America's Newest Offroad Route Was Impassable - The 750 Mile Oregon Backcountry Discovery Route

[Music] I want you to ask yourself how many trips of a lifetime can be done in a lifetime the newly released Oregon Backcountry Discovery route is like nothing I've ever seen before all the miles that we have to cover and all the spring snow I'm not even sure that 10 days is enough time to complete this journey we're going to push ourselves and our vehicles to the absolute limit to do whatever it takes to get to the Oregon Nevada border inside of 10 days foreign this year's video for the power stop Trail Series starts where last year's ended at The Bridge of the Gods on the Washington and Oregon border you're going to recognize some people from last year but you're also going to see a couple of new faces because I wanted to bring in some friends that I thought had some skill sets that would come in very handy as we Trek our way 750 miles from the Washington Oregon border all the way down to the Oregon Nevada border [Music] oh I feel so much less stressed now I feel 80 miles here we didn't burp any fluid third gear the whole way feel so much better what David is talking about is that unfortunately yesterday we pulled out of the grocery store and he lost fourth gear in his freshly rebuilt 4l80 so after a lot of talking about this and thinking about this and talking to the transmission Builder down in Texas who put this together we decided the best way to do it would be let's go down the bdr we'll end in Nevada where David's truck and trailer is located and then he can tow it from there back down to Texas so he's just gonna lock out fourth gear because every time it goes into fourth it spits fluid but if we keep it in first second and third he's driven around a whole bunch and we've had no issues so if you've got to get from northern Oregon down to Southern Oregon anyway might as well do it on a bunch of slow back roads all right boys tag team back again Let's uh let's have some fun in Oregon by the way welcome to Oregon for all of you that are from out of state I guess we're all up from out of state I'm not no longer in my stomping grounds this is completely undiscovered um I'm pretty excited to just have another adventure with you guys and you know have a lot of fun and maybe get a little bit of trouble over there today is [Music] David is making a great point last year's trip from the Canadian border down to the Oregon border of Washington had its tough moments but at least I knew somewhat of what to expect because I had already done like three out of the six sections in this case we're going in completely blind and I don't even have like really good trail reports to pull off of from any like Facebook groups or anything to really even know it's up ahead so we're going into this experience completely blind which is very different from what our experience was last year we changed some things in the interest of efficiency this year and one of those things is that we each have our own jobs one of those jobs of course being navigation and that job is being held by David and Chris hey David since you're a navigator why don't uh once we get on the Highway here why don't you take lead and uh you can show us the camp tonight yeah that'll uh that makes sense good copy I think uh I'll set the nice steady Pace you know how I'm uh well like you said earlier three out of four is not bad where I'm from 75 percent [Music] now we're traveling from The Bridge of the Gods which was our official end of last year to the town of Hood River Oregon which is the official official beginning of this year now this is technically section seven I believe of the Oregon bdr but for us this is the beginning because the long-term goal is to slowly work our way and have Adventures from Canada all the way to Mexico over the course of a few years stop right at that turn hey you can get out what you need from the cooler the new organ route was just released a few months ago it's about 750 miles and we've given ourselves like 9 to 11 days to try to complete this entire route what are you airing down doing this tonight I am going to go down around 4 th if we had snow it's going to get really low but 14 it makes this ride pretty nice off-road Mount Hood is the closest mountain tour we're going to be camping tonight and so before we left I wanted to figure out about how much snow to expect and I just used Mount Hood as like an index as to how deep the snow could be up there now Mount Hood is quite a bit higher from where we're camping but nonetheless this is in the ballpark and in April they had a maximum snow depth on Mount Hood of 490 centimeters which is about 192 inches so there was a lot of snow this season no doubt about it where we're camping is about 4 000 feet and whenever I looked it up the snow level was at 4 000 feet so I imagine somewhere give or take 100 feet depending on how much sun everything has seen over the last month we're gonna be running into quite a bit of snow in those shaded areas you could measure the width of this road in Suburbans roughly one Suburban live you guys okay just trying to keep the dust down you can go faster if you want but we'll just we'll just spread out a little bit Yeah so whatever speed you feel safe Kelly's S10 rocklander build just got buttoned up enough to drive out of his garage it is not ready for a big trip like this but I really wanted him to bring it on this trip and he wanted to come too so this is basically a giant trial run for this fresh bill and my buddy Aaron with the dogs has a couple of really nice Jeeps and he decided to bring a diesel Gladiator with the GFC on 37s thank you this time on Cribs yeah we gotta set up the tent now the tent that is the size of the Suburban I've not seen the times I'm gonna love it yeah I find that day one night one on a giant trip like this is typically a burner day you know everybody's just trying to get their gear together and usually you're traveling long distances to make it to the beginning of a Trailhead so we didn't expect anything big but we did expect some snow I'm very surprised that even though we're a stone's throw for Mount Hood I mean it's the middle of may they had a lot of snow up here this year and we just got super lucky that we're not knee-deep in snow right now so tonight is going to be all about whipping out Onyx trying to figure out the next leg of our trip trying to decide where we might camp tomorrow if we have a successful day and just getting reacquainted with old friends all right so looking at the map we've got uh we've got a little bit of this Flash start gaining some pretty good altitude you know depending on which side of the mountain we're on Shadow or whatnot may have our first chance for snow but we're gonna get close to 6 000 and I think kind of the same rules apply as yesterday you know just keeping an eye on gauges and you know we'll take our time and enjoy the view I couldn't believe how beautiful it was outside considering that we are in the middle of May in the Pacific Northwest but our luck is just about to run out when we have the first of what will be many mechanical failures on this trip foreign there is a small drip coming from the fuel filter under the truck there's no it's not