Merry Christmas

Back to the lake pictures...

Christmas day was just beautiful, too nice to stay inside! Sorry for the poor quality, these are mostly pulled off of the video camera and the resolution leaves a lot to be desired.

This is the only decent shot (from the camera). Beautiful clouds.



Ok, I'll make fun of myself first, here I am riding. No, it's not actually cold enough to need the hoodie, but we share a drysuit and the neck is a little too big for me. This is the first time I tried the hoodie and it worked great, I stayed very dry. Much cheaper than buying another suit.



I don't need no steenkin' rope! Oh wait...



Someone else's turn! Scott riding. Notice how horribly crowded it was...



He falls so much better than I do!

SuperCrawl 2005 - Fire!

Again, a bit too slow with the camera, but this guy rolled down the obstacle just behind him and the vehicle burst into flame. This happened quite a bit, so the rescue guys ran over with extingushers and put it out right away, but here's the aftermath...









And last but not least, we had to take this picture. Turns out there is a MasterCraft seat manufacturer with a similar logo to the boat manufacturer. Anyhow, this was a cool little rail.

SuperCrawl 2005 - Waterfall Rollover

Another series of a guy trying to climb the waterfall... and a good example of how it usually ended.















Same vehicle, I believe they are towing it off the course.

SuperCrawl 2005 - Sticky Spots

Some more random pictures....

Almost everyone we saw on this obstacle ended up in about the same position. Believe it or not, everyone we saw ALSO made it out. It seemed to be a technique, rather than a problem.



Another shot of a guy that was apparently doing "Just fine, thanks."



This was kind of a cool shot, since you can see three different vehicles going at it.



This guy got high centered and was determined to... I don't know, but he kept gunning the engine like crazy.



Here he is with smoke pouring out of his engine. Flames had been shooting out probably 2-3 feet from his turbo just seconds before I took this. (The battery on the video camera was long dead at this point, so we missed some cool stuff.)



Bottom right of this picture, the spotter has actually just heaved a large rock, trying to wedge it under the tire so it could get "gription". This did not work and the guy eventually had to be pulled off by a recovery vehicle, but other teams seemed to adopt the heave-a-rock technique after this. I don't think it worked for any of them, but the rock did keep getting smaller, so I guess that made it less of a hassle to throw.



This poor guy was having such a great run, until he suddenly went wrong and rolled over. Incidentally, this is the same obstacle that Walker Evans ran so easily in the pictures in the last post.



Back upright, a little worse for wear...

SuperCrawl 2005 - Walker Evans

Walker Evans, standing in the crowd watching the show, probably 10 feet away from us.



Eventually, he left the spectator area and climbed into his vehicle to show the kiddies how it's done. He sure did make it look easy...







After a successful crawl...



So how cool is that? ;)

SuperCrawl 2005 - The Waterfall

By far the coolest obstacle was the Waterfall... the pictures are almost too dark to see it, but on the side pictures that look past the cherry picker, you can kind of see where the water was coming out. This thing ate vehicles, nearly everyone who tried it rolled over and/or snapped their drive train. I've also got some of this on video.

This guy alllllmoooooost made it...



Here's a view of another guy as he started up. The dark streak down the middle of the obstacle is the waterfall.



Same guy, farther up. He didn't make it, but he got close.



Same guy, trying to fall off the wall without rolling over.



From the other side of the Waterfall, here's a guy who made it over.







Diabolically, completion of the Waterfall obstacle required them to go over the other way too, so here's a guy who made it over the front, starting back up the backside.



SNNNNAAAAAP! There goes the drive train...

SuperCrawl 2005 - Stuck

Here's a guy who got stuck and slowly tipped over. He got wedged in really tight, it took three recovery vehicles over 20 minutes to pry him out. I've got this one on video too, so hopefully I can add that later.

SuperCrawl 2005 - Crawling

The next several posts are not lake or boat related, but Saturday night we did something really cool. A rockcrawling event was held as part of the SEMA show this year. As a sport, this was totally new to us but WOW was it cool. To start out, here's some random pictures of vehicles crawling up "rocks" - actually devilish piles of concrete set up in the parking lot of the convention center. Hang in, I've got a ton of photos...