The Truth About Driving Your Jeep Off-Road Across the Country
Jeep Talk Show roundtable: longest Jeep road trips without towing. Tony and the crew share real stories of driving to Moab, Sedona, the Rubicon Trail, and more—then wheeling hard and driving home. Hear about Rick’s epic Micro TJ run from Arkansas, sleeping in a 6’4″ TJ, leaking fuel pumps, 4xe torque, and why catalytic converters can shut down trails in fire season.
Timestamps
Key Highlights
- John drove roughly 3,000 miles from the Austin area to Moab, wheeled, and drove home with no major issues
- Roger ran a two-week family trip from Wisconsin through Utah to Sedona then home
- Rick’s longest trip: Northeast Arkansas → Silverton → Salt Lake → Rubicon → Fordyce → Barrett Lake in a 38-inch TJ with coilovers, 4.88s, and no working radio
- Rick (nearly 6’4″) slept in the TJ using the soft top as a tent and swapped a cracked fuel-pump nipple in a parking lot
- Catalytic converters and parked vehicles can start grass fires; some Northwest OHV trails close by 1 p.m. in fire season
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Episode Transcript
[00:00:00:09 – 00:00:05:14]
my question that I had thought would be a conversation, what is the longest trip you have taken in your Jeep
[00:00:05:14 – 00:00:08:21]
without towing it? Where was it?
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How far?
[00:00:09:23 – 00:00:23:10]
And did you have any issues? Well, I guess John towed his, drove it one way but had it towed back. Well, that would be an issue. No, that was only during the end of the Arizona trip. Last year
[00:00:23:10 – 00:00:27:21]
in September, I drove it all the way to Moab, wheeled it, and then drove it all the way home.
[00:00:27:21 – 00:00:35:09]
So I think I’m not quite as far as Rick is, but I have driven mine to Moab and we haven’t come back, which a
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lot of us probably have, was getting it to Rick, is not exactly a
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cheap endeavor. So…
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How many miles is that for you? I would probably say for anybody that isn’t aware, John’s in the Austin, Texas, greater area. Yeah.
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So how many miles was that for you, John?
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Well, let me ask Gemini.
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I’m pretty sure somewhere around 3,000 was in the West total.
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What? No issues.
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I drove mine from Wisconsin to
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Arizona and then back home.
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You said Sedona?
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Yeah.
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Yeah, a little wheeled Sedona.
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No issues with you at all, huh?
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How long were you gone for on that trip, Roger?
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I
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think it might have been two weeks because we took my son down for college.
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Oh, okay. I know that route.
[00:01:24:25 – 00:01:33:00]
Yeah, that’s pretty much what we told him. We went to, actually, I think we went to Utah first because we took him and his
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girlfriend with and went to Utah first, then went down to Arizona, dropped them off and then came home.
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So now you told regular, obviously, out to EJS and stuff. Do you wheel it differently knowing that you got to drive it home?
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No.
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No?
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No.
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I’ve always believed that I would never let
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the idea that I have to drive my vehicle home limit what I’m willing to do because there’s plenty of shops, especially for EJS when you got
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the good of your tent there or the BFG tent. Not good here, but BFG.
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So I mean,
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it can be fixed.
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Nobody hears you use that, right, Rick?
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I do.
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Don, what about you on your trips? Have you had any concerns about having to drive it home or did you have bill there as your safety net in this trailer?
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No, no, no. As we go on overland trips too, where
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we’re both driving, there is no trailer at all.
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I’m kind of running across. So I mean, I don’t
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hammer down and drive like Rick
[00:02:28:08 – 00:02:36:03]
necessarily. Hey, now. I do. I kind of drive normal, but I’m normally, I
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want to say, discretion is a better part of valor kind of person. You won’t shame me into taking an obstacle, right? I’ll just tell you the
[00:02:44:00 – 00:02:56:26]
off. I don’t care. But the goal is to challenge myself, right? Regardless. So I am going to, you know, I do want to go tackle the trails and do as much as I can, but I am also,
[00:02:56:26 – 00:02:59:18]
I’m also a realist. But I’ve also come down the trail and
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here and Rick spend all morning telling us how he has to drive his TJ home and come down around the corner of a trail and see him
[00:03:06:21 – 00:03:22:00]
near 90 degrees vertical, white smoking all four tires, trying to pop up the ledge. Bouncing off the rear axle. Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. So I’m in like a Toyota on the Red Bull. So any special prep, you did jump for that trip besides your normal?