from an impact or anything like that I don't know what happened I changed the fuel filter like 8 000 miles ago so it's had plenty of plenty of time to start leaking there's zero drips in my garage so it definitely happened on this trip I'm gonna try just loosening up the housing just like and because it's an O-ring that seals it and hopefully it'll fix it otherwise he brought an extra fuel filter and o-ring so if we have to we have the parts but I'm hoping we can get away with just loosening it and tightening it back up do extra work we don't have to [Applause] here but ultimately this was not a big deal at all and it was we're talking like a 10 minute fix I ended up just breaking the filter loose again and then tightening it up like another quarter turn I think I just didn't quite have it tight enough it was tight enough to seal because no ring you don't need it to be tight to seal but it wasn't tight enough for it to hold position and I think that over like eight or ten thousand miles of off-road use it's slowly like chattered loose just a little bit Tori was a slow seat but after stopping and tightening it on the trail put everything back together even to this day still no drips all right [Music] left at the fork continue uphill we are lifting as we speak and continuing as well [Music] slowly but surely we were marching our way up in elevation and we knew it we're starting to see some patches of snow we found our first snow here in a shadow [Music] right turn Aaron did Kelly make the turn yeah we're right behind Nate small patches of course turned into bigger patches and then after some trail maintenance and Trail clearing of some different trees and debris all the way up to where it got really really deep you could tell that I mean it was hard packed don't get me wrong we're not sinking too bad but we had some really dense really thick spring snow yeah this is all [Music] [Music] oh [Music] I think maybe before you decide to leave this you should walk it I really don't like using the word impassable because so many people online will stay impassable and it's because it's got a couple down trees or it's got some deep snow and we're not afraid of any of that but dude I am telling you this was this was definitely impassable we've even spent half a day before digging down uh you know really steep snow Banks just so we could drive 100 feet and not have to back down and go all the way around the obstacle but in this case this is like thousands of feet of extremely off-camber snow and there's just without heavy equipment there's no way that we could pass through this really off-camber really dense hard pack as it sits right now so we made the decision to pull the plug on this route and uh we looked at Onyx we found a route around it so we had to go back down to the highway which was a beautiful drive and then once we got on the highway we zipped down to the next section that we could access from the highway and went back up into the mountains hey there is no way I mean if it doesn't work for your truck and you've got flotation big chunky like there's no flotation right it just digs and you just slides and of course there's an edge right there so uh you know even though we just aired up this is the smart thing to do this is the game you play when you're trying to do this type of travel I mean you don't always air down for Comfort sometimes you have to air down just so you can get on the snow at all and then a few miles down the road after clearing some trees and whatnot it was time to air right back up hit the highway and it was going to be our last fuel stop for a while in a tiny town called Government Camp [Music] speed we are officially out of section 7 of the Oregon Backcountry Discovery route and we are going into section six and section six looks super similar you're up in the mountains it's beautiful trees all around I mean we couldn't have picked a better day to go and do these uh these Northern sections it was absolutely gorgeous and in a very short period of time we made it from Government Camp all the way down to Timothy Lake Dam we then took a couple of minutes to cool off the dogs and just kind of catch our breath and then it was time to go back up into the mountains and I had a feeling we were going to run into some trees and sure enough this is a section where there had not been very many people up here throughout the winter obviously because there was quite a bit of work that needed to be done when it comes to the electric versus gas chainsaw debate I've always been I've always leaned gas just it's something that I have used for many years and I'm very comfortable with but after last year clearing all those trees in the Washington Backcountry Discovery route I have earned a completely new respect and see a different level of value for the electric chainsaw and so this year I've I actually bought a very small electric chainsaw I have like the 16 inch Bar Milwaukee at home but I decided to bring the eight inch bar because most of the trees that fall aren't that big and I knew we were going to have three other saws in the group so Aaron did bring one gas and one electric but you know whenever we would hop out of the rig and by the time you'd get a gas one started and everything you could just pull the trigger on electric and be done with the project so we found ourselves leaning much more on the electric chainsaw route plus there's a big advantage on a 10-day trip like this not having to carry around Jerry cans is really nice because you basically have an unlimited fuel source if you have an inverter and that's exactly what what we did we would just charge the batteries for these saws whenever we'd be driving and we also had plenty of spare batteries so like every couple days we would charge a battery for these saws and uh you don't ever have to worry about stopping and getting any gas or pre-mix or any of that spilling and it when it comes to trips like this the electric saw is extremely valuable this is a much different experience than last year in a few different ways one we have more people which is really nice we have more saws and when we come across a big tree like this one just cleared a big tree they'll want to come across a big tree like this one we've got you know different Vehicles we know exactly what to do and this is like a five minute ordeal instead of like a 20 minute ordeal we got another biggie up here boys [Music] the deeper we got into Mount Hood National Forest the more dense the tree fall was and it was extremely clear that we are definitely the first group to come through and clear this area since the route was announced because it was tons of untouched snow that was surrounded by tons of downed trees the good thing is we I mean we've done this in the rain we've done this in the snow like this is nothing it's a beautiful day with good people we've got plenty of saws plenty of vehicles and this actually was a ton of fun and it didn't even feel like it was a detriment to the trip at all [Music] for sure [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] thank you three out of four bars still pretty good we've got a lot of trees we're having to give this snow way too much skinny I mean it's it's almost embarrassing to re-watch this