Lawdog734
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- Location
- Colbert, GA
This weekend a friend and I attempted to knock out a portion of the "GA Traverse". It's an interconnecting network of forest service and logging roads about 400 miles long that crosses north GA. It starts near Seneca, SC and ends just over the Alabama/GA line. This trip was straight-up awesome. It was nice to be out doing stuff with the humvee that I feel it was made for. So we started out Saturday morning, camped out Saturday night and wrapped up on Sunday night - we ended up doing about half the route. To keep with the mil vehicle theme, my buddy Joe was driving his 86 Chevy CUCV and I took my GMV. Difficulty ranged from easy, but rough dirt roads that Helen and Gladys could easily traverse if they took a wrong turn to rougher stuff that required a bit more care and skill. We were up on some very narrow goat trails on hill sides down to making several water crossings. My freshly painted GMV now looks very well seasoned.
Before I get onto pictures, I learned an extremely valuable lesson this weekend that everyone should take to heart. I can only describe it as negligence on my part because I knew better, and nearly payed dearly for this lesson. I've seen talk of people wanting to remove the run-flats from their humvee tires and I never did understand why. They're a pain in the butt to remove and get all the grease out plus they're only so-so tires anyway. I've driven them on my Ford Excursion and they don't ride any better with them out. Like most of us, 99.5% of my driving is on-road, but this incident made me a believer in the run-flat.
The last pic in this post is of my back right tire after 13 miles through some nasty, rocky terrain until I could get to pavement. My buddy also runs humvee wheels on his CUCV, but had aired down his tires earlier in the trip for comfort. I felt that my ride was ok, so didn't bother. Well, when traversing this particularly nasty trail - I blew out the tire on a sharp rock. Like a dumb-ass, I didn't have my spare and neither did Joe - we had everything to change a tire, but the actual tire. Even if I did, it was easily a mile before I was in an area flat enough to actually change the tire but being without one, we continued on the trail. If I didn't have a run-flat, I would have been really up a creek. There was zero cell reception for most of the trip and AAA definitely wasn't an option. The lesson learned is BE PREPARED. Yes the spare is 150# and a pain to get in and out of the bed, but it would have been a lifesaver to have it. The other lesson is never to go it alone - always travel in pairs if possible. I was fortunate in that this particular part of the route was within an hour of the house, so my father in law was nice enough to drive up the spare that I didn't bother to take with me.
All in all - even with the blown tire, the trip was fun as **** and I'll definitely be doing it again.
Before I get onto pictures, I learned an extremely valuable lesson this weekend that everyone should take to heart. I can only describe it as negligence on my part because I knew better, and nearly payed dearly for this lesson. I've seen talk of people wanting to remove the run-flats from their humvee tires and I never did understand why. They're a pain in the butt to remove and get all the grease out plus they're only so-so tires anyway. I've driven them on my Ford Excursion and they don't ride any better with them out. Like most of us, 99.5% of my driving is on-road, but this incident made me a believer in the run-flat.
The last pic in this post is of my back right tire after 13 miles through some nasty, rocky terrain until I could get to pavement. My buddy also runs humvee wheels on his CUCV, but had aired down his tires earlier in the trip for comfort. I felt that my ride was ok, so didn't bother. Well, when traversing this particularly nasty trail - I blew out the tire on a sharp rock. Like a dumb-ass, I didn't have my spare and neither did Joe - we had everything to change a tire, but the actual tire. Even if I did, it was easily a mile before I was in an area flat enough to actually change the tire but being without one, we continued on the trail. If I didn't have a run-flat, I would have been really up a creek. There was zero cell reception for most of the trip and AAA definitely wasn't an option. The lesson learned is BE PREPARED. Yes the spare is 150# and a pain to get in and out of the bed, but it would have been a lifesaver to have it. The other lesson is never to go it alone - always travel in pairs if possible. I was fortunate in that this particular part of the route was within an hour of the house, so my father in law was nice enough to drive up the spare that I didn't bother to take with me.
All in all - even with the blown tire, the trip was fun as **** and I'll definitely be doing it again.
