The Jeep Guru

Last year my son Scott and I visited Wooly’s Off Road park near Lewisburg, Tn while our wives shopped on the Friday after Thanksgiving. Last year we took his mom’s Cherokee complete with street tires and Motives Makeup decals. We saw enough of the place to know we wanted to go back. It took us a year but we finally made it back to Wooly’s with our off road Jeep.

The trails at Wooly’s straight right out of the parking lot. There are also trails on both sides of the road. Unfortunately they don’t have maps available. There is a crude map on the wall where you check in but nothing to take with us. However the trails are really compact so you really can’t get very lost.

After playing around on the trails a while and exploring, we decided to tackle so of the more challenging obstacles. There is a nice rock climb right behind the barn. As I was going off the top of the climb we saw a couple of Wranglers. They told us about another rock climb near by so we headed over to try it out.

The trial we were on led us to a spot about a quarter way up the climb. It was a narrow trail that intersected at a 90 degree angle. As I tried to maneuver onto the rocks to head up the hill, I got hung up on a stump. I thought I could use it to pivot the back of the jeep down the hill an get the nose pointed up. However, that did not work and I ended up sliding sideways down the hill. After a few dozen back and forth movements while feeling very tippy, I finally got my Jeep pointed up the hill. However in the process, I managed to severely bend one of my newly installed ZJ lower control arms. With the aid of my front locker I made it up the climb relatively easily.

With the control arm bent we decided to take it easy the rest of the day. I went back down to the parking lot and it seemed to track straight so we headed across the street to the less rocky side of the park. I thought this would be a good time for Scott to get more experience behind the wheel.

It took him a few stall to get used to the clutch but after he did he got really good at maneuvering up and down the hills. At one place there are several paths up the same hill. Scott did three or four runs at progressively steeper climbs.

We then headed over to the part of the park where the old home place is located. There we found an old spring house.

We remembered a rock garden that we had tried in Janice’s street Jeep but did not go very far last year. It took us a while to find is because it had become over grown by weeds and briers.

This was a good place for Scott to learn where the tires were and how to place them on the rocks. He ran the course several times taking different lines.

It looked like fun so I decided to give it a run. We played around on some more trails before heading back to the trailer in the early afternoon.

We then decided to explore the south part of the park. With no map, it took us a while to find the right trails to connect to that part. Scott found a really fun climb between two trails. It had large rocks but with good access.

After running this climb several times using different lines, Scott noticed were running low of fuel. We took a long run around the perimeter of the park to make it back to the trailer. Even though there was still daylight left, we decided to pack up an go because we were very tired and there was now fuel station anywhere close.

There is still alot of trails that we never ran. A guide or a map would be a great help. Thinking back, we should have joined up with the two Wranglers and followed them around. But we did have a lot of fun just exploring on our own pace.

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