footage but the reality is we already aired down and up twice today we we just have this feeling that right around the corner is probably another like small stretch of paved Road and we're just being stubborn or not airing down I'm also I've also got 37 pounds of air in those tires right now I got 30 and it was the same deal with me way too much dude I'm like being stubborn at this point we could air down 10 times by now and we're all like yeah well if we were gonna air down now we should have done it earlier and we just keep not airing down now it's yeah I'm just being super stubborn about it maybe a mile mile and a half from the lake and the campgrounds that are around it nice I feel like it's getting to be a pretty good time instead of Camp because of all the cutting and clearing and you know running Street tire pressure in the snow it sure made us feel like we had gone pretty far since Timothy Lake Dam until you look down at a map and you realize that we are a stone's throw from where we were many hours ago but um this is kind of the theme for what it's going to be like over the next couple days I believe and the northern half of Oregon once we get to the southern half we're going to be the desert I think that it's going to change a lot more like just beautiful scenery and like aggressive dirt roads but when we're up here in the mountains it's just so unpredictable as to how much Trail you're gonna be able to cover in a day and uh after sitting around and talking about this at dinner and around the fire we realized that we've got to make some serious miles over the next couple days if we want to be able to make it in our allotted 10 days of uh of time that we have to spend here in Oregon [Music] there is something so valuable about getting out in the woods with your adventure buddies and being silly and eating good food and making fun of each other and getting into trouble and then back out of trouble I think that this is an exercise that will yield it's like you'll get the most bang for your buck as far as the amount of memories that you get out of it versus the amount of calories burned to get into it and if there's anything that is a takeaway from this video it's that don't just watch Nate and his friends have fun call your friends today and get the next big trip on the calendar we ride we're ready to rock and roll whenever we all are [Music] she's a little slimy but we're doing good now that we're down foreign [Music] snow is really nice to wheel off because it can just you can be on like a ton of hard pack that was from eight months ago that's just had time to get really solid so you don't sink down but other times you'll have like one inch of slurry on top of that hard pack and it makes tour traction is really hard to find this is pretty mushy but we're not off camber enough for it to matter but when the snow is melting you'll find a whole bunch of voluntary Creeks that just pop up everywhere and uh I mean there's so many times that I have just fallen into a mystery hole in the middle of a trail just because a creek has formed underneath it and eventually that spring snow is not strong enough to sustain the weight of a vehicle and at this point in the trip we're seeing a ton of voluntary creaks but so far we're not really having too much problem navigating it we're just having to get out periodically cut some different things out of the way and continue on yeah at the very least forgot to move this and that there's another one underneath oh yeah that's a big one yeah well why don't we just I mean for now it looks like it's not too bad of a hike we can just grab our saws grab our hands and yeah since we're parked take that one that's I'm thinking we can take them all whatever we can reach oh I see another I think I think big boy with as much as we've cut before and just rolled by hand we can at least make room to drive around it yeah for sure but then we just use yourself I'll grab a pair of gloves and let's get going [Music] oh [Music] [Applause] [Music] coming up on some patches of snow and it looks like we're gonna have to do some lumberjacking I'm gonna do some Lumber jaking yeah well a lumber Jake is where you take the sod you go forward or backward a whole bunch while you're cutting and then you have the whole internet all over you [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] thank you put some really good looking lumberjacking you did Chris of the mount Jefferson Wilderness Area and 40 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail are still closed due to the lion's head fire the fire was sparked by lightning three weeks ago on the Warm Springs reservation it's now grown to nearly sixteen Thousand Acres it's spreading to the west and is 31 percent contained level one get ready and level two get set evacuation orders are in place for the Camp Sherman area and nearby campgrounds this little chunk of section 6 is completely optional and it's actually closed up the lake um but I highly recommend that you visit if you plan on coming through here because I think that perspective is very valuable and even though this fire was started by lightning strike it's not man-made or anything it when you can see what the devastation can be if you are not a good Steward of the land um I I hope that this would help prevent man-made forest fires in the future because people get to see what it smells like they get to see the devastation in person and see what it feels like when you go through a place like this so we're good stewards of the land and we've always made sure that we put our fire all the way out before we go to bed at night and sweet you know I can't tell you how many campsites I've driven by and dumped water on Strangers fires because they just left but I think that this even for us this is just reinforcement when you see it in real life to take good care of these forests because it's it's a real privilege to be able to come up and do what we like to do [Music] in an attempt to lighten the mood a bit I think this is the perfect time to break out something that Jake and I have been working out many of you might remember in last year's video where David and I have this little back and forth about butts only loaves do you eat the butt I'd usually just eat the butt like you only eat them because nobody else will eat the button nobody else eats butt so unless somebody else let's make bread that has no butt and let's sell it to people who don't like it and then sell the butts and then sell the butts separately totally that's exactly right with the assistance of my wife we were able to collect a bunch of bread loaf butts put them together so that I could present David with our concept loaf of bread for our first million dollar idea I mean I see it all crunched up is there something living in it that is an idea we had on the last all right I'm up that's an all what are y'all having an all butts loaf of bread oh thank you the first million is made this is just the Prototype I mean from here I mean I'm thinking you know QVC yeah and then we approach Safeway in Walmart um oh oh yeah that's that's small we can scale up from here buddy yeah oh yeah this is fantastic outstanding [Music] thank you [Music] it's time to get back to work because we wanted to