From Indoorsy to Outdoorsy

I bet you thought I'd never go four-wheeling and camping for five full days. I certainly never did. I left during the middle of last week to go to beautiful Moab, Utah and enjoy quite an adventure. I had so much fun and was completely out of my comfort zone. Here are a couple of pictures:

This was my first obstacle. I was a little bit of a dare devil, I guess, because I really wanted to do this whole Jeep Safari thing 100% if I was going to do it at all. So I rode along for some really scary obstacles. This one wasn't bad once I had something to compare it to, but at the time it was terrifying!
I was laughing and screaming at the same time and this is kind of what that looks like. :)

One of the most interesting things for me to watch on this trip was how all of the guys seemed to just have a sense about them with four wheeling. There would be a problem and they'd just all jump out, pop the hood and start checking things out. They always seemed to know what to do but they rarely communicated about it. They just kind of worked together. It was fascinating. We were going up this really steep obstacle when Colby popped his tire off of the rim. It was sitting right on a rock and the guys didn't want him to move it because it would ruin his rim. They needed to change his tire, but the truck was at a 45 degree angle. They all got in there and assessed the situation...

Then they jacked it up a little bit and put the rim on a piece of wood so that it would be so bad. The tied a strap to Ben's truck (parked in front) to give Colby's truck stability.
Then they changed the tire and it was finished. The whole thing probably only took 15 or 2o minutes. I could not believe that, almost without a word, all of these guys could solve the problem.
This was the scariest thing we did the whole trip, and I got to ride along!! This is called the Escalator. The way this whole thing works is that the boys walk the obstacle and decide where they want their tires, etc. This is called "a line." Then someone is in charge of making sure they keep their tires where the driver wanted them and they get going. It's a pretty controlled environment, really.
So at this point we're on a pretty steep incline and I am almost completely laying flat in the truck because of it. You really can't see anything at certain points and that is terrifying.

There is then a big hole in the ground and it has water in it, which isn't great because the water doesn't help traction. So the goal was to keep the tire out of the water.

This is Ben telling Briton that there is not way the tire will be able to clear the hole without doing through the water a little bit.
Feeling a little bit scared at this point and pretty unstable but trying not to make that known.

Yep, that's three tires making contact with the rock. Scary.

So at this point we were pretty much stuck in a hole.
Here are the guys trying to figure out how they should get the driver rear tire out of it's little rut.

So they tied a strap onto the truck and then they all pulled on it. They're not really pulling the truck out, they're just providing tension so it doesn't roll down the very steep rock we were on.

What a fun time! Might post some more pictures later.