Shamrock Run 2012

Every year we make our way down to the small town of Delta, Alabama for the Annual Shamrock Run event at Morris Mountain ORV. This isn’t your typical off road event. There is no race. It is just a bunch of fellow wheelers out to do some wheeling and enjoy the outdoors. The best part is all proceeds go to charity.

Morris Mountain is known for getting rain before every event and this March was no different. It poured down rain Thursday and Friday before the event. This event is rain or shine so we loaded up the Heep Friday morning in the rain and headed south. We unloaded around 2pm and went straight to wheeling. To our surprise there were already a ton of folks out wheeling around in the mud. The fun part of wheeling when it is raining and nasty is you don’t break near as much stuff since you don’t have as much traction. It makes the easy trails difficult and the dificult trails nearly impossible in anything other than a buggy. The switch for our electric fan on the YJ bit the dust as soon as we took it off the trailer. After a few minutes we had it wired straight to the battery and off we went. Morris Mountain is a good sized park with tons of trails to conquer. We started off over on GBU, then made our way over to Gauntlet and V-notch. Then the ol propane injected 350 started sputtering. After swapping the tank and cleaning up the distributor we were back to wheeling. We hit all the easier trails on the North Side of the park before calling it a day and heading back to camp.

Satruday is the big day at Shamrock Run. We arrived at the park around 10am and got back behind the wheel of the YJ. We wheeled all over the mountain for hours. We stopped and watched a bunch of buggies attempt the most difficult obstacles the park had to offer. There is nothing like the smell of race gas in the morning! Carnage was abundant. We saw a Rockwell Rig almost lose the rear axle out from under it. Travis Lovett was out putting on a show at the infamous double ledge at Los Primos. He was seeing how much air time he could get off of the first ledge. LC wouldn’t be outdone in his recently redone buggy. He launched his up the nasty ledge with plenty of power. Jake Burkey rolled his Jeep before we could even get the cameras out. Another buggy busted his throttle cable. The show was great and the crowd of wheelers were having a blast.

The day was almost over and we hadn’t hit all the trails on our list just yet. We headed over to Viper and some of the easier trails. The big 44″ tires and one tons were making everything breeze. I found a nasty ledge of rock at the top of one of the easier trails. I decided to tackle it. With some liberal amounts of throttle something snapped. I get out to assess the situation and find my knuckle has completely busted in half. I guess the full hydraulic steering, Highsteer, and 44inch tires were too much for the stock knuckle. This was a bad situation because it was the end of the day and there was no way we were going to make it back to camp like this. I walked over the hill and found a group of guys in Jeeps. I asked them with a grin “Any of yall got a spare Dana 60 Knuckle?” The whole group laughed and came over to assess the situation. They helped winched me out as another guy went back to camp to get a stock Tie Rod. Since I still had the stock tie rod locations on my knuckles and the double ended ram still attached to the passenger side knuckle this would allow me to drive back to camp. We got the Tierod in place and off I went to camp. I had to drive super careful because the only thing holding my left tire and wheel on was the lower kingin. Everytime I tried the turn right the entire left tire and wheel would lean out away from the jeep. So we only made left turns and used reverse alot but made it back to camp and safely on the trailer. A great ending to a great event. A huge thanks goes out to my fellow wheelers who went out of their way to help get me off the trail. It’s People like this who make this sport so great. Until next time keep those gas pedals on the Floor.






About The Author
- Camera Guy/Editor/Gearhead

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