Mojave Road

We tackled the old Mojave Road this weekend. We picked up the trail outside of Needles and finished at Afton Canyon. All in all, a great time and incident free, almost. Somewhere during the last 10 miles, J.W. hydro locked his Dodge Ram in a water crossing. He stalled out in 3 1/2 feet of water with a locked up motor. After towing him out, we put the truck on an incline and drained 5 gallons of water from the exhaust. When we tried the motor, nothing. It was still locked up. When we pulled the the throttle body off, we saw that the intake manifold had about a gallon of water in it! We used a combination of siphoning and a Coleman mattress pump to suck out the water. Next, we pulled all the plugs, breaking one, and prayed. The motor cranked over and shot water out each spark plug port. After some drying and a jump start, we got the truck running albeit badly. We finished the trail and nursed J.W.s truck back to Barstow on 7 cylinders. Quite an adventure indeed. It helped that we were well prepared and had enough technical know how to get out of the jam. We are theorizing that when J.W. started crossing, he went too fast and flooded the intake. To make matters worse, when he backed of the throttle, back pressure sucked water in tho the exhaust and past the catalytic converter. Could have been worse though. More pics when Blogger gets their act together.