make it to the Tiny Town of Detroit today uh but of course we ran into some snow that was a lot more difficult to pass than I thought it was going to be holy crap that's actually getting deep this would just run top of 24 inches of snow [Music] foreign [Music] took the lead through the Section in the Gladiator because if you look close you're going to notice that the 39 inch all-terrains on the Gladiator are holding the snow really well and nobody else's tires were doing that and a lot of times in many different types of snow that's not that big of a deal but in this type of snow it's a really big deal so I was leading David and I together we're cutting Trail and it it didn't really matter because it was so slushy that even though we put a really nice set of tracks in for everybody else anytime it was off camber it was so easy for them to just blast through those tracks because they just had no no structure to them because there's so much water in the snow but anyway after a whole bunch of recovery and hard work we're able to get around this off camber section and then we can start making some miles back [Music] I'm foreign [Music] [Music] Trail was an absolute Mad Dash we were moving fast we were working hard we were trying to make up some miles and it was it was so hard through snow that was so slushy but we finally found a rad campsites we didn't quite make it to the city of Detroit but we at least made it to an amazing camp and this ended up being one of my favorite campsites of the entire trip we had a couple more that definitely rank up there but the views from this place and the weather were absolutely outstanding [Music] after another perfect night it was time to head to Detroit and this is a place that was really important for us to stop at once we did a little bit of research about it and learned that just a couple of years ago a good chunk of this town was leveled by wildfires so we had planned on either doing a breakfast or a dinner some some meal here and spending some money here to help regrow its economy and get people to move back in and so that's exactly what we did we had breakfast we talked about our route a little bit and then we went and we bought some different supplies at the local store all the mood yeah I'm going to suggest that like Bend would be cool but we sisters is better end is optional we don't have to get into that whole morass of traffic if we can tackle every job we need including a shower the sisters been the sisters before no I I've driven through it full size time it's cool at all yeah full-sized town but like the I'm gonna just like an old west facades on the front of the buildings in downtown and all that stuff it's pretty cool little town I'm gonna get down I'm gonna use my googler and I'm gonna see what what do we have available to us yeah there's quite a few miles between us and sisters or us and bend for that matter but once we get past bend on the rest of this route there is virtually nothing between Bend and Nevada there's just a couple of small stores where we can fuel up and they'll have like just the absolute Basics but we need to make this next big stop Count that's why we're talking about it so far ahead of time just to make sure that we have everything we need to finish the trip plus we're trying to research and figure out where we can get a midweek shower because man I'm telling you on these long trips having a solid shower in the middle of the week changes everybody's attitude I learned a lot by Leading our last bdr trip and I've had a year to think about the best ways to lead these types of trips in the future and so one thing that I'm toying with on this trip specifically is I want to cycle out who leads and who follows throughout the week not only to give everyone the experience to appreciate what it's like to have to navigate in real time um you know and have to hop out and cut all those trees because you're in the front of the group and all that other stuff but there's something else that I think a lot of people don't think about and that's your air filter management you know we've got an entire group of people that all are just sucking in tons and tons of dirt except for the lead guy and I've been able to lead a lot this week so I've been able to reap those benefits but this way we're going to be kind of we're going to be taking the weight of ingesting all this dust into the vehicles a little bit more evenly if like right now I'm bringing up the rear I'm adjusting all the dust and Kelly is leading so he's not having to adjust near as much dust as he has been throughout the week speaking of which I think today once we get to camp and get some food in us and stuff tonight maybe we should pull all of our all of our air cleaners and have a really good inspection because I don't want to have anybody start getting weird check engine lights or some uh drivability issues because we haven't been taking good care of our trucks I'm gonna give you a little bit of a head start just to keep [Applause] hey Aaron you got a copy yep I'm gonna back off quite a bit I'm I find I'm eating way too much of your dust so if you get any like stuff from the front of the group well you just relay that back to me because I bet I won't be able to hear it yeah 10-4 I'm trying to space out too if I see a little snow guys I think we should air down Kelly's leading today and I want to continue Kelly to lead today which means he's gonna be breaking Trail in snow and yesterday he didn't have the best luck but today he's going to try to air down a little bit lower this is a new build new tires um he's not on bead locks but he's gonna go as absolutely low as possible to try to make sure that he can stay in the lead and he can break the trail for the rest of us man this four PSI I think is where it's at it just didn't slip once yeah like you were tractoring just pretty nicely just steady yep just idling through [Music] yeah copy as you get around here the snow gets pretty deep so anyway that's all just pretty deep Kelly's about to hit it pretty hard [Music] [Music] take us through what you're doing baby well I'm unschooling uh my warrant foreign pull me through a tree that way nobody has to scoot around and act as an anchor strap around the tree detect it before we hook everything up it's difficult enough to drive on ice cream much less drive up ice cream and now we're at a point where it doesn't make any more sense for David to turn ice cream it makes a lot more sense to just pull them out with the wings it's a big old diesel-powered slush machine is what that is the thing is making icies this this is not ideal for traction this is wet really wet really churned butter that we're gonna have to float up but we're gonna winch him out of the way I'll try to fill the holes by just kind of kicking them the best I can and then I'm gonna I'm already at seven I think it said I'm gonna drop down to three because I can already tell that this is gonna be tough to get traction to come up with unassisted do not have time to mess around anymore we have got to make some miles I I don't want to sit here and plan this obstacle all day and for that reason I'm playing it safe I'm Gonna Fill in the holes with the shovel to make sure that things are flat and I'm not