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Anything you bought additional equipment or?
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For the Moab trip?
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Yeah. So for the Moab trip,
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not really. I mean,
[00:03:29:27 – 00:03:31:09]
I think there’s
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just the things you need for wheeling, right? Make sure you have your recovery gears about that. The only thing I did take with Moab that normally don’t take them, I’m just hopping out to the park, which I now always take
[00:03:43:20 – 00:03:47:25]
is fluids. Normally I had spare parts about that, that, you know, just bringing a cord of
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gear oil, bringing a small, we can get them in a rile, it’s a little small thing, a brick lid,
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just to have, and then a little bit of silicone, gasket maker, and a tube kind of thing. So
[00:04:00:29 – 00:04:12:01]
stuff like that I carry now. Since, you know, you’re going to be out and about. Other than that, nothing special for a long trip versus just kind of another trip.
[00:04:13:29 – 00:04:18:02]
So Rick, you just did the Rubicon. Was that your longest trip to date with the Micro Jeep?
[00:04:19:07 – 00:04:21:19]
Yeah, it was, yep.
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That would be the longest one from Northeast Arkansas to Silverton, Colorado first,
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and then from Silverton to Salt Lake, and then from Salt Lake over to
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Georgetown, and then from Georgetown to the Rubicon, then from Rubicon to Fordyce Trail, and then after flopping in on the Fordyce Trail, driving another hour and a half through the rocks to get to the end of the Fordyce Trail, then three and a half hours around the mountain and rounding over the mountain to start Barrett Lake, and then we wheeled all the way into Barrett Lake,
[00:04:55:24 – 00:04:57:19]
and then yeah.
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Make sure everybody knows what the Micro Jeep is, because I think that’s
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kind of impressive. It’s not a JK or a JL. Well, and that brings to my point. So you got that TJ, but it’s never been the same configuration on each of your trips, has it?
[00:05:16:06 – 00:05:22:11]
It goes through some changes here and there, but yeah.
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What’s the average time on the last bolt torque
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to rolling out for the trip?
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Five minutes.
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About four to six hours.
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I got to have some time to rest before I leave.
[00:05:42:02 – 00:05:43:18]
But yeah, this time was,
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you know, because I, you know, I mean, a double triangulated rear,
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three link front,
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no sway bars.
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Didn’t have time to even mess with that.
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Cool overs, two and a half inch Bilstein cool overs
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and 38 inch
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wraps, 488 gears in the axles.
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And, you know, it’s a five speed.
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And then no cruise, no fancy, anything like that.
[00:06:17:04 – 00:06:32:16]
No radio that works. Yeah. Well, yeah. And right before, let’s see, somewhere in there, I pulled a wire trying to, I was trying to stretch a wire over to my iPad. It’s not an iPad, it’s a tablet, to my tablet.
[00:06:32:16 – 00:06:45:09]
And I thought, oh, I got extra wire back there. I remember having it loop back there. So I like kind of pulled it up as I was pulling it up, the whole dash and everything went dead. What’s like what the
[00:06:45:09 – 00:06:59:23]
So somewhere in there, I pulled a wire and I was able to get everything else to come back on, but I didn’t have my radio or anything like that. That’s the nice thing about the TJ is you blow up something and you don’t affect every other system, right? Right.
[00:06:59:23 – 00:07:06:26]
So, and then I put a soft top, a bowl of soft top on it for that trip,
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because I took my passenger seat out. I was also sleeping in the TJ when we were camping. And so that’s how I did that. I just basically, the
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soft top was my tent,
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basically. So you drove it across this time with the soft top? Yes. So this is your first time driving the distance with soft top? Yeah, first time distance with soft top. It was a little noisier. Okay, it’s a lot noisier, but
[00:07:33:06 – 00:07:48:11]
I kind of look at it like this when, I used to ride motorcycles everywhere, all over the place, not trips that big, but pretty good trips where you’re driving all day for days in a row.
