Just for snicks, here's a copy of the post I made to the NorCal Rover club site:
Deer Valley was a pretty tough run. Harder than what we had planned by far. None of us escaped without paying some form of toll.
Per the Charles Well's book CA Back Roads and 4wd Trails Deer Valley rates as difficult, between trails like Slick Rock and Signal Peak. Having run all three of them this year I would defiantly say Signal Peak was easier and this was easily a match for Slick Rick. The book describes it thus: Difficult. Serious rock obstacles. Not for stock suvs. High clearance and lockers recommended.
So of course we took a stock RRC up it.
And judging by how well Chad did in that loaded down RRC apparently we've all been doing it wrong as he killed it. Somebody tell me again why I don't have one of these?
A brief summary of the carnage. Because I know that's what you animals want to hear about.
Nick, built RRC lwb.
Nick would have escaped without incident if he'd had his sliders installed. But since he hasn't quite gotten to that yet he got a front lower door creased by a rock on one of the several tight spots. Otherwise his only difficulty was where the lwb made squeezing through tight spots a challenge. And there were plenty of tight spots.
Chad, stock RRC swb.
I was really worried about Chad running the trail at first given that he is all stock plus had a full load of gear in addition to his wife and 2 kids. But he did great. We had to do a bit more stacking and carefully spotting but he got through surprisingly well. He did take a number of hits to the diffs and rockers but nothing that caused any damage. He also knocked off both rear light guards and a rear bumper end cap but those are basically pop on parts. He did lose his ABS module and maybe picked up a new PS leak as well. Then on literally the last rock coming off the trail we got tiered/lazy. It was a bit of a drop off for his driver's rear tire and he stopped before coming off it and asked if he would be OK. Both Graeme and I said 'oh yeah, no problem'. Heck, he had just cleared the gatekeeper and was within sight of the parking lot. But he came down a bit fast and the bounce dented the lower body behind the tire. Not a huge issue as it can be straightened pretty easily or it's also common to just trim that area off for exactly this reason anyway. Chad's my new hero, not the least reason of which is because he offered to set up camp and keep watch over my fully loaded truck when we had to leave it on the trail overnight.
Graeme, built D1.
Graeme's trusty old D1 handled the trail well until near the top when he took a pretty major bounce that popped a rear spring out of place. This wasn't too difficult to get re-seated, but then the truck would not restart. We tracked it down to the fuel pump not running thanks to a fuse that kept blowing. We ended up rigging a hot wire directly to the fuel pump but then found any time he would get a good bounce going on an uphill it would still blow the fuse and kill the ignition. This one will likely prove to be a pita to fully track down but the truck was fine so long as he was going downhill and didn't take any big bounces.
Don, built LR3
I was doing pretty well other than one tight spot that left a lot of wheel paint behind and the to-be-expected abuse of my armor. I did put a small bend in a slider, and on the way out on the 2nd day I got sloppy and dropped that big 'ol butt down hard on the bumper which I later realized cracked a tail light housing. You can't see it, but the outer bezel is separating from the inner housing a little and the turn signal quit (which is how I realized it was cracked in the first place)
My real fun came as we were about half way down on our way back. It was nearing dark and I was leading when I heard a new and bad metal scraping noise on a tight rocky spot. I got on the radio and asked somebody to have a look at my front passenger side fender, thinking I must have accidentally laid it into a rock but they reported it as clear. However a quick look underneath showed the problem. The bottom of the air strut had snapped off and was poking through the lower A arm by about 5". The bad noise was the strut body scraping as it pushed through. This had the special bonus of putting the truck all the way down on the tire since the bump stop is integral to the strut and therefor wasn't doing anything in this situation. We limped it down about 20' with the tire rubbing hard in the top of the wheel well to a wider flattish spot where we could get the wheel off to better assess the damage and realized there was no way to continue like that. If we'd had a welder we could have tried a field repair but lacking that, much head scratching eventually led to a very jury rigged combination of shackles and a ratchet strap that after a couple of attempts got me mobile enough to tip-toe down another 100' or so to a wide spot where I could get it off the trail. It was probably around 10 pm by now, and Chad agreed to set up camp there while Nick and Graeme and I headed down the trail and back to Nick's cabin about 30 min away where I would call Michele back home and try to talk her into bringing me a spare strut I had in the garage. Running the trail down in the dark was both fun and challenging but we made it out, aired up, and started back to the cabin. Along the way I got enough cell coverage to call Michele. As it was now nearly midnight I woke her up and explained what was going on. She then explained that she wasn't particularly interested in driving 2 hours to bring me the part. Apparently she was clear enough about this that Graeme could hear as well and in the interest of marital harmony he volunteered to just drive all the way to my place in in Walnut Grove. We made good time since the roads were largely empty that time of night and got to my place about 2am, had a few hours' sleep, then headed back up to retrieve the LR3 about 5:45 Sunday morning. With the part in hand we made quick work of swapping it out and got back on the trail headed home.
Having had enough adventure for the weekend plus wanting to get home to take care of some work and give the other front strut a look over, I headed home from the trail. Graeme too headed home as he had a longer drive than the rest of us. Nick and Chad met up with the others who were coming up for a day run, though I haven't yet heard that part of the story.
