,
We knew we were getting close to a tough section when we started to see evidence of carnage! We decided to park at this point and make our way further on foot just to make sure we didn’t do something stupid.
A good thing too, because the trail turned into this just a couple of hundred feet further ahead. Not only would we have gotten stuck here pretty easy, but no doubt Project Tundra would’ve come out of this with some customized body panels.
Uh…yeah. We later found out that we were at the start of the infamous Chocolate Thunder part of the course. Of course, a lot of guys were trying to give this challenging part of the course a crack with their own rigs.
These pictures truly do not give justice to how tough this part of the trail is. It would be hard to walk up there, let alone drive a truck up the trail. Some of the “steps” were nearly vertical rock faces, some over 6′ tall. Somehow most of these rigs would end up making it up and over.
One by one, nearly all of these rigs eventually made it up and over the top.
Sometimes, things got a little backed up. It’s hard to see, but there are thousands of people watching the spectacle. It was super fun to watch the struggle and close calls as all of these rigs tried to make it up the hill with the crowd cheering them on. This went on all night and eventually we went back down to Hammertown to catch some sleep at the Hellwig camp. We needed to be up early so we could get up and watch the real race in the morning.
The next morning, we were up at the crack of dawn to get our media credentials and to get out on the course to do some serious spectating. We were excited as we figured our mighty TRD Supercharged Project Tundra was gonna rule on the trails. Wrong!