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And to me,
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even still, riding in the TJ is way more bougie than riding on a Harley, you know, baking in the sun for that long, you know? I think you should still say how tall you are to sleep in a TJ.
[00:08:05:13 – 00:08:42:11]
Well, I’m almost 6’4″. I used to be 6’4″, but I think I’ve shrunk a little bit in my old age. But I’m right around there, about 245, 50 pounds. And correct me on the first trip, you were sleeping with the fumes from the leaking tank, right? Yeah, first trip out to Arizona and Moab, had a crack in the aluminum, or is it aluminum? I don’t know what it is. I thought it was plastic. It’s aluminium. Yeah, whatever, aluminium, whatever, it’s some type of metal.
[00:08:42:11 – 00:09:05:12]
I think it’s aluminum, actually, and it’s that nipple thing that comes off the pump, and it had a crack in it, and so it was just dripping, you know, the whole time I’m driving. I kept wondering, it’s like, “Man, I’m getting horrible gas mileage. I’m only getting 10, normally I get 12.” And a huge difference to the TJ. Yeah, I couldn’t figure it out, and then I kept smelling gas, and
[00:09:05:12 – 00:09:13:11]
then not… I wouldn’t do this in a state park, or some government-owned
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national forest
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parking lot, but
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I pulled out my pump
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and swapped it, replaced it there in a parking lot, who knows where. It was a dead horse state park in Arizona, if I recall. Well, now it’s not named.
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It was my reservation, so I’m not worried about it. Allegedly. And there wasn’t, but the thing was, there wasn’t any gas spillage or gas fuel. No, there wasn’t. There wasn’t at all. That other folks were walking past, and I was like, “Oh my goodness, there’s a lot of gas, I’m in the open.” No, it wouldn’t have been. And then,
[00:09:52:26 – 00:10:01:10]
so yeah, I mean, for me, the whole jeeping thing is all about the adventure. For me, it’s all
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about the challenge and the adventure of it, and
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throwing my booger welds on it, and driving it across the country, and wheeling it hard, and coming back. I mean, to me, that’s all part of the adventure, is go meet a bunch of people I’ve never met before,
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except on the internet.
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I’ve had people ask me that, “You’re gonna go what? You’re gonna go drive 2,000 miles and meet a bunch of people you met on the internet?”
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Yep, that’s how we do it.
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That’s awesome. All part of the adventure.
[00:10:29:03 – 00:10:33:25]
Oh, thank you for that. So Kevin, have you had any big road trips with the Jeep for off-roading?
[00:10:33:25 – 00:10:36:19]
I drove it 35 miles to work and back.
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Did you do
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curbs along the way?
[00:10:43:09 – 00:10:53:13]
So in fairness, my Jeep is an off-road only Jeep. I don’t have any intentions of driving my Jeep on the road. It wasn’t put together to drive on the road.
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The only time it has been driven on the road is because I wanted ice cream, and I’m like, “The Jeep’s there. I’ll go get ice cream or pizza in it.”
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Or the weather went to complete
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and I was like, “Well, I need to go to work and make money, so there’s the Jeep.” So what’s the furthest you had to trail earth, then?
[00:11:09:09 – 00:11:11:19]
Uh, first I’ve trailred…
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probably hot springs,
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which is six and a half, seven hours.
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And that’s just, you know,
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time off versus how far I can get.
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Sure. You’re not doing any mountain driving to get there, really, do you?
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Uh, not really.
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As you get into hot springs, you get up into small mountains. And when I say small mountains, like,
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they’re nothing compared to the Rockies or the Appalachians. Like, they’re small mountains. The Boston Mountains, actually, is what they’re called.
[00:11:38:19 – 00:11:46:13]
Yeah, I mean, so, like, they are mountains, but they’re very small. I’m not gonna, you know, hype them up at all. But
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outside of that, you know, mine has solely been, you know, the amount of time I have off versus how far I can get. Enjoy myself for the
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weekend, long weekend.
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And get back home and get back to work.
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Sure.