I'm not like trying to dig my way through and out of any of the holes that were made when David and Kelly went through we just need to make it through this obstacle we need to make it through any other obstacles that we find today and try to make some serious miles otherwise we are not going to be able to finish this trip and the time that we have allotted ourselves driver driver driver driver driver [Music] nailed it keep going little driver right into the path [Music] thank you foreign snow isn't just changing by the day now it's changing by the hour and all the snowmelt has made these like rivers and streams that are going under what we're driving on and it's making it to where everything seems normal and flat and then I'll just have a tire sink down like six inches and I know that that is a forecast of what is to come later in the day if we keep seeing so much running water and snowmelt go underneath the trail [Applause] all right now have fun my original plan was to take the high line and then David's rear tires were sliding down and digging a little bit and I was like well Kelly made the low line Legacy I'll just take that route but I think I have a little bit more weight a little bit higher than he does because as soon as I hit this the rear just wanted to go down every time I went forward so now we're gonna do a little double winch pull it's not really stuck I'm just trying to like save the GFC I don't want it to go into a tree in order to uh just get from A to B so we're going to tighten up these winches I'll start slowly crawling forward and gets back on back on track [Music] I think we could all feel the weight of time ticking by and we could feel that we were going so much slower than we need to in order to meet our goals but everybody kept a really cool level head and we all were still having a lot of fun with each other throughout this entire process Jake is requesting bad energy nay this is not my fault I promise but Nate Nate did have to use two winches in a snatch block to get through the same spot that the S10 did so there's that I'm just gonna leave that out there oh really yeah someone's a fan dude I'm gonna eat the Prototype all right we gotta put these Loaves on Amazon soon or someone's gonna someone's gonna take this idea for sure no nobody has the guts to do a butts only love nobody has the butts yeah the butts or the guts shortly after we had some morale boosting sandwiches we hit a highway so we decided to air up put some miles in and very shortly we made it to the last off-road chunk of section five which is pretty cool I mean the numbers are getting lower however it is like a little bit after four o'clock on day four and we've only made it 209 miles we have so much road to cover and I know that I'm not the only one who's excited to get out of the snow and out of the trees but unfortunately we're gonna have to earn it first so Nate and Chris are up ahead clearing what I'll call the groundskeeping team I'm marching in those tracks they're going a little bit fast and as they can and then just cutting Limbs and get them out of the way and We're moseying alone I took the lead because I wanted to give these guys something to chase after I knew that at 3 PSI I could make a ton of miles even in deep snow and while I'm like cutting Trail if guys are getting stuck they could be dealing with that instead of me being stuck behind them so for that reason we were able to make a ton of ground pretty quickly considering the circumstances but eventually it all caught up to us and there's just no denying the complications that come with driving over spring snow [Applause] oh [Applause] don't fall in a nape hole that's usually pretty good advice when I showed up to this section of Trail it just looked like flat Snowy Road that was melting and then of course my tire found one of the thinner parts of snow and it fell like 18 inches down I mean it was it was crazy how deep the water is underneath this snowpack and while trying to avoid the hole that I fell into David found his own and again when he drove over this the first time it was just flat Snowy Road and then it swallowed his 40 completely and he found himself having to dig his way out of what we're gonna call David's hole don't go in my hole negative sir we will not go in your hole that felt sketchy what did it look like I got it on video I'll be making a reel out of all the uh sketchy Suburban moments of the day whether you you're gonna there's a 90 second limit man so it'll be highlights it looked as sketchy as it probably felt so when we were getting kind of going through those twisty parts and like every tire rotation and then grab of the snow grab of the snow matter I was doing something called two footing where you're using the brake remember I got an old truck but you're using the brake to kind of give like artificial traction control so I'm doing manually what the other trucks in this group like the two Jeeps will do automatically and that brake action that I'm doing manually just with my pedal it's just it's keeping the tires from slipping too much going too fast even those low range they kind of Lock and I'll just say chatter a little bit and sometimes that when that happens you can actually lose you know your line that you're on in the snow especially I'm using mud terrains right so it's not a snow tire enter use just a little bit of the two foot action to keep the line that you're on to keep you from sliding off the trail pretty darn important I guess oh hello there's no drift at this point we're all starting to have our own little struggles for fighting for every foot of Trail the trails have gotten super narrow where we're driving between the trees it's so difficult to keep the trees off of our trucks and the trucks off of our trees just because like almost everything is like pointed or you're off camber this was some of the most technical driving I might have ever done in the snow because everything was so tight and it was so difficult to navigate our way through here and on top of all that it was time for another Parts failure unfortunately [Music] don't still shame man who you are we love you I'm trash but thank you come back to the crown come practice a crown foreign [Music] this is not a hard pull at all we're not high centered on rocks we're not like doubled back with a snatch block to double our pulling power of a winch this is a straight pull where I'm just trying to load my suspension down so that I can drive forward we're not stuck but the hardware gave up that all so there's eight bolts that are holding this bumper to the frame horns and seven of the eight bolts just stripped all the threats somebody did the only one holding it is on your side can you see which one's on there I think it's the top one that is a that is definitely a hardware problem and another part of the problem is that this Hardware all eight bolts have been welded to the inside of this bumper and that means that I can't even replace the hardware to then have a front recovery point or a functional winch what we need to do is we need to get this truck flat and we need to start figuring out how we can get off of this Trail so that I can get a winch bumper ASAP this is this is a really big deal when you're doing Trails