010804 - Grand Canyon

This is the sister site to Slindon Safari and was recommended to me by a bloke I work with. This is a site worth going to just to experience the feeling of the place!

You enter the site through an area full of old cars, trucks and buses and all sorts of other stuff. Then you wind your way through great big hulks of abandoned buildings and eventually come out in the middle of the quarry. Although you're probably never more than a few hundred yards from the road it feels like you could be miles from anywhere!

It's a really big hole in the ground!

You can see the tracks go from one ledge to the next or follow the ledges up and round, all the way to the top of the quarry.

Not long after we arrived there was great excitement about some rock crawling going on at the top of the quarry. We thought it'd be worth a look so we shovelled the bacon rolls down and headed off up the quarry side. Pretty much everyone had come to watch so there was quite a gathering of trucks at the top! Unfortunately the rock crawling turned out not to be quite as exciting as I had hoped. Maybe I'm being a bit unfair but I've seen much more impressive stuff in videos and magazines. I was just watching though, maybe I should have had a go myself!

There's an amazing difference between driving on even hard looking mud and packed stone. Even driving on apparently flat bits of track felt pretty brutal in the Zuk. The surface was so grippy when dry that I didn't really need 4 wheel drive at all and when I did use it I was getting wind-up like on tarmac. However, the tracks were fun and certainly tested out the suspension lots!

Another site well worth going to though I would worry about my transmission a bit!