The 2008 USRCCA Nationals was held once again in Moab, Utah. Moab is well known in the full-size off-road world for its amazing terrain and mile and miles of trails. Our event was held next to the world famous Potato Salad Hill.  Our trip began on Thursday night at about 9:30 as we hit the road. There were 4 of us making the trek, 2 competitors and 1 spectator from KCRC and 1 competitor from CMRCRC. It is a 15 hour drive covering about 1000 miles.

We arrived in Moab shortly before noon on Friday, tech started at 1:00. After getting our rigs through tech we practiced on the surround rocks for a few hours trying to learn the terrain. The rock is like none I had crawled on before, it was just extremely compacted sand. You could watch your tires dig a hole in the rock. We headed back to town that night to get a good nights rest, the next morning would come very quickly.

The next morning we arrived at the comp site slightly after 6 AM. The event was running the Free Crawl format, this means you decide when you want to run and in what order you want to tackle the courses.  I decided to hit course 1 first, but many others had the same idea.

Course 1:

This proved to be the most butal course of the day. Tackling this course as early as possible was key. The line was very long but you could watch as every competitor passed through that the course was changing drastically and not for the better. A competitor attempting Gate 4 had caused a large piece of rock to become dislodged and fall from the course. After that point very few competitors were able to progress this gate. I timed out attempting this gate, very disappointing.