like this we are using our winches a lot we are taking big risks and I can only do that with the confidence of having a front recovery point thank you [Music] cool well uh we want to bolt this bumper back on so one of the studs is bent and it's like actually broken like halfway so uh we can't get the bumper back on so it's just hanging off by like half of the nut right now so I'm gonna cut the stud off that's bent so we can try and actually bolt it on at least a little bit so it's not just falling off I am so thankful that I brought the right crew with me on this trip because not only is everyone everyone has a very extensive mechanical knowledge which is nice but on top of that everyone maintained a great attitude every time we've met challenges and even though we're all tired and hungry and the sun's going down and we probably won't set up camp until midnight it was still a lot of fun tell your Savage sir thank you you know I bring tools for a reason in these hands for a reason and these hands these talented hands Roger checking Chris Miller is going on a walkabout to figure out where is the correct route Chris is just walking through all the small spaces between the trees being like come on let's go I think the only way for me to get out of where I'm at is oh right there so I gotta take a left yeah on my map it looks like we're just a little bit left of the trail yeah that could be an error from the GPS when they're recording or even the GPS now so it sounds like we're gonna need chainsaws according to Mr Miller [Music] I'll stay right here that front Locker just being able to turn it on and off due to such a game changer oh absolutely [Music] thank you [Applause] weed so I like to hear it's in the Suburban go through a first and a little bit easier for us to kind of made a path sometimes he makes it worse sometimes he makes it better here we go like that just like that [Music] on Friday the morning it was a late night it's uh day five Grizzly's taking a bath just crawled out of my little cocoon there was last night we made a discovery first off we're sleeping on like I don't know a small watery something with snow on it and that is the trail behind me it's gonna be hard to see because of the snow but that is the trail right there that's the power stop Trail in fact and today we need to cross the power stop Trail oh there's ice on it this morning oh it was yeah it was a whole sheet I think it's hard enough to float us but there's ice so I walked out I walked out and back it's fine we have uh we have two options um one would be to make the dog fight all the way back with me not having a winch or two throw ourselves a little water crossing vote show of hands I haven't even talked about this with anybody water crossing vote there's everybody all right motion carries we're gonna do a water crossing all right David commence organ Trail jokes oh well we're gonna we're gonna cut down some Timbers we're gonna build a raft we're gonna caulk it and we're gonna then get it across but we're gonna have a ferryman come along and we're gonna pay him on where to do it but the problem is Jake had all the money and Jake has died at dysentery [Music] thank you hey the current attitude status is happy and optimistic one of these one of these one of these let's go across some deep water Let's Go internet one of these we've all got lots of caffeine going through our veins with no food so energy level is at an all-time high it is a beautiful morning we're crossing a absolute beautiful body of water which is Surprise Lake I gotta be honest this is not supposed to be a body of water there's just been so much snow melt that it's turned it into one but even at its deepest point we're only talking like bottom of the door this is not this is not a deep dramatic water crossing it's just really pretty and kind of fun [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you foreign [Music] [Music] the deeper in we went the more intense the tree fall became and I don't know if it's because we were Delirious from showing up at midnight the night before but we were all still having an absolute blast we're marching our way to the closest freeway that we found on onyx and I mean everybody was doing their part everybody was laughing and having fun and I know I'm not the only one that is very much looking forward to the desert section of the Oregon Backcountry Discovery route we're supposed to take the ride at the Y you are correct sir I am backing up backing alert I am backing wanted to do the hash brown loop I gotta be honest I love hash browns same thing foreign [Music] [Applause] big stubborn American man we aired up of course and then I took a shower with my air filter as one does on a trip like this and then we went from there to dinner and having someone else cook a very very nice high quality steak for me was a real treat because the next couple of days We're Not Gonna See hardly any other people much less at high-end restaurants so after we found a very quick and dirty camp we set up we went to sleep and then woke up nice and early for some pancakes before we hit the road trying to reach the desert hand them in our face yeah talk to me about these cakes well I mean first off no two should ever look the same they're like snowflakes they're special well like I said they're real weird in shape and I'm into it okay well that's good because even if I wanted to I could not replicate the same cake twice it's just it's not physically not what that is not with that attitude guarantees oh yeah party whisk this whisk is here to party all right well we got the first batch on there and they're starting to curl up at the edges too they're like real pancakes oh they're they're just like real pancakes that's the Kodiak the real pancakes with bite I know I've been saying this for days but we are finally in a position where we can start covering some miles we need to make like 100 mile days not 20 mile days and now that we're out of the mountains basically involuntarily because of the bumper situation we are getting closer and closer to Desert you can see the changes in the forest all around us there's not near as much ground cover it just feels drier outside we're seeing like zero snow and it's very obvious that we're gonna get in a position very soon where we can air down nice and low and we can just start bombing through the desert which I'm very excited for now on the bumper I did reach out on social media and I asked for help a whole bunch of you in the band and sisters area offered a whole bunch of just very very generous offers and I decided to take one guy up on his offer because he just seemed eager to come out and have an adventure with us and I was really excited about that so we have a guy who's going to drive a bumper up from Nevada and he's going to deliver it he's going to help us install it and then him his wife and his dogs are gonna come camping with us looks like we're gonna start gaining elevation here huh yeah it looks like the mute off to our left is a 6800 seats um I don't have toppo up on my map so I don't know exactly where we're at right now we're sitting at 6 300 feet right now and we have been climbing so far all day looking at the map I just realized we're gonna break into the desert