Grizzly 700 meets 700 foot sand mountain.
Posted: Mon Apr 14, 2008 8:35 am
So this weekend my friends and I took a little camping trip to the Little Sahara Recreation Area about 3 hours south west from Salt Lake City, out in the middle of nowhere.
http://www.utah.com/playgrounds/little_sahara.htm
This BLM recreation area is filled with all sorts of trails, plus thousands of acres of sand dunes to play on.
This is a picture of sand mountain from the base, it is not mine, and I'll get into why in a minute.
http://rides.webshots.com/photo/2873624 ... 5012yWNHPh
Now, there are two sides people go up, the left side is pretty much where sand rails go up. The right part of the mountain is where dirt bikes with paddles go up, and sport quads pretty much take any part of it.
I on my grizzly with stock rims and tires, did the right side in 4 high going about 25 - 30 all the way up. It is a crazy mountain to climb and saturday there was just a constant stream of people climing this thing. when you approach the base camp to this place all you see is this mountain with little dots going up and down to this thing. Once you get to the top of the mountain, you turn around and head right down. Most people really have to take it easy going down. They have paddles and are light enough that they don't really dig down into the sand enough to slow their decent, so they start off going slow. With the grizzly and the engine breaking I was going down way to slow and ended up giving it a little bit of gas to get down the mountain. Keep in mind while you're going down, hundreds of other motorcycles, and sport quads are coming up, and all of them have paddles and are throwing sand everywhere. I can say that now I've climbed it, and will probably never climb it again. It was rather fun to watch people climb it. There were a ton of sand crawlers, sand rails, jeeps, suzuki sidekicks all tricked out trying to climb this mountain as well. Most normal vehicles that tried it would go up the left side but would end up having to arc back down about half way up. There was one guy with a late 70's chevy blazer with a lift kit and really agressive tires that managed to drive up the left side, the right side, and all over the mountain like it was nothing. It would seriously take him less than 20 seconds to accend the mountain. There were not any rollovers on Sand Mountain at all which was a good thing. My experience which I describe below meant that I really had to do an all or nothing thing here.
As to why I don't have my own pic's of the bottom and the top of the mountain, and time for the bad part of the story.
Now this was my first time doing any dune riding, and so one of my friends and I went out saturday morning before we hit sand mountain, in order to get some experience with the dunes. After an hour I was doing great, I could handle going up steep dunes, and with the power of the grizzly I could do most of the dunes without going into 4wd. One of the dune's I took, however wasn't so kind to either me or my grizzly. The ridge of the dune isn't very wide, it was wide enough to stay level so I figured I'd go up it. Now I wasn't riding strait up the dune as it was about a 70 degree slope. I instead took to the ridge like people do, and I got up to the top, the downhill side of the dune decided to play a prank on me and gave way. Needless to say, my grizzly sank in, and threw me down the dune, then decided to roll down as well. The quad did two rolls, then another 90 degree roll and land on it's side down at the bottom. Now when it sank, it pretty much threw me off, so I didn't roll with it. I remember it giving way and I said "Oh shit" and I flew off. Once I hit the ground the only instinct I had was to keep rolling to get the hell out of the way should the quad follow me down. Thankfully I still had somewhat of a forward direction while my quad did not. This dune was just way too soft. My friends little 350 took it no problem, so once he saw that I didn't make it, he turned around and came down the ridge line instead of the face of the dune that i rolled. The dune pretty much showed no tracks whatsoever. There were no indentations of where my machine rolled, no tire tracks, nothing. It's like it never happened. Now because the dune was so soft, it was really like rolling in water, so there was no damage to myself or the bike. The only thing that did get damaged was my ram gps mount, which when I replace i'll mount it lower on my handle bars. All in all it was a great time, and I'm glad I popped my rolling cherry on a dune instead of a rocky trail. I wanted to take pictures of this, but it just so happened that my camera was in my cargo bag that was on it's side and under sand. Once I rolled it over, it just looked like a quad at the base of a dune.
http://www.utah.com/playgrounds/little_sahara.htm
This BLM recreation area is filled with all sorts of trails, plus thousands of acres of sand dunes to play on.
This is a picture of sand mountain from the base, it is not mine, and I'll get into why in a minute.
http://rides.webshots.com/photo/2873624 ... 5012yWNHPh
Now, there are two sides people go up, the left side is pretty much where sand rails go up. The right part of the mountain is where dirt bikes with paddles go up, and sport quads pretty much take any part of it.
I on my grizzly with stock rims and tires, did the right side in 4 high going about 25 - 30 all the way up. It is a crazy mountain to climb and saturday there was just a constant stream of people climing this thing. when you approach the base camp to this place all you see is this mountain with little dots going up and down to this thing. Once you get to the top of the mountain, you turn around and head right down. Most people really have to take it easy going down. They have paddles and are light enough that they don't really dig down into the sand enough to slow their decent, so they start off going slow. With the grizzly and the engine breaking I was going down way to slow and ended up giving it a little bit of gas to get down the mountain. Keep in mind while you're going down, hundreds of other motorcycles, and sport quads are coming up, and all of them have paddles and are throwing sand everywhere. I can say that now I've climbed it, and will probably never climb it again. It was rather fun to watch people climb it. There were a ton of sand crawlers, sand rails, jeeps, suzuki sidekicks all tricked out trying to climb this mountain as well. Most normal vehicles that tried it would go up the left side but would end up having to arc back down about half way up. There was one guy with a late 70's chevy blazer with a lift kit and really agressive tires that managed to drive up the left side, the right side, and all over the mountain like it was nothing. It would seriously take him less than 20 seconds to accend the mountain. There were not any rollovers on Sand Mountain at all which was a good thing. My experience which I describe below meant that I really had to do an all or nothing thing here.
As to why I don't have my own pic's of the bottom and the top of the mountain, and time for the bad part of the story.
Now this was my first time doing any dune riding, and so one of my friends and I went out saturday morning before we hit sand mountain, in order to get some experience with the dunes. After an hour I was doing great, I could handle going up steep dunes, and with the power of the grizzly I could do most of the dunes without going into 4wd. One of the dune's I took, however wasn't so kind to either me or my grizzly. The ridge of the dune isn't very wide, it was wide enough to stay level so I figured I'd go up it. Now I wasn't riding strait up the dune as it was about a 70 degree slope. I instead took to the ridge like people do, and I got up to the top, the downhill side of the dune decided to play a prank on me and gave way. Needless to say, my grizzly sank in, and threw me down the dune, then decided to roll down as well. The quad did two rolls, then another 90 degree roll and land on it's side down at the bottom. Now when it sank, it pretty much threw me off, so I didn't roll with it. I remember it giving way and I said "Oh shit" and I flew off. Once I hit the ground the only instinct I had was to keep rolling to get the hell out of the way should the quad follow me down. Thankfully I still had somewhat of a forward direction while my quad did not. This dune was just way too soft. My friends little 350 took it no problem, so once he saw that I didn't make it, he turned around and came down the ridge line instead of the face of the dune that i rolled. The dune pretty much showed no tracks whatsoever. There were no indentations of where my machine rolled, no tire tracks, nothing. It's like it never happened. Now because the dune was so soft, it was really like rolling in water, so there was no damage to myself or the bike. The only thing that did get damaged was my ram gps mount, which when I replace i'll mount it lower on my handle bars. All in all it was a great time, and I'm glad I popped my rolling cherry on a dune instead of a rocky trail. I wanted to take pictures of this, but it just so happened that my camera was in my cargo bag that was on it's side and under sand. Once I rolled it over, it just looked like a quad at the base of a dune.