Choccolocco Mountain Off Road Vehicle Park is located in Jacksonville, Alabama, just one mile from the town square. We recently had the chance to make it out to this park for the Thrills in the Hills Event. This place is just plain ridiculous. We took the sport quads so we could get around easy and film. We had a hard time following the big buggies around due to the loose steep climbs. After a few hours of riding around we had gotten the park figured out so we could easily drive around and see all the best obstacles. There was even an f-250 superduty that was basically stock roaming around on the main roads.
We started off the day bye hitting Hells Revenge which is a dry creek bed that runs down one side of the property. It had a lot of steep loose climbs that went up the far side of the creek bed. There was also a nasty stacked ledge at the end that gave the rigs a good fight. No worries though, the ones that couldn’t make it up just took the bypass. We found that most of the more difficult trails had a bypass so everyone could see the main obstacle without having to back down or turn around.
Our favorite and the most well known trail of Choccolocco Mountain ORV is “BOAT RAMP”. This obstacle gets its name because it is a rock slab that has water running across it year round. If you have ever tried to walk up a boat ramp at the lake then you will quickly see how it got its name. Kyle even tried it on his Suzuki Z400 and quickly got bucked off the back. A guy in a honda powered buggy on stickies made Boat Ramp look like a driveway but a few of the other rigs had to make multiple full throttle attempts to conquer this beast. Two of the rigs slid back down and punctured a tire on the sharp edges of the step down into the obstacle and had to make repairs. We had a good scare when lightning struck just 30 feet from where we were filming. The owners claim that most people come into the park and immediately want to go try “Boat ramp”. He tries to convince them to try a few more trails first, but sure enough they come limping back 30 minutes later with a half broken rig.
All in all the trip was great. It was almost unbearably hot, but atleast there were creek beds and water everywhere you turned to cool off a bit in between obstacles. Bottom line is you have got to put this place on your list of off road parks to check out in Alabama. Check back for a detailed review of the park. For now enjoy some of the trip videos.
The park is easily found if you take the Faulkville/Eva exit on I-65 and head east. Take your first left on Mt Zion Road and then take another left on Akins Mountain Road and it will dead end into the park. There are no RV hookups or Bathhouses at present but plans are in the works to make them available in the near future. If you are more of the hotel type, there are some nice ones just 5 miles down the road from the park.
Once you get the setup there is one issue you might have and that is syncing the two cameras together for editing purposes. There is no way to turn both cameras on at the exact same time. Lucky for you we have a FREE solution. Once the cameras are turned on and are filming, you can gently tap the outside of the camera cases at the same time. This creates a spike in the audio track that you can later use to line up the two video tracks.
Most of the body has been reworked and there is very little left of the original panels. The front and rear is doved and the whole thing is caged extending all the way to the front of the motor. The front panels were cut off and welded to the hood along with the grill so the whole thing lifts up as one unit and is out of the way so it can be worked on without anything in the way. The body was painted from the baby-turd-green it originally came from the factory to a bright “Ford” blue implement paint found at TSC. The cage got orange paint just to be bright and stand out.
