Nicholas Fluhart

My friends and I have an annual ritual that takes place in Mt. Holly, AR every fall. At the age of 14, my friend Philip and I started the tradition of taking a camping, four-wheeling, and hunting trip every fall on his family property in Mt. Holly. In subsequent years, others joined us and now we have a core group that meets every year. We primarily squirrel hunt, because it allows for multiple people and provides some lively action, and squirrel is a game that we can easily process and cook right at the camp site.

The first day, a couple of us get there early for an evening hunt in hopes of getting some meat to cook for dinner. As seen in the photos below, my friend Matthew and I were successful.

Then, we harvest some wood for the cook fire…

After the hunting everyone relaxes. There’s plenty to eat, lots of guns and target shooting, sometimes even some fishing, but it’s not until later that the real fun (in my opinion) begins when we hit the trails. Our riding style demands us to push the limits of our machines…

Almost lost it.

Almost lost it Part II.

…so it’s not uncommon to have to improvise when there’s an incident on the trails. In my case, I had a tire issue. While night riding, I hit a log in the trail and it applied so much pressure on my front tire that it shot an old patch-plug out of the tire like a bullet with a stream of pressurized green slime. Unfortunately, we were miles away from camp. It’s in situations like this that you have to analyze your surroundings and improvise with whatever you can find, or “MacGyver” it so to speak. On the side of the trail I found an old cigarette butt. I smeared some of the green slime sealant on it and used a small stick to plug it into the sidewall of the tire effectively sealing the hole. Fortunately, someone had a 12V air pump and we were able to air up the tire and finish the ride. Below you’ll see the cigarette butt in the tire.

And that’s the basis of our annual event. There will be more of these kinds of posts to come as I find more and more photos from the many years we’ve been doing this.

Until next time…