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So, I know Bob has taken a few road trips here and there with his Jeep, with the little red brick, as he calls it.
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Bob, what’s the furthest road trip you’ve taken in your Jeep?
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Um, it’d either be
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from Colorado to
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Hidden Falls,
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or Colorado to Arizona to go down to Sedona and Prescott.
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I would say that your falls has gotta be farther.
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Now, you got the
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4.0, right?
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Yep, I got the 4.0.
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With or without radiator fan clips?
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Uh,
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5 out of 6 ain’t bad.
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Any major issues on any of these excursions with yours?
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Getting it home? No. You’re getting it there?
[00:12:37:20 – 00:12:43:08]
No. The biggest issue I’ve had with the little red brick is I put a
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platform box in the back,
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and now I can’t recline the seats,
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so I can’t sleep in it when I stop taking that.
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Interesting.
[00:12:54:04 – 00:12:56:15]
Now, you do have cruise control unlike Rick though, right?
[00:12:56:15 – 00:13:00:11]
Oh, yeah. I got cruise control. I never use it, but yep, I got cruise control.
[00:13:00:11 – 00:13:06:20]
Let’s see, Rick, you don’t need it. He doesn’t use it. Yeah, I don’t need to use it. In fairness, in the seat reclining thing, I have
[00:13:06:20 – 00:13:11:02]
a harness bar so that I have harnesses, because I make bad decisions.
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So, sleeping in mine is not allowed at all.
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Hey, the first step is admitting the problem.
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The problem is me. I have no problem admitting the problem.
[00:13:22:06 – 00:13:26:10]
Looks like we have a new name joining us today, Ryan. Are you there?
[00:13:26:10 – 00:13:27:28]
Let’s see if he comes on mute.
[00:13:27:28 – 00:13:34:10]
Tony, what about you? What’s your for the trip? Was it EJS and 24? Yeah, I haven’t been to very many things. EJS
[00:13:34:10 – 00:13:38:19]
and 24. What a great trip.
[00:13:38:19 – 00:13:44:14]
Well, I better not have to worry about overheating like the XJ. Oh, God, yes. It was such a freeing thing.
[00:13:44:14 – 00:13:48:22]
I’ve seen you talking about getting the XJ places more lately.
[00:13:48:22 – 00:13:50:10]
Are you trying to get it back going?
[00:13:50:10 – 00:14:00:00]
Not really. I think that it’s still going to be an overheating issue. The problem has never been solved, but driving around locally is fine.
[00:14:00:00 – 00:14:04:18]
Yeah. Mike, what about you? What’s been your furthest excursion in your Jeep?
[00:14:04:18 – 00:14:06:20]
I’m here
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states away,
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about seven hours.
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Was it for wheel and trip or just to drive out somewhere?
[00:14:15:22 – 00:14:21:19]
I’ve kind of seen my brother do a little bit of wheeling out there, but not a whole lot.
[00:14:21:19 – 00:14:24:15]
No? So no major issues then? What do you have for a Jeep?
[00:14:24:15 – 00:14:28:17]
At the time I did that, it was an all nine JK.
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I have a year. I’m 20-14 now, so.
[00:14:31:12 – 00:14:32:02]
All right.
[00:14:34:27 – 00:14:40:22]
Well, I can tell you– Looks like Ryan unmuted himself for a second there, so he might be willing to talk to you. All right, are you there?
[00:14:40:22 – 00:14:42:23]
There you are. Yeah, I’m here.
[00:14:44:04 – 00:14:57:12]
So where are you from? What kind of Jeep you got? And then what’s the longest off-roading trip you’ve taken with it? I’ve got a 20-24 Jeep Rubicon 4-by-E.
[00:14:58:17 – 00:15:00:00]
I’m up in Portland, Oregon.
[00:15:00:00 – 00:15:01:01]
Nice.
[00:15:01:01 – 00:15:02:22]
And
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longest trip, I don’t know, a
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few hours I think. I don’t know, just freeway driving.
[00:15:07:23 – 00:15:19:06]
Okay. So have you had it on the trails yet? Yeah, I’ve had it on the trail. I’ve had it at Brown’s camp and Jones Creek, and I had it up on Mount Hood.
