So it took a while because I have more than a thousand photos from my trip out, EJS, the week between in CO and UT, Sand Hollow and the trip back (5090 miles total). Sorry for the delay.
I'm keeping these to just the Sand Hollow portion, with a couple extra days on the front end before the national officially started.
I found out in Moab that the newly installed rear ARB was leaking air into the diff. It worked, but I didn't like it pressurizing the housing and potentially blowing the seals, so I borrowed the lift at a generous friend's shop in Toquerville to check to see if there was something simple with the copper line or something that I could fix easily. Nope. It's internal to the diff itself and there was no way I was digging into it that far when it was at least still functional open and in an emergency for locking. I pulled the one-way valve on the vent hose to make it as easy as possible for air to escape and only used the thing a couple times very briefly. Figured the shop was worth a photo.
There was a WEROCK event right next to the golf course (reportedly rather pricey to play too) on a bunch of large rock formations the weekend before the National. I'd never been to one, not sure that I'd go to another. As I expected, just not my thing to see stupid $$$ rock buggies just do insane things. The more stock class stuff was cool and there was a nicely built (but still $$$) XJ that put on a nice show... maybe if it was all stock class and had the same total number of competitors... I know people love it, just not for me (same reason I don't care to ever go to KOH.)
Side note, I have a very, very bad feeling that there's going to be a very, very bad accident at one of these that hurts/kills a lot of people. I'm sure it's what people love that there's really very little crowd control and they can get up close, but I was constantly cringing at where spectators were relative to the vehicles. Particularly kids. A rock shelf coming loose, a throttle sticking, a loss of all brakes, etc. and multiple people were going to be in serious trouble. Pic was just a funny moment when two different competitors were upside down in one shot.
Here's a video I forgot I took of this rollover, he'd been on the face of the rock a while before I started this. He was trying to climb up and to the left but the right rear slid down over a ledge that there was basically no hope of recovering from. He inched around for a bit before basically giving into it and I think he was hoping to be able to right/catch himself as he rolled. You can hear him give it gas:
Had to include one of some of Mopedal's finest shine being sipped. This was in honor of Gary and Debbie Nix finally making it out to Sand Hollow after their brand-new 900 mile dually crapped out on them in central TX, requiring heroic efforts to procure another truck (dealer loaner) to hitch to their trailer. Shortly after this photo, the steering box on his Scrambler proceeded to blow out the sector shaft seal as he started it to back it off the trailer, dumping all his PS fluid on the trailer deck.
Jake still needed to pre-run one of the trails that was debatable as to scenic or easy-moderate, so he and his crew, Kevin and Beth Sullivan and Gary Nix and I ran out to do Backdoor to Babylon Sunday evening.
With the exception of one short downhill V notch/chute, it was totally scenic and we had a perfect sunset to experience (the trail took a touch longer than expected and went past dark)
These mountains were always in view everywhere you went, unless the cloud deck was too low. We got some awesome cloud/sun time. I didn't take a good camera, so these are all just phone shots and un-retouched.
Jake on the start of the one fun bit. As long as you stayed where he was on the driver's side, it was cake, but a stock-ish Scrambler slipping off of that was going to have a bad day and there were a couple diff biter rocks farther down. There was no bypassing this, so this went to easy-moderate.
And we had to pose for a sunset shot. Again, no filters/retouching, this is right off my phone. Pretty amazing. It got dark obviously after this, so we cut things slightly short and headed to town to finally eat something. Really fun evening, despite the hunger.