged twisty canyons to deep, deeper, and deepest mud-filled pits. If this is your kind of thing, then there is camping for both RVs and tents and after a day in the muck the showers and running water for rinsing off is a great treat. Now don't expect to meet a white-linen-suited General Sam as this park is named after the late Sam Houston, one of the first commanders of the Texas army and the first president of the Republic of Texas back in the 1830s. Instead, General Sam's is run by Denny Powell, a true southern gentleman who, with the help of some local off-roaders (The Texas Mud Mafia), showed us a great time in their dirty little park (and by "dirty" we mean only the muddy parts).
Day four of our trip started with a surprise welcome to returning Ultimate Adventurer Tim Hardy and his granddaughter Bridgette Carrillo. Tim and Bridgette had a rough trip just getting to the start of Ultimate Adventure when they were almost stranded in Death Valley on their drive to Texas. Luckily they made it to our roundup safe and sound, until this hillclimb sent them back to camp for a repair of the front differential. | 
Invited reader John Lambert and his father Gary had come all the way from Vermont to attend Ultimate Adventure and they weren't going to let a little mud scare them away, even if it meant stuffing the radiator of their Chevy V-6-powered Sidekick. Though they didn't have the massive tires of the local Suzukis, they still gave it their all when hitting the mud holes. | 
After stretching our legs on some rocky hillclimbs it was time to play in the dirty stuff. Fred Perry returned this year as the official Warn winch vehicle and his V-8 powered, stretch Jeep TJ made short work of some of the first mud holes we encountered. |
Our group of wheelers this year is from a wide range of backgrounds and states, but amazingly we didn't have anyone that was champin' at the bit for a good old mud hole. (Note to you readers that have built mud machines, maybe you should apply for UA next year so you can show those rockcrawler and trail guys how mud's supposed to be run.) However, even though no one is "required" to run every trail, a sure-fire way to get some harassment is if you wimp out and take the bypasses (if there are any) around any obstacles, whether they are big rockclimbs or deep sloppy mud pits. Needless to say the mud at General Sam's had some of our troop peeling out and our new mud tires hucking the slurry all over the place. The fact is that even though mud is a pain in the neck to clean up and very hard on vehicles, when you're deep in it and have the throttle pegged with all four tires spinning and you're just hoping that the hole isn't getting any deeper, mud can really be a ton of fun. Again our fearless leader Pw took us straight through the holes behind the local trail leader and even when his Jeep filled with nearly 6 inches of creamy chocolate malt, he just grinned and kept on truckin. By the end of the day we had rigs overheating, cameramen falling down in the slop trying to get photos, and a truly excellent time playing like pigs in the messy muck of General Sam's.
Showing us the way through General Sam's was owner Denny Powell, riding along in his friend Paul Morris' slightly modified Suzuki Sidekick on 40-plus-inch tires. Though our group had tires ranging from 35 to 46 inches, most of our rigs were dwarfed by the massive mud trucks our local guests had brought out to play with. | 
We found that at General Sam's most of the local wheelers are very cautious with their use of four-wheel drive. For example, this driver chose not to use four-wheel drive unless he really needed it, which resulted in not only a great photo, but also the complete dousing of his girlfriend and himself in mud. Isn't that romantic? | 
Dean Bulloch was driving a Jeep TJ outfitted with a set of the new BFGoodrich mud tires and when he hit the mud he did it with rockcrawler speed. Dean is one of the top rockcrawlers in the nation and rather than throttle through everything, he would rather let the tires do the work and merely crawl his way through the soupy mud. |
Wheeling Wildman and returning Ultimate Adventurer Tom Boyd was back again this year, but since Jeep had decided to sponsor this year's trip, Tom took the hint and transformed his Bronco into a Ford Jeep CJ thing. Whatever it was he still had his good old throttle-down driving style which is perfect for muddy trails like those in Huntsville. | 
After breaking a selectable hub on the earlier hillclimb, Ultimate Adventure alum Trent McGee repaired his Superlift Jeep buggy and returned to play in the mud. Trent and co-driver Sam Gillis took the high line on this hole and got very close to taking a bath in it before throttling down and saving it at the last possible moment. | 
You might think working for an off-road magazine is a great job, and it is, but like every occupation it has its hard days at the office. For example, this is the last photo Tech Editor Fred Williams took before getting a mud bath from Jake and Glen in the Flatfender Jeep. |
As we said, our group leader Pw was more than happy to lead his rag-tag team of rowdy wheelers through whatever muddy holes could be found. Unfortunately the drainage holes in the floor of the JK hadn't been cut open and after a few passes in the mud pits, his Jeep was filled with 6 inches of mud soup. | 
With mud comes carnage and if you're looking for it check the radiator first. Ryan Hagel had cooling problems when the radiator and fan of his Optima Battery Jeep took a big gulp of the nasty mud milkshake. | 
Meanwhile back at camp, Kane Riccardi and his wife Denise set about repairing a radiator that had been battered by their mechanical fan as they were dunking in the mud. Luckily for them a local wheeler had an identical radiator for a Jeep with a Chevy V-8 conversion and was more than glad to donate it to the Riccardis for the rest of the trip. On top of that, sponsor 4-Wheel Drive Hardware was willing to replace that local's radiator when they heard just what had been offered to the Riccardis to keep them going. Good deeds don't go unnoticed on UA. |