We received some queries from Jeep Hobby customers and visitors about accompanying us on our next 4x4 trip. After warning everyone that we are definitely not tour guides and that our trip was not expected to require heavy 4x4ing, we invited the Great Lakes 4x4 Community to join us on our "Fall Color Tour." Eighteen vehicles showed up at our meeting place in Newaygo, and needless to say, we were slightly overwhelmed. That was fifteen more than we'd ever gone Jeep'ing with before! Apparently we were tour guides after all! We turned out to be pretty bad ones, since we lost half the group for about ten minutes. And when we were reunited, our missing friends brought along some nice DNR guys who wanted to follow us around for the rest of the trip! While we knew that the trails we had planned were legal, we couldn't help but be a little nervous, in case of a wrong turn or something. We cut the first leg of our trip short, with the hope of losing our tail. Thank goodness for Woody and Roger, the locals we had along. They kept us rolling and introduced us all to some terrific trails that were not on our maps.
The last leg of our journey ended in an extended stay around a deep, nasty, muddy pit. Three of our braver (or perhaps crazier) cohorts challenged the pit, only to be defeated. Whereas Jim and Roger lost only a small amount of their pride, Jason also sacrificed the ass of his Jeep while attempting to pull out a new friend in need. After we felt it was safe to break the complete silence that fell upon us, everyone agreed that they had NEVER heard of anything like that happening before! Three winch pulls, one tow strap, and one lost Jeep rear end later, darkness fell upon our clearing, and we headed for home.
We tried out some great trails, got close and personal with some smelly mud, and met some terrific people. Where else would you find someone who would drive an hour on a Sunday morning to deliver a large portion of your Jeep to your front door and then refuse gas money, when you only met them the day before? Only in a Jeep! (Sorry, Freak, you are always welcome to wheel with us, even if you do drive a Dodge!)
Where We Went
Our trip started in Newaygo, MI at the local McDonalds. From there, we went north on M37 and entered the seasonal trail system around 24th Street. The map below shows our route for the day along with waypoints to identify parts of the trail or something interesting.
The map above was created using a kml file which can also be used within Google Earth. If you would like to use the file with Google Earth then download the tracks and waypoints to your computer, launch Google Earth, click on File and then Open and select the two KML files one at a time. Please note, if you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer the file extensions will be changed to xml. Google Earth doesn't understand the xml file so you will need to change the extensions back to kml.
Here are the files:
Tracks File
Wapoints File
Pictures
Below we've added some pictures from our trip. Click on the image to see a larger version.
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