today we're gonna break into the desert on this section so uh what happened to Nate guys well uh he got he went past the turn off and then he decided to continue on because there's another trail that I guess comes back and meets here and uh I thought you guys voted him off it's pretty far away it seems like so we might be here a while so that's kind of kind of why we can't leave Nate by himself so someone's always got to be watching over him otherwise these kinds of things can happen so the bumper came off again and uh at this point I'm getting pretty tired of having this thing on here and so I strapped it down a different method than I did before and this time I'm pretty sure it's going to stay on here the good news is as soon as I met back up with the group and we hit the road things smoothed out a lot and then there was this amazing line where the forest ended and we were officially in desert for a second and then we Dove back into the forest for a little bit and then went weaved our way in and out of this really cool Mason-Dixon line between forest and desert see the beginnings of the desert over there to the east is the part of Oregon I'm least familiar with so I'm excited to see it just uh we've got a little bit [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] and heading to me we finally made it to Christmas Valley which means that we've got Desert from here all the way to Nevada which is very very welcome and on top of that Eric from Relentless fabrication is waiting there with a new bumper to help us get to help us ensure the rest of this trip being possible I really want to have a front recovery Point even though we're in the desert you know if we get stuck in super deep mud or if someone starts to get Tippy I just want to have that flexibility I do not want to finish the trip without a winch and Eric is making that possible Now Moto built is the company that made the previous bumper they did reach out to me on social media and they did say we're we're willing to you know send you a new bumper and all this stuff and that was really nice of them but after seeing what happened with the last bumper there's no way I want to bolt another one of those on there and after looking over Eric's design on this Relentless fabrication bumper there was a bunch of different aspects that I look I looked at as a huge upgrade and strength bracket goes slides up and mounts underneath the winch plate yep dude that is so smart you get four more bolts this way than a traditional bumper exactly like that well and then the other thing too is you'll see a lot of the other aftermarket bumpers that do have a drop in winch plate and separate the shell and the yeah yeah so this is all one piece this way too yep Chris and Aaron double teamed the wiring Kelly and Eric and I were putting the bumper together and getting everything mounted and of course Kelly was making statements that would later in the video come back to bite him hard I feel like the S10 is the most reliable vehicle at this point on this trip I gotta say it to the camera straight to the camera the camera bold statement right down the barrel however let's not act like you've done anything Kelly oh I've loosened some bolts tightened some bolts this morning Kelly tighten my spindle nuts that's a bowl technically right I am very very excited great completely unrelated to anything happening in the S10 right now but does anybody have an OBD2 scanner just just asking for a friend right now yeah I mean since you and you said that it's the most reliable rate here I I highly doubt you would need it um but I think Aaron no it wouldn't who would have it well good because I mean I don't need one perfect I'm glad I left mine in the uh Ranger we really hate for you those needed one yeah me too I'm just glad nobody here needs an obtuse OBD we need some at home at home what's OBD2 number higher than OBD1 I think my friend will just disconnect the battery for a little while and then plug it back in it'll just it'll fix all the problems I may have one I I can't remember if I've got one in here or not well it's okay I mean I don't need one I definitely don't need one see on the ground so it's just like don't Kelly I see an ax and I see you're perfectly running perfectly reliable S10 you wanna talk about it yeah absolutely are they unrelated unrelated to the action okay good the axis so I can open up the rooftop tent so it's just it's part of my process okay so um after spending a lot of time on these Dusty roads uh the check engine light has now come on so wait a minute wait a minute I feel like there was a statement about two hours ago are you are you eating your words are you eating crow over here oh I'm not eating anything it still runs like a top check engine light doesn't matter when you shut the engine off the light goes off and you know it's off so uh my my best guess is probably mass airflow sensor because we're sucking in all this dust and I have a really cheap Chinese em filter on there I have a better one in the truck I have two filters for this exact reason so uh let's start there yeah that's the easiest thing if we don't have an OBD2 reader which I don't know everyone probably we don't have probably which is not a big deal because it does run totally fine all the temperatures are fine everything's fine so that's my best guess is just the intake of all of this dust is just in that chicken it's taking its toll on uh the mass airflow could be the intake air temp yeah dirt can get into a few different things you know the air intake side of things it would be my in my professional opinion what are you gonna set up camp and are you gonna fix it now fix what [Music] foreign [Music] this was an amazing experience and definitely one of the like top 10 campsites for me the next morning just more of the same beautiful weather awesome food we did however start to run into some of Kelly's bad luck after quick bolt check somebody noticed that Kelly had a pretty sizable crack starting to form on the sea Channel section of his frame so we decided to drill a hole in the end of it to keep it from spreading too much more at least to try and keep it from spreading too much more and then at that point we said goodbye to Aaron we said goodbye to Eric and we headed down to our last fuel stop of the trip in the town of plush and this fuel stop is extremely important because the next section which is our final section of the trip is 149 miles mostly off road what's going on well when we were driving by here I saw a gentleman with some really cool cars in his backyard jeeps and Broncos and stuff and he was actually loading the trailer up so figured that might be the man who would have a welder so I pulled off and talked to him for a minute and uh he has a welder and he's willing to let me use it so as soon as we fill up I'll head over there and see what he's got I don't really know what kind of welder he has I didn't ask it's a welder so it could be stick could be a good stick if it's stick or uh anything other than Mig we might have to let uh David handle it because I've never done that before so I could help well I'm sure we got enough people we'll figure it out we can figure it out so yeah that's exciting I'm very fortunate in the fact that