Pauline and I decided to take Kermit the Jeep out yesterday for the day and do a 100 mile loop though the local mountain range and see what we could see.
We saw a lot. But what we did not see almost turned real bad real quick.
We wanted to take a small mountain road at the start of the day to get some good pictures of the area, so we left here at 6am and by 6:30am we was on Aztec Road taking pictures.
But somehow, we ended up on “Diamond Mine Road” without even knowing it. We got into a real bad area, trail rated at least 9/10 area. It was so bad we was forced to back the Jeep down a rugged “road” on the side of a large cliff. It looked about 1,500′ down to the bottom, but honestly, I don’t think Pauline and I looked down too much during this. lol.
There are no pictures of this time period since I was thinking nothing but “FRAK FRAK FRAK FRAK….” and making sure I still had all 4 wheels on the “road” while Pauline was just holding on. Tightly! lol.
During this we drove past a tree branch that I didn’t give much thought about until we hit it and it scrapped the Jeep from front to back, but it was either that or…. “open air”.
When we got back to that stupid tree, I needed to take a time out from driving backwards and try and relax some as my shoulders, neck and arms and hands were just sore as hell from tension and holding on as tight as I could.
I decided to get my hatchet and and see if I could whack that tree branch off. As I was opening the back door of the Jeep, I remembered I keep a bow saw in the Jeep for camping. It took 15 seconds to cut that branch. It will take hours of buffing the Jeep, and I’m sure we will always have a permeant reminder of that drive.
I’m 50/50 on the scuffs. Sad I scuffed up our Jeep, which I LOVE! And pride that we have “off road” badges permanently displayed on the Jeep.
Once we got turned around, we went back to “Flux Canyon Road” which at the worst part is maybe a 5/6 while the rest of the road is at most a 3/4. However at the very end of the 5/6 part, I took a dip/crater wrong and whacked the bottom of the Jeep hard. But I didn’t think anything of it and kept going.
About 5 minutes later we got a warning on the Jeep we never seen or heard of until we got it. “HOTOIL”. That sent a deep shock of fear into me. My first thought was I hit the oil pan and we was ready to seize up the engine in a REALLY bad spot to break down in. I stopped and we both jumped out looking at the bottom and saw nothing leaking.
I got the owners manual out and it mentions nothing on “HOTOIL” Lucky, Pauline had 1 bar on her phone and was able to google it and discovered it was basically the transmission fluid was over heating due to the high use of our 4 wheel drive in high.
According to what we read, this is a known design flaw with the Jeep Wrangler Unlimited automatic. We needed to stop for a while and let it cool down or the Jeep would go into “limp mode” and would not allow us to start the Jeep for 20-30 mins. But since we did NOT know this. We would have panicked. More on this later. We will be addressing this with Chrysler/Jeep/Warranty.
After a 15 minute break, Jeep started right up and I switched back to rear wheel drive and we had no other issues.
We saw what we believe was a 2 year old Bald Eagle not more then 15′ from us as it flew away, no time to really get a good look or a picture as we was driving and was surprised by it. HUGE bird.
We stopped in Sonoita for lunch and ate at the “Cunningham Ranch House Restaurant” and had a really good lunch. Its a good spot for lunch in the area. I will give it 4 of 5.
Some of the lesson’s we learned on this.
1) Bring both the Jeep GPS and the Hiking GPS as the hiking GPS tracks our route, so we can figure out where we went wrong.
2) Tell someone where we are going. We told no one. Bad mistake. Lucky it ended as well as it did.
3) Get that shovel for the Jeep we been saying for years we will get. We almost needed it.
4) Get a Jeep mechanical manual. If we did not have the use of the cell phone, we would have thought we was “screwed” and might have had to call for help since we had no clue what “HOTOIL” meant.
5) Pay more attention to where we are going. We will go back to see where we went wrong, I know the general area where we took the wrong route, but no idea why or how. Was the main route “hidden” or was we just not paying attention?
6) Remember what tools you do and do not have in the Jeep. That bow saw would have been a huge help the first time.
We had plenty of food and water, so at least we was prepared for that.
Here are the pics. It was fun getting them, we plan to do this route again if we can.
Well, not the “bad part”…
Point “B” is the “bad part”, the rest was amazing!
“C” is a “ghost town” we saw only a small part of, but realized later we drove past the main part.