Big Blue To Tackle The GOAT

Assuming I can get the reservations set up, Janey and I are taking Big Blue on a 620+ mile adventure in about a week. We are going to take the Greencountry Overland Adventure Trail. It is a ~500 mile route through the back woods of Oklahoma that are sure to test the limits of Big Blue.

Seriously though, I'll embed the map below, but Big Blue is going to think this is a dawdle. In fact, we took ~20 miles of it in Blue the other day just to go decorate graves near Grove and then to get some strawberries from a local farm.

On top of that, we were married in a church building on the GOAT, albeit many decades before the GOAT was dreamed up. In fact, Janey's family lived on a section of it, and I've driven many of the roads in my '69 Super Bee, '72 F250, or on my Honda XL350.

But, we've decided that Big Blue is now ready for the trip, and I'll be making reservations tomorrow. Turns out someone is turning 74 in a week or so and he requested that for his birthday he get to drive that route. So, here we go!

The route is below, but you can Google Greencountry Overland Adventure Tour and find more info.

That looks like a fun little adventure before you head out to Colorado. Good idea too, as it will test Big Blue out before you make the bigger journey. You gonna do the whole thing and if so, over how many days? Janey like to camp out? No way I could get Sharon to sleep in a tent. BTW, in case I forget, Happy Birthday! You get your console?

Thanks!  The birthday is on the 8th.

We plan to do the whole ~500 miles of the GOAT plus about 130 miles to get to and from it on the 7th - 9th, and will go from Skiatook to Locust Grove via 412 to start the GOAT.  I spent my summers as a kid in a cabin on the Grand River just out of Locust, so part of that area is familiar.

We'll go south on the GOAT past Tahlequah, where we went to college, and around the bottom of Tenkiller if there is time.  I think we can make it to the spot on the map near Scraper where the trail goes west.  That's just across the Illinois from Eagle Bluff and we can cross there and go back to Tahlequah.  Having gone to school at NSU we've spent a lot of time along that part of the river, so that will be filled with a lot of memories.

On the 8th we'll cross the river again and head north, hopefully making it around the horn to Bernice and then drop down to Shangri La, where we spent our honeymoon in 1969.  But if not we will cut through Grove out to Monkey Island.

Then on the 9th we'll continue on back to Locust and then head home.

No camp sites will be involved!

Cool stuff Gary. I'll be following along with envy.

Well, as of a few minutes ago we are GO FOR LAUNCH!  We have reservations for Monday night, June 7th, in Tahlequah and Tuesday night at Shangri La resort west of Grove.

The lady in Tahlequah asked "What brings you to town?"  I laughed and then described the Greencountry Overlanding Adventure Trail.  She expected something to do with the college.  But I explained that I graduated there in '69, and I got the feeling that was before she was born.  

Similar conversation with the lady at Shangri La: "Have you stayed with us before?"  Yes, but in your system you'll just find the one on Aug 1st, 2019.  "What was the other?"  Fifty years to the day prior to that.  

Anyway, I have a few things I want to do to the truck 'twixt now and then, so may get started this afternoon with padding the storage compartment.

Nice, Im hopeful after I finish my truck of going up to RWP just once to see all the fun first hand, always fun watching other people tear up their trucks doing insane things than tearing up yours.

For me that would be a 679 mi round trip for me from where I am currently at, if I am leaving from the property I have it would be 684 mi round trip for me.

Gary Lewis wrote

....  But I explained that I graduated there in '69, and I got the feeling that was before she was born.  ....

That's nothing.  I started my current job in 1987.  About half the engineers I work with weren't born THEN!

I don't know how inflammatory it is to say "Long before you were born", but I'd like to.

They put tags on roads I drove in my '58 Impala, my '69 Bee, then my '72 F250, and rode on my XL350 and call them an "adventure trail".  Sonny, I was married on that road.  My inlaws are buried there.  I've pulled a '50 Chevy 3-window pickup, a '60 Chevy pickup, and a '65 Malibu 396 out of fields beside that road with the same truck I'm going to do the whole thing in.

In fact, last weekend we traversed probably 20 miles of it in my 2015 F150 to decorate graves and to buy strawberries.  Sure was comfortable.  Switched it into 4Auto a couple of times just 'cause, but otherwise it was easy.

Anyway, they say there are harder parts, so we shall see.  

Subscribed and looking forward to hearing about it and seeing some photos.
Great way to spend a birthday wish!

Yes, it is a good way to spend a birthday!  Been wanting to do it for some time, and getting the A/C working was a key.

So now I'm trying to remember what we were taught about Gaia.  Got it working on both the iPhone and this tablet, so am playing with it on the tablet.  I guess I just press Record when we get on the trail.

That's one that the day 2 classes being inside had the real advantage. He has a few GAIA videos on his channel:

https://youtube.com/c/OzarkOverlandAdventures

Thanks, Scott. But since there are bunches of videos on there I'm going to embed the two I've now watched on here so's I can get back to them. (And for the rest of y'all, this is the guy that taught Scott and I at the Big Iron Overland Rally a couple of weeks ago.)

