Nicholas Fluhart

Well, it’s that time again…time to post the 3rd Annual East Camden Expedition that took place in early March 2012. This year produced some wild rides, magnum cooking, and fun shooting, all with minimal casualties to machine and personnel. By the way, if you missed the 1st or 2nd Expeditions, click here to catch up on those as well as many other cool rides and trips. This year’s Expedition was extended to four days. I’ll start this off by outlining the crew, in alphabetical order, then you’ll see an awesome slideshow documenting some of the carnage. I’ll follow up with Part 2 which will contain live video footage.

Brad

Brad’s an expedition veteran, having attended all expeditions to date. This year he unveiled his new CanAm Renegade which saw many miles on this trip. With a fully snorkeled machine, he took to the water like a fish. Surprisingly, aside from a broken bumper and an over-wheelie or two in the creek, there was no major incident. Unbelievable…

Brian

Another expedition veteran, attending all the trips, Brian is usually the first one on the scene at camp when the rest of us arrive. This year he put his classic Honda 350 FourTrax through the paces, including a nice swim. It’s become an expedition tradition for someone to drowned their machine. Last year it was Chris…this year was Brian’s turn.

Chris

After last year’s expedition, Chris was hooked. He showed up with machines and fish cooker in tow. After drowning his ATV last year, he vowed not to make that mistake again, so this year he unveiled a Max Amphibious 6-wheeler. When those of us on four wheels were carefully avoiding deep water disaster in the creek, he easily motored by us…laughing.

David

A newbie to the Expedition, David fit right in.  He cut the Ranger XP no slack in going where the 4-wheelers went (even if it meant wheels up…). Fully snorkeled, he had no problem in the deep water which was everywhere on this trip.

Moore

After having experienced the 2nd Expedition, Moore was a guaranteed player in the 3rd Annual…even if it meant altering his career, or any other trivial things. This year he brought back the Recon, which performed surprisingly well in the dunes (at this point, why am I constantly surprised with the performance of this Recon on these trips?). He also spent some time in (and out of) the saddle of a Grizzly 600.

Nick

OK, then there’s me. Am I the one responsible for organizing these yearly travesties, where unexplored terrain looms in the distance, where only eagles and angels dare to fly, where both man and machine come together and leave exhausted and heavily worn? No, not me…it’s Nick Black. Enough said…

Nick Black

Philip

And last, but certainly not least, Philip. LOL Where do I start? This was Philip’s first Expedition experience. He may have been a green-horn at the start, but he was balls to the wall all the way. He very, VERY narrowly avoided deep water disaster on his Kodiak 450. However, on the last night of the trip, Philip-Pinot-Grigio learned what it meant to destroy a primary on an automatic transmission. I’ve never seen a belt roasted like that…

Now for some good stuff. Check this out:

Stay tuned for Part 2: Live Video

Before posting the 2012 Expedition footage, I’m posting the final 2011 photos of the Day-3 Freestyle ride. I finally found these, and they’re pretty good…better than I remember.

So on Day-3, things really got crazy on the trails. Everyone knew it was our last ride before departing for home that evening, so it was wide open balls to the wall! Some had to cut out early, the rest of us stayed to have every last bit of available fun before heading back to civilization. Amazingly there were no casualties, aside from me taking a roll in the creek and Chris having to be towed back to camp after floating his machine. It’s all documented in the slideshow at the bottom of this post.

Here are some screen caps from the slideshow posted below:

I’ll soon be posting the 3rd Annual Expedition from 2012…

Our annual Mt. Holly hunting trip, usually taking place in late October or early November, was postponed this last year due to excessive drought and fire bans. We reconvened the weekend of January 14th. We camped three nights and had a lot of fun. As always, there was plenty of food, guns, and riding to be had. Here are some of the few photos I have of the event:

It seems I have more pics of us cutting fire wood than anything else, nonetheless it was needed to survive the 20° nights and cold wind…

With camp provisions squared away, we set out for a hunt with the dog…

The next day it was too windy to hunt, so we engaged in some recreational shooting activities…

Our last night we had a pretty good ride, but after getting lost miles from civilization with temperatures rapidly dropping, no one was in the mood to take pictures.  However, after happening upon a rather oddly shaped tree, I couldn’t resist fishing out my camera and taking a few shots.