[00:15:19:06 – 00:15:25:06]
Other than that, trail is now completely gone. It got ate up by a forest fire.
[00:15:25:06 – 00:15:26:12]
Oh, that’s unfortunate.
[00:15:26:12 – 00:15:27:05]
Yeah.
[00:15:28:12 – 00:15:33:10]
That’s always been on my bucket list to get up there in the Northwest. I’ve never had that opportunity.
[00:15:35:09 – 00:15:41:21]
Northeast? Northwest? Northeast is main danger. Oh, never mind, never mind, never mind, never mind. When he said Portland, I was thinking of Portland, Maine for some reason.
[00:15:41:21 – 00:15:52:17]
I’ve been to Portland, Maine, but he thought– Oh, Oregon. Oregon. Yep, never mind. West Coast? One of the show co-hosts, Josh, is from there. He does a lot of wheeling up there.
[00:15:52:17 – 00:15:55:28]
Gotcha. So are you looking to take it on any more big trips, or…?
[00:15:55:28 – 00:15:59:07]
Yeah, I’ve been kind of in a…
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I’ve kind of not been able to do a whole lot with it, because I’ve been…
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You know, can’t spend money.
[00:16:05:08 – 00:16:07:14]
But that’s coming to an end.
[00:16:07:14 – 00:16:10:23]
But I finally got a front bumper and a winch on it, so…
[00:16:10:23 – 00:16:14:18]
And I got wheels ordered and a bunch of other stuff, so…
[00:16:14:18 – 00:16:16:28]
So now the important question, what color is it?
[00:16:16:28 – 00:16:19:00]
It’s the anvil gray.
[00:16:19:00 – 00:16:23:27]
Hey, this is better red. I’m waiting for the sound effects here from Tony.
[00:16:25:11 – 00:16:26:16]
Awesome. Ooh.
[00:16:26:16 – 00:16:31:22]
He’s a little sore. Any plans to take it out to Moab?
[00:16:32:28 – 00:16:37:03]
Not in the near future, but I want to try to do Moab and Rubicon.
[00:16:37:03 – 00:16:40:20]
But that’s later down. I got to
[00:16:40:20 – 00:16:43:06]
get through the training period of my work,
[00:16:43:06 – 00:16:43:29]
so…
[00:16:45:10 – 00:16:45:21]
All right.
[00:16:45:21 – 00:16:48:07]
Well, nice thing about Moab is you’re going to find a trail
[00:16:48:07 – 00:16:51:20]
for any type of Jeep, whether it be a stock
[00:16:51:20 – 00:16:53:18]
sport off the drone floor,
[00:16:53:18 – 00:16:56:20]
or something like what Rick’s doing there with his little micro Jeep.
[00:16:58:23 – 00:17:01:12]
Just getting into Hell’s Revenge can be an adventure.
[00:17:01:12 – 00:17:02:27]
Yeah, I’ve seen videos of that.
[00:17:02:27 – 00:17:11:01]
The only thing with the 4-by-Es I’ve noticed is that when I spot them, if it’s running in electric mode, is you don’t hear when they’re spooling up, right?
[00:17:11:01 – 00:17:16:12]
Because you can hear a regular engine when it’s giving power, and you know what the driver’s doing. But the 4-by-E, that caught me off guard
[00:17:16:12 – 00:17:18:27]
when I was spotting someone.
[00:17:18:27 – 00:17:20:18]
But other than that, it’s not a big deal.
[00:17:22:00 – 00:17:22:19]
Yeah. Good times.
[00:17:22:19 – 00:17:26:04]
Oh, yeah. I love it. I like the thing. It’s, you know…
[00:17:26:04 – 00:17:30:14]
I mean, I get… I do about 1,300 miles to a tank of gas.
[00:17:30:14 – 00:17:34:16]
So I live, like, right on top of my work, so I just run into electric
[00:17:34:16 – 00:17:38:14]
all the way there and all the way back, and I only use gas on the weekends.
[00:17:38:14 – 00:17:41:26]
So now, what do you think about the fact that they’re not making the 4-by-Es anymore?