Made it about 150 miles on the GOAT today. On top of the 100 miles to get to the trail and then from it to Tahlequah, where we are spending the night, it was a long day.

But Big Blue did very well. We only had three problems. First, one of the fog lights is out. Dunno if it is burned out or a wiring problem, but I'll worry about that at home.

Second, the security system is flakey. It is giving warn-away beeps when there's nothing anywhere near the truck. So much so that I'm not using it until I can check it out at home.

Third, we drove in rain, and sometimes heavy rain, for several hours, and there's a very small leak around the windshield. I found a few drops that came through, so I'll have to check that out - again at home.

Otherwise, the truck did well. The rain was apparently very heavy east of Tenkiller Reservoir and the roads there had MANY places on them where the water had cut ruts crosswise in the road. So much so that many times I was down in 1st on the ZF5, which is S.L.O.W. And we drove through lots and lots of running water, both just running across the road and in low water bridges, like shown below. I had the hubs locked the whole way on the GOAT and went down into 4Lo once when we were going up a hill that was badly rutted and had a sheet of water coming down it.

But that wasn't the case everywhere we went. Down this one road we crossed running water over the road in many places, and then turned the corner to find this. We backed out!

Thanks for posting that video, Gary!  Great to see Big Blue in action!

Smart move!
Glad to hear the only truck issues aren't anything the stops forward motion. Looking forward to more updates.

Cool!

Oh, come on Gary, where's your sense for adventure. Big Blue could take that second water hole.....

A little off topic but just got back from Big Cedar. If you've never been there, it's a must do! The place is awesome!  

I'm subbed to your channel, so I've seen these snippets in my feed.

I don't think you even submerged the hubs, let alone got the rockers wet.  😋

Haven't been to Big Cedar, but have heard good things about it.  Guess I'll need to go.

As for the hubs not getting wet, true from fording.  (Or is that Fording?)  But, EVERYTHING got wet from the thousands of mud puddles we hit.  Many times I had to turn the wipers on to see where we were going.  The truck is absolutely filthy everywhere and it is going to take a long time to get it clean again.

Anyway, we are home.  Made a bit more than 1/2 of the 500 miles of the GOAT and got up this morning thinking we've seen enough of rutted roads, so booked it home.  (We do that sometimes.  Did the same in Germany several years ago and decided we'd seen enough cute little villages.)

But, in fairness, we picked the wrong time to go.  That part of the state has had a tremendous amount of rain and the roads have had water across them many, many times.  So there are ruts everywhere.  In fact, it seemed like they were taunting me as every time I shifted from 2nd to 3rd the ruts would appear, necessitating a shift at least into 2nd if not 1st to go slowly enough for the bumps.

We used the mapping app called Gaia and it worked pretty well.  However several times it froze and if we were approaching a turn we had to stop and wait for the app to start working again.  Anyway, the app provides some interesting stat's:

268 miles on the GOAT

Average moving speed of 22 MPH, but that includes several miles of blacktop to get to the next rutted gravel road, so I'm sure the pace was more like 17 MPH.  In fact, that's about the speed I drove most of the time 'cause it is about as slow as I want to go in 3rd gear.

Moving time of 12 hours & 16 minutes

But the truck did really well.  In fact, the security system worked perfectly yesterday during the day so I armed it last night and when I disarmed it this morning there were no extra chirps saying that "this sensor faulted", so maybe there's no issue.  That just leaves the one fog light not coming on and the drip around the windshield to figure out.  But I will want to go over EVERY fastener on it as we bounced the thing, hard, for most of those 12 hours.

In fact, we almost went airborne at one point.  We were on a very small blacktop road running at about 30 and came over the top of a small but sharp rise to find that the road dropped away abruptly.  There was no time to drop the speed and it was obvious that many other vehicles had come down hard given the number of grooves in the pavement, so we prepared for the worst.  But while we landed firmly there was no chance we slammed metal into the pavement.  In fact, I'm pretty sure that we didn't hit the bump stops as there was no abruptness to the landing.

So I'm really happy with the way the truck has come together.  The D60/SD springs/RSK made a tremendous difference in the ride.  And removing 2 leaves from the rear spring pack has dramatically helped the rear suspension.  I'm sure our teeth would have jarred loose with the old setup.  

Last, here are some more pics.  I'll apologize right up front with the size of the pics.  They were taken with Janey's iPhone 12 and while that thing has a good camera it takes big pics.  I edited the pics in Photoshop, but in many cases still couldn't get the size less than 1 MB to load here.  So I cropped them to get them small enough to load w/o resizing.




Look closely at this one.  Right in the middle between the two tracks is a snake.  I didn't see it when I took the pic but as I returned to the truck it had crawled into the DS track and .... let's just say I was a bit shaken.

I've always used the big size option.  While I know you prefer images the whole width of the page it's what I have to work with.

Heck, I would have been excited to see a snake  doing its thing.
They obviously aren't going to see you as prey.
I'm sure it was more scared of you than you were of it.