That wraps it up. Until next time…

Now for the long awaited day-2 4×4 ride. We woke on the second day to see that a late night storm completely obliterated the camp. Fortunately, we weathered the storm quite well in the enclosed trailer. Equally fortunate, all of our ATV’s and vehicles escaped harm. The photos below show the camp minus the canopies and shower that blew away in the night. It appears that the ATV’s far outnumber the people on this trip. That’s what I call being prepared. Had the storm taken out a few of them, we still would have had enough to continue the ride.

The guys spent the morning rebuilding the camp while I cooked breakfast burritos for everyone. Once we recovered from the previous night, the storm, and the rebuilding of the camp, we geared up to head out to the main event: magnum mud, rugged terrain, and everything else we could steer toward. We plotted a course that would take us over a large portion of the property through the most challenging routes, i.e. abandoned trials, wash-outs, deep water, etc. On the first leg, we encountered a series of creek crossings that proved to be moderately challenging. In fact, it took most of the day to get through them all. Second, our path took us through a long stand of flooded timber. The challenge of riding in murky water is that you cannot see the bottom and have no idea if or when you might drop out of sight. Below you will see a slideshow, followed by videos of our encounters. The video footage, which contains the subsequent and moderately humorous dialogue, is from Chris Taylor’s hat cam.

Slideshow: Outlines the Day-2 highlights.

Video 1: Our encounters with the creek.

Video 2: Flooded pipelines.

Video 3: Into the unknown – Flooded wilderness.

Alright, that sums up Day-2, but last and certainly not least, I will be posting the Day-3 freestyle ride; one of the best rides of the event….lots of action (and carnage) so keep an eye out for the upcoming post!

Part 2: The Day-1 Sport Ride

So after getting the camp squared away, we decided to hit the trails for an afternoon sport ride. The first spot on the list was the TNT Plant. There are multiple ways to get to the plant from our camp site, so the ATVs took one route, and the dirt bikes took a second route. The dirt bikes consisted of Chris on his XR650R and myself on my KLX650R. We proceeded at a fast pace, and while headed east on a gravel road, we had a very close encounter with a deer. Chris and I were riding side-by-side when the deer jumped out of the roadside brush and narrowly avoided collision. We got it on video; check out the clip below:

At the TNT plant we took a break and climbed up to the roof, or what’s left of it…

Then we decided to check out the basement…only it was under water. After unsuccessfully attempting to persuade Moore, our resident scuba diver/pilot, to conduct some under water spelunking adventures, we just threw rocks at the entrance instead.

Leaving from the area shown above, there is a mysterious concrete sidewalk about six feet in width leading north into the dense woods. It goes on completely unobstructed for about an eighth of a mile through the woods until it runs into a massive concrete theater of sorts. This area is believed to be the small arms testing site. In the photo below, I am standing by the south wall near an indentation where targets were apparently hung.

Now it’s on to the dunes…or our version of “dunes”. To build the 68K acre complex of mostly concrete bunkers and structures, it required a large volume of rocks and gravel. The surrounding area is rich in gravel and wash-rock which is one of the reasons the government chose this location. Subsequently, there are numerous gravel quarries indiscriminately scattered throughout the area. Most are abandoned, but some are still in operation today. All were linked via railroads, as too were all the structures in the area, however, all of the railroad tracks in the abandoned areas were long since pulled up and scrapped. Two large gravel yards border our lease, so we can easily access them on our ATVs. We road over to one on the NE section of the area, which we refer to as “the dunes” because the small, fine type of gravel there gives the appearance of sand dunes. There we find a variety of riding terrain. There is an abundance of long, steep hills, open flats and table tops, as well as wooded trails and lakes. It’s fantastic.

Although we didn’t have the chance to take many photos, we did manage to grab some video footage as seen below. We did some hill climbing and general riding. I learned first-hand how difficult it is to ride a dirt bike in sand and gravel, although Chris makes it look easy. Toward the end of the clip, Brad takes a pretty big spill attempting to climb an insanely steep hill, but I only caught the aftermath on video.

After all that, we retreated the few miles back to camp to cook diner which was dear steaks, burgers, potatoes, cut green beans with bacon and a touch of garlic. And if that wasn’t enough fun for one day, we headed back out for a late-night ride at which point we had entirely too much fun which subsequently put us out of commission until noon on day-2. The Day-2 4×4 ride will be posted next, so stay tuned!