[00:17:41:26 – 00:17:51:14]
I get why. They did some really poor sourcing of parts and mainly the battery.
[00:17:52:27 – 00:17:55:17]
I don’t know. Everything I’ve had at Samsung has been
[00:17:55:17 – 00:17:58:02]
and it’s a Samsung battery.
[00:17:58:02 – 00:18:02:24]
So I’m kind of disappointed. I was hoping that they would just, I mean,
[00:18:02:24 – 00:18:04:27]
retool it, you know?
[00:18:05:29 – 00:18:12:24]
I think… I was kind of surprised too, because at one point, the 4-by-Es were, like, outselling all the other hybrids out there.
[00:18:12:24 – 00:18:39:23]
Yeah. A lot of it was with the tax advantage, the $75 tax credit, and that went away. And then a lot of the electric car sales have dropped, and then the EVs are still hanging in there, but not as well as they were before that. Well, that and the Jeep recalls, it seems like they were almost always on the 4-by-Es for a while. Yeah, I’m trying to get through an oil change without a recall on it, but so far I haven’t done it.
[00:18:39:23 – 00:18:44:19]
So I’ve had three so far, and all three of them had a recall attached to it.
[00:18:46:27 – 00:18:47:07]
But,
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I don’t know, it’s cool technology. It’s fast.
[00:18:50:19 – 00:18:56:06]
That’s the thing. I mean, I’m, I think, eight-tenths lower than a 392 Jeep.
[00:18:56:06 – 00:18:57:09]
I mean, that’s got… Really?
[00:18:57:09 – 00:18:59:28]
Oh, yeah. It’s
[00:18:59:28 – 00:19:03:27]
very fast compared to… It’s the second fastest Jeep they’ve made.
[00:19:04:26 – 00:19:07:18]
The torque curve with anything electric
[00:19:07:18 – 00:19:11:02]
is so far beyond anything a
[00:19:11:02 – 00:19:17:16]
internal combustion engine could do, and that’s diesel, big truck, whatever. Yeah.
[00:19:17:16 – 00:19:26:23]
They can be fast. It’s the top end where they fall off. The torque curve for an electric is a brick wall. It’s just straight up and down.
[00:19:26:23 – 00:19:32:02]
But internal combustion catches all of that on its top end, and that’s where it
[00:19:32:02 – 00:19:35:27]
evens out or where internal combustion starts to win out.
[00:19:35:27 – 00:19:37:22]
Yeah. Yeah. I mean,
[00:19:37:22 – 00:19:43:17]
from an engineering standpoint, I mean, you want pretty much a low-end torque
[00:19:43:17 – 00:19:46:27]
thing to be doing off-road stuff anyways, and like it…
[00:19:46:27 – 00:19:48:07]
Like a tractor motor.
[00:19:48:07 – 00:19:54:17]
Yeah. Yeah, you want low torque, and that’s what electric motor provides you.
[00:19:55:08 – 00:20:00:20]
Just because you have a tractor motor in your Jeep doesn’t mean it’s the best thing ever.
[00:20:03:28 – 00:20:06:07]
I was just saying it’s a tractor motor.
[00:20:06:07 – 00:20:08:20]
Outstanding.
[00:20:08:20 – 00:20:14:02]
So does anybody have any pointings for a long trip coming up at all?
[00:20:17:23 – 00:20:20:14]
Well, not in my Jeep. With the Jeep.
[00:20:20:14 – 00:20:21:16]
To be with him.
[00:20:21:16 – 00:20:25:16]
I need it to not be… I need it to not be a hundred and
[00:20:25:16 – 00:20:26:09]
you
[00:20:26:09 – 00:20:34:22]
for enough time for me to work on mine. Yeah, it’s crazy hot right now. Yeah, you know, I was surprised. I left Atlanta this morning,
[00:20:34:22 – 00:20:38:13]
and when I landed in Chicago this afternoon, it was hotter than Atlanta. I was like, “What the
[00:20:38:13 – 00:20:45:27]
I was in Atlanta last week, and the weather was awesome. I woke up, it was 82 degrees, then I went off right off.
