Sorry, not many pictures on this one, the camera was put away most of the time due to us repairing vehicles :)

Well, the plan for this one was to get a couple of buddies from work out and try out the "four wheel" thing that I'm always probably ranting about at work. One of the better local trails for first timers, I find, is Sunrise Lake. The challenge is moderate to difficult for stock vehicles, depending on what they're driving,, but still lots of fun. It's an easy to moderate one for most modified rigs depending on the time of year.

Sunrise Lake is a marked forestry site off of the West Harrison Forest Service road. It's easy to get to and is a pretty scenic drive. It's located near Hale Creek and the directions are the same to get there.

We met up with everyone at the Sumas exit McDonalds (Abbortsford) on the Friday night. The plan was to camp at Hale Creek and run Sunrise on the Saturday. We camped at Hale because it has a lot more room for a group of you and the scenery's a lot nicer. The drive to Hale was pretty much uneventful, except for Vince's Ford fishtailing all over the place on the heavy washboard. I had forgotten to mention to him to lock in the hubs and put her in four-hi, that front end would have helped him out a lot. Trent and Vince seemed to enjoy the brief steep decent to the site - their first crack at some off-camber stuff. We did a quick survey of the area and decided to camp around the point, right on the beach. After we set up camp, we kicked back and had a few drinks. We warmed up some rocks in the fire and enjoyed a couple of trips to the sauna. Vince and I decided to go for a late night spin, for wood and a joy ride. We cruised down the beach (a km or so of a drive), gathered some wood, and Andrew got stuck..............Yes, I was having tooo much fun!! On that beach head there's a couple of nice stretches of rock crawling (when the water's low), the only problem is that the rocks usually have a nice coating of dry algea on them and when you get too close to the lake, the algea gets wet again..........You get the idea,,,,, numbnuts here slide himself into the lake. Luckily we were close to camp and Vince got his stock Ford pickup to tug fancy pants YJ (me) out of Harrison Lake.

The next day's run to Sunrise got even worst for the two modified rigs in our group. We were working Trent's and Vince's rigs up the trail without many problems, when Raf called out on the radio that he had a rear end problem. Turns out that his axle tubes had spun on the rear end's pumpkin, causing the pinion to point almost 90degs up..... not good,,,,Raf was parked. Less than a minute after we started rolling again, I decided to try a tough guy line and ""SNAP"" I dinged my rear slip yoke on a rock and broke it.....also not good,,,Andrew was now parked. Well the two mody's were now parked and the three stockers were having a blast. They made it past the main obstacle ( a large v-rock, that raises tires and your attention) without many problems. Luckily we hadn't tried to camp at Sunrise because it was already full. The ride back to Hale was uneventful (except for Trent's facial expression coming back down the v-rock) and we all enjoyed a nice bbq on the coals as well as some more saunas.

Jason gets a yank

Trent along the way

Where Andrew broke his yoke

The following day we were visited by Chris Waterman, Larry Soo and someone in a lifted CJ (sorry, if your reading this, I don't remember your name), they were out on a run with some others from the BCOff-Road mailing list and were nice enough to venture around the point to come say hi and see if there were any new ideas they could stir up concerning our breakdowns.

Everyone had a great weekend (even considering the breakdowns and having to be pulled out all the way back to the forest road, due to the lack of the rear ends),,,and of course we'll be doing it again (minus the rear end problems, of course)...........Later,,,,