Date: 17th July 2010
Trip leader: Bill Knowles & Rick Fisher
Trip report: Tracy McCrenor
I’d decided a while back to participate in the night drive as Andrew was due to be away in Dunedin for the winch competition. The Cherokee was sitting all ready to go – so it would be rude not to! Being the good work colleague that I am – I asked my mate Barb along for the evening and she happily agreed!
Early afternoon saw a bit of texting with Scotty and with no co-driver he came along with us (which in hindsight was a very good plan as Barb decided with her navigating – we would most probably have ended up in Murchison...!). We turned up at the allotted place and a bit early to find our eager organizers waiting for the participants to arrive...and we waited...two or three turned up....and we waited...another turned up....and we waited...and that was about it!
So with the small amount of trucks we went from teams of two to teams of one, were given a sticker and the usual trip talk, and off we went...following the instruction sheet very ably put together by the organizers. After a bit of compass and GPS correction we came back and hopefully headed off in the right direction (read into that what you will...).
The instructions took us off towards Mt. Heslington Rd. and onwards through small cemetery tours and farm gate stops finally bringing us up into the Waimea Forest up the back of 88 Valley where Rick was waiting for us in the dark (by this time we’d managed to have several discussions, backed up, guessed or made up or tried to answer most of the questions, filled in the blanks and collected some greenery – thanks Scotty for being the bush scrambler!). After a bit of a wait for the others behind us we carried on up to the tea stop. By this time we were one truck down due to mechanical failure so the group was small indeed!
After a quick cuppa and sammie – we were given the next set of instructions which were all diagrams of skid sites (picture one very excited Scotty.... “this is more like it – pictures, I can understand these...!”) so with Scotty on spotlight and following the maps and me driving past all the markers (which had letters on to make up a word)...we headed off for a long 20-odd km circuit of the area. Interesting in the dark...but very enjoyable especially the nice bulldozed firebreak we headed up (I did hear Barb remark that she was pleased it was dark so she couldn’t see the drop off...!). By the time we got back to the rendezvous point – funny enough the others were already back there! Considering we set off first...it was a bit of a mystery until we found out that we were the only ones to have driven the firebreak and they’d missed a whole section! Team Jeep rules! Barb and I spent some time looking at the jumble of letters we’d collected until it finally dawned on me what the word was... “DRIVESHAFT”.
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Past club trips 