[00:20:47:09 – 00:20:47:15]
No,
[00:20:47:15 – 00:20:52:21]
I want to try to get out on the trails in the next couple weeks, because I’m going to be
[00:20:52:21 – 00:21:04:04]
gone out of country for a while. But I’ve been kind of not going just because of most of Oregon’s on fire, and I don’t want to be the reason Oregon starts on fire, another fire.
[00:21:05:15 – 00:21:29:19]
Well, the four of us are going to be a fire hazard. Well, yeah. It just takes one hit off a rock with a spark, and you said to the whole place on fire, and I don’t want to be that guy, you know? So is that really… I’ve never even thought about that. Is that really a concern for off-roaders? Oh, yeah, they shut down some of the OHV trails out here by one o’clock in the summer when they were in high fire. Really?
[00:21:29:19 – 00:21:38:00]
Yeah, like you got to be off the trails. Or you can get like a catalytic converter somewhere around 400 degrees.
[00:21:39:00 – 00:21:47:13]
Brushing against dry grass, you could start a fire. I didn’t say that the woods and whatnot are more combustible after 1 PM.
[00:21:47:13 – 00:21:52:00]
Apparently, I don’t know. We had an ambient temp to dry
[00:21:52:00 – 00:21:54:06]
grass, dry fuel.
[00:21:55:26 – 00:22:06:23]
I mean, it makes sense. I just never put that together. Dry grass in the Pacific Northwest? No, the fact that your spark coming off a vehicle, you know, like off-roading could be a problem.
[00:22:07:29 – 00:22:16:24]
I think things like the kind of looking for some DPS down here in the south, absolutely, Jan. But I mean, I would think the Pacific, though, I would think they got a giant
[00:22:16:24 – 00:22:18:10]
bastard setting up.
[00:22:19:00 – 00:22:54:03]
I do know that when you go out west now, you can’t… I mean, you’re going to go wheeling and camping. You better bring one of those portable propane fire pits, because you’re not going to be able to put a campfire. You’re not going to have to be on it. It’s blocked and pretty much everywhere you go. That I get. I was up in northern Minnesota a couple weeks ago, same thing. They had massive fires. We had to use little backpacking stoves. I just never equated the fact that we shut the trails down because the vehicles could be a contributor to creating the hazard. We talked about it last week. I’m surrounded by fires, or I was. Luckily, most of them were out now, except for the big one.
[00:22:54:03 – 00:23:03:26]
Well, just because it shut down doesn’t mean it was common sense shut down, too, with that. Pretty extreme, as I want to shut down, just because it’s an awful vehicle to be in the neighborhood.
[00:23:05:10 – 00:23:07:29]
Not all the time does it make sense.
[00:23:07:29 – 00:23:11:28]
No, it’s plenty odd to be a precautionary.
[00:23:11:28 – 00:23:16:05]
I’m not calling it right, but I get the thought process behind it. I
[00:23:16:05 – 00:23:20:04]
think the main thought process is, in the
[00:23:20:04 – 00:23:21:21]
Jeepers world,
[00:23:21:21 – 00:23:27:26]
we’ll get lumped in with side by side, we pretty much any offer a vehicle type side of them. Sometimes they’re out for more
[00:23:27:26 – 00:23:32:24]
than just a wheeling trip. They want to go party, right? Oh, I’m transferring.
[00:23:32:24 – 00:23:39:10]
Well, I mean, we’ve had several fires here, which, don’t get me wrong, Pacific Northwest versus here is very different, like you said earlier.
[00:23:39:10 – 00:23:45:12]
But we’ve had several fires here where somebody drove three or four hours, parked in somebody’s yard, and
[00:23:45:12 – 00:23:47:17]
grass caught on fire from a catalytic converter.
