4/14/2017 Day 9 Rusty Nail/ Gold Bar Rim.

The day started like normal getting the cooler packed up and things put in their place before heading out to a familiar starting point up north of town, where we started for Metal Masher.

We aired down and started back towards Gooney Bird Rock, and jumped off on to Rusty Nail. Today with my new gps card I would lead and let Mike follow, as he had led nearly all of the other trails.

Trouble was, I hadn’t had time to figure out where these trails were found in the gps but quickly sorted that out. We hit the ledges first, then Riff Raff, climbed the wall and and came upon “No Left Turn” aptly named because a left here drops you some 300 ft to the bottom. This was what we thought would be the most challenging obstacle of the day, so we took our time crossing it.

In fact another group met up with us with some rock buggies, we’d helped out earlier and we let them pass, and Brandon turned his Jeep off. Then when trying to restart had nothing. So we tried using jumper cables, still nothing. Then we pulled Mike’s battery to get him started, it worked but quickly stalled again after hooking up the cables.

In our testing we came to notice his negative post seemed to move a little, and the tester leads got hot when testing the battery. Dead Short in the battery, not good, we had no cell reception, and things got challenging. We needed to get ahold of Tammy who was back at camp to get a new battery, but also needed to keep moving or abandon his rig and come back after it.

Angie suggested hop scotching it with our batteries, so I pulled mine and put it in Brandon’s and they got him to the top off the hill, before running it back to me. Then I drove up the hill, in the mean time Mandi had walked up the hill and got a message to Tammy, and things were in motion. We sent the other guys ahead to meet Tammy and Anne and get the new battery.

When we got to the top I took my battery out again to get Brandon going and thought instead of reconnecting to a dead shorted battery, we tucked his negative cable out of the way. It seemed to work, unfortunately for me the movement of my cables killed the lead to my Switch Pro, essentially killing all of my poorly functioning lockers, lights and air compressor.

So we did a trail fix on the cable using a hose camp to the terminal and some Gorilla Tape, and we were back in business, I sent Brandon ahead to meet the others while we made our way down to them on the now busy trail. After about 30 mins we caught up to the others as they were finishing up with the battery swap, then proceeded out to Gold Bar Rim to finish up. A second time now for Mike and Steve. Mike apparently suffered some scrapes on the first trip out. But all got up the waterfall and safely out to return to camp and prep for the voyage home tomorrow.