Always enjoying your videos Mark!

What was that off camber around 2min10secs in? Like 30 degrees or so? Was it as "steep" as is seemed in the video?

 

Mark, are there areas in BBNP that are a little less remote? Something that is perhaps a little more beginner friendly but still rougher than the everyday tourist trail?

 

As usual, i wish i could tag along. Thanks again for sharing the pics and video!

 

Looks like you ran it "backward" from N to S. I've run it the other way, and I hear it's a little trickier the way you went. That incline is like you said in the video - way (way) steeper than it looks. You should run it the other direction next time as the scenery looks completely different. The off camber part I remember puckering on - it put the vehicle leaning toward the rock wall till I thought it would hit. Fun video - thanks for the flashback. There are not many photos of people running that trail much less videos.

 

Oh yes. That is, most of the trails are really little more than very rough dirt roads. Black Gap Road (video) was an exception. Because of the recent rains, much of what we drove had been recently graded. :-( LOL. As far as remote, you can go out as far as you care, then return. Or camp and return the way you came. There are backcountry campsites within even a few miles of paved roads. I recommend always have a buddy, but we did see a couple vehicles traveling solo (including a Lincoln pick-up truck--that gives you an idea how tough it is).

BTW: We were supposed to have a fourth party in our group--a lawyer from Houston. He had to drop out at the last minute because of work. He would have driven a new Grand Cherokee with the off-road package. Probably not on Black Gap Road, however. Matt (Nissan xTerra) was our guide and he'd driven Black Gap Road both directions many times in previous iterations of xTerra. Since he'd just bought this one a couple months ago, and hadn't had time to install the rock rails from his previous one, he decided to bypass Black Gap Road--said he'd have felt pretty stupid if he got into the rocks with a set of rock rails setting in his garage.

 

Afterward it dawned on me that I should have taken my second GoPro, which was setting in the glove box in the Rover, and put it on the driver's side of my vehicle such that it would have barely cleared those rocks. It would have been quite dramatic footage of the angle and the closeness! Oh well, as you say, next time!

 

I have a Nexus 7 running the Torque app, which includes roll and pitch indicators. However, I was so busy keeping an eye on those rocks and the trail that I never even glanced at it. It can record, so I could have had it do that for later viewing, but it never occurred to me to start it recording. So, don't really know the amount of lean, but 30% is probably a good estimate. When you're in it, and the rocks are about an inch or two from your sheetmetal, it always seems like it's a lot greater than it really is. Still, I was glad that I wasn't carrying anything on my overhead rack that would have shifted my COG any higher!

Edit: Going back and measuring the distant mountains and the Rover's lean, it appears we hit 35° multiple times in the next minute or so after 2:10.

 

Nice video Mark. Have you ever mounted a GoPro to the back of the Rover to give an additional camera angle of the front of your Jeep? Might be a cool thing.

 

Thanks for the info. His trailers look great.

On the simpler trailer front I think the Ruger & Manley ORV trailers look pretty tight.

 

Yes I have, and don't ask my why I didn't think to do that on this leg of the trip. If you visit my YouTube page (digitalbydoiron), I have a video called "Seeking a Lake" in which I switch back and forth between the view from the rear of the Rover and the front of my Jeep and I thought it worked well. I have raw video recorded from the back of my Jeep of the Rover at Big Bend, just haven't had time to go through all of that, yet. I'm still new to this video thing, so I hope no one expects anything particularly great. Photography I literally have decades of experience and feel I'm pretty good at it; video can be boiled down to a few months of experience. LOL.