[00:23:47:17 – 00:23:54:07]
Yeah, this picture I’m sharing right there, I pulled in behind this girl she had pulled off the side of the road,
[00:23:54:07 – 00:24:09:26]
and her little beetle there, it had died on her. And she’s sitting there talking to me, and she’s calling somebody, and I said, “All right, just making sure you’re okay.” And then as I was walking back to my car, I started hearing
[00:24:09:26 – 00:24:14:24]
something crackling and popping, and I turned around and looked, and sure enough, she had fire under her
[00:24:14:24 – 00:24:34:27]
little car, and I said, “Hey,” I said, “You got a fire starting there. Can we get it back off the grass and on the pavement?” And she’s, “No, it won’t run, it won’t start or anything.” And it didn’t take five minutes, and we actually hooked, there’s a guy in a truck came by, and he had a chain, and we hooked it to her
[00:24:34:27 – 00:24:48:24]
rim there on the driver’s side and pulled it out of the grass, because there was, to the, where the fires blowing, was a huge cornfield, and it was like eight foot tall. And brown?
[00:24:48:24 – 00:24:54:10]
Was it browned up by that point? I don’t remember it being browned, but
[00:24:54:10 – 00:25:05:07]
I don’t, you know, everybody there, everybody that pulled up is like, “Oh man, we gotta, we need to get that out of that, that cornfield goes up.” There’s a bunch of houses and stuff back there, you know, and so,
[00:25:05:07 – 00:25:23:02]
but yeah, she, her car died, and she just pulled it off the side of the road, not thinking about it, you know, anything about it. And that’s only, that was maybe about two weeks ago when this happened. I think that’s natural, your car dies, you don’t want to become the hazard, right? What do you do? You want to get out of the road? Yeah.
[00:25:23:02 – 00:25:22:28]
Yeah.
[00:25:24:11 – 00:25:25:20]
That’s nuts.
[00:25:25:20 – 00:25:31:22]
You didn’t go over there and yell at that SUV driver for a lot backing into the car? Yeah, screwing up your picture. What is that about?
[00:25:31:22 – 00:25:32:29]
He pulled off.
[00:25:32:29 – 00:25:36:03]
They, they were just, they were getting out of the way.
[00:25:36:03 – 00:25:46:13]
That’s insane. Yeah, because the only first thing you think about is, I don’t want to be in the roadway, have someone coming around the corner and hit me. I was trying to see if I got the cornfield in any of the pictures here.
[00:25:46:13 – 00:25:53:22]
Especially if some might truck coming around the corner, right Roger? You want to be sitting in the middle of the road. I
[00:25:53:22 – 00:25:55:00]
am. I am.
[00:25:55:00 – 00:25:58:07]
These guys seem like it took them forever to get there,
[00:25:58:07 – 00:26:00:20]
walking around, laying the hoses out.
[00:26:00:20 – 00:26:06:19]
Well, the other side of that too is if you want to take the hybrid off road, this battery packs man, because
[00:26:06:19 – 00:26:09:21]
they get started, you can’t just put them out pretty easy.
[00:26:09:21 – 00:26:11:18]
It
[00:26:11:18 – 00:26:13:14]
doesn’t happen very often when you’re driving.
[00:26:13:14 – 00:26:20:01]
That’s only when you’re parked. Yeah, in the garage. Cadillac converters don’t sell fires very often when you’re driving either.
[00:26:21:11 – 00:26:22:12]
It’s only when you’re parked.
[00:26:24:04 – 00:26:24:18]
Fair point.
[00:26:27:09 – 00:26:29:21]
I was trying to see if I had one of the cornfield. I guess I did.
[00:26:29:21 – 00:26:32:03]
I was… I guess I’m your neck of the wooks.
[00:26:34:11 – 00:26:36:27]
Rick, you don’t have to worry about Cadillac converters sharing fires, do you?
[00:26:36:27 – 00:26:49:09]
No, although all the methods have already stolen all the Cadillac converters. They all went to Texas and Illinois.
[00:26:53:15 – 00:26:56:28]
That’s crazy. All right, well, awesome.
[00:26:56:28 – 00:26:58:29]
That was my question for the night.
[00:26:58:29 – 00:27:00:10]
Appreciate y’all’s input.
[00:27:00:10 – 00:27:02:22]
And I said, “You all, not y’alls.”
[00:27:02:22 – 00:27:05:01]
What’s wrong with y’all?
[00:27:06:11 – 00:27:07:11]
Not everybody knows how to talk.
[00:27:07:11 – 00:27:10:09]
You never used the word “you’re”?
[00:27:10:09 – 00:27:11:14]
You are? What?