I've gotten to travel a ton in my life I grew up as a military brat we were stationed in other countries we traveled all over Europe we traveled all over America growing up and then over the last 20 years I've traveled and wheeled all over the country and one thing that I have found that is a through line no matter where I go on this planet is that there are great people willing to help you everywhere it was so cool that we showed up at a town of 60 people this really tight-knit little community and the first person Kelly asked hey do you have a welder and would you mind if we fixed our junk in your yard the guy was more than willing to help and I think that this says this speaks volumes to some of the perspective that you can gain on the road and why these types of trips are so important to unplug from the news and unplug from the way people tell you the world is versus what you actually go out and experience yourself right and so without going too deep and too sentimental I think that there's really important messages here that you can only learn by getting out of your house and taking a trip like this so next on our agenda was to head up into the back up into public land find a place to Camp those quick and dirty because the next day is going to be a gigantic day we want the next day to be our last day we have one big stop that we want to make that's supposed to be an amazing view for a place called BD's Butte or Betty's Butte and things get a little eventful look mom over Landing I feel like you're just trying to crack my frame more at this point crack slack Kelly get off it I'm trying to quit but this road is not helping we are very eager to cross the finish line in Nevada today but we have an opportunity to go just off trail to the highest elevation that we have seen the entire trip thousand feet of elevation the highest we've been the entire trip we should be at just over 7 5 you will have gone and yeah we'll be pretty high the views up here are absolutely incredible but would I do it again well definitely not with 10 days worth of camping gear in a truck [Music] we have to go back down [Music] foreign [Music] that might be the worst place in the world to have your truck Fall Apart you're right where the coil spring mounts and the track bar mounts underneath there right in between there the frame is cracked and the whole thing is bent up so you can see my rear tire stick ERS oh wow Channel life right there yeah dude that is nuts you see the tire here way in and the tire here way out and that coil spring is all kinds of bent this way jeez man unfortunately we do not have time to make a plant just with us sitting here talking about what we should do we've been feeling some raindrops here and there and if it starts to rain well we go on that off-camber section it's going to become even more dangerous than it already is with a bunch of overloaded vehicles off camber one of which is very badly broken so we decided to do is have David go down first because he is the most top heavy and then I could sit on the hill behind him and if I needed to I could throw a winch on the rear corner to help level them out and ensure that he doesn't end up going on his side or even worse [Music] [Music] foreign ratchet strapped down so tight he actually had the easiest time going down and navigating through this out of all of us [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] we've got about a hundred miles before we can cross the finish line into Nevada and call this one a w and man I've helped a lot of friends limp a lot of broken Vehicles off trails I have never had to help somebody limp a vehicle a hundred miles um this is gonna be a marathon but I know that we can do this so once by the way we dotted a huge bullet it did end up raining and I'm so glad that we didn't have to do that off camber section in the rain it wasn't it wasn't that bad I have done worse but that was the worst off camera section I've done where the consequences are that bad where you're like looking at your tomb definitely didn't feel good but it felt great to get out of there before the rains hit now we're going to try a couple different things to help remedy the rear axle problem with Kelly's truck and what ultimately ended up working is pulling the panhard bar completely or the track bar and just taking straps and putting them in an x pattern and then like loading the rear suspension a little bit so it kind of was like a synthetic strap Watts link of sorts but uh it's weird but it totally worked I mean limping a vehicle 100 miles like that is proof that that that's that ended up being a pretty good remedy to get him off the trail the road looks more prominent up ahead I think this little jumper will end eventually and then we'll get to normal Road speeds again yeah we don't want to have the actual Oregon Trail time come up that says Jake got bit by a rattlesnake [Music] this was our last official night of camping and we showed up to camp super late there was just not a lot of camping on section one of the Oregon Backcountry Discovery route we did find a spot where the trail just widened out just enough for us to pull off the road sleep we didn't set anything up other than the tents and then tear down bright and early and head to the Finish Line Nevada I think the lesson of this video is that you don't have to necessarily do every inch of a trail in order to have a great adventure with your friends I mean I don't regret any of the spots that we're forced to go around if you do want to do every inch of the trail definitely push it out another month or two don't go in may like we did but if you like Adventure and you don't mind having to go around things that are closed and whatnot this was this was outstanding Jake how about a left-hander handshake thank you so much for doing this and for coming out with this I mean is there anything you want to say yeah I mean the whole point of the trail series is really to you know our vehicles are tools to have great experiences meet great people and if this does isn't the best example of that I don't know what is I highly encourage that you call your friends today and you get something on the calendar there's no reason that you can't come and do these routes they're everywhere now go to ridebdr.com download a route that's in your area go have fun with friends and make sure that you support the people that support this channel huge thanks to power stop break and for Onyx Offroad for making this possible this entire trip was planned using Onyx off-road and every vehicle in this video had power stop brakes thank you for watching and I hope to see you on the trail

Channel: Dirt Lifestyle

Views: 403,840

Keywords: oregon bdr, oregon backcountry discovery route, backcountry discovery routes, backcountry discovery route, oregon bdr film, oregon bdr route, off road extreme 4x4, off road 4x4, off road camping, oregon bdr route 6, oregon bdr section 1, oregon bdr route 5, oregon bdr route 3, oregon bdr section 3, oregon bdr film premiere, backcountry camping, overlanding, overland camping, snow wheeling, snow offroad, overlanding camping, off road, overlander, overland

Id: BBj7i9cqy9g

Length: 77min 27sec (4647 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 18 2023