Winter Romp 2001 - January 2001 - Photos and story by Peter Vollers

Several members of the BSROA planned to meet up at Bruce Fowler's Winter Romp in Unity, Maine, President's Day weekend. We were lucky enough to get one of Bruce Fowler's free rental cabins for the weekend and we were all excited about the prospect of "roughing it" as any self-respecting Land Rover owner would be.

When my cycling team friend and budding Land Rover enthusiast, Aaron Bagshaw (1972 Series III currently being rebuilt), Peter, Jr. and I arrived at Bruce's home on Friday afternoon, we were delighted to find several Land Rovers already parked in Bruce's driveway. We went inside to meet the man himself, rover legend, Bruce Fowler. Bruce turned out to be everything we expected, a true died in the wool Land Rover enthusiast. Turns out that Bruce has been driving rovers for almost 25 years and is currently driving a Series IIA109 pick up with a massive antique winch mounted on the front bumper.

After meeting several of the other Rover owners, Bruce escorted us to our accommodations for the weekend, a two-room cabin not much larger than the interior of a 101 ambulance. The cabin had one gas lamp for light, no running water and a wood stove about the size of a bread box as the sole heat. The powder room consisted of an outhouse located about 50 feet from the cabin in the woods. We had to dig our way there the first time. Aaron and I must have both seemed like Steve Martin in "The Jerk" when we exclaimed, after Bruce asked us how we liked the place, "Like it, we love it!" We quickly set about preparing the place and getting it warm for the arrival of no less than four other BSROA members who would be staying the weekend and, as the day wore on, Gary Schroeder, Todd Wilson and Graeme and Gavin Robinson trickled in. Also, Joop VanDenBroek arrived as well, but ended up sleeping in his Defender 90 after he realized there was barely any room left to walk, much less any more room to sleep.

At around dinner time, we scooted over to the Unity College Student Center to register for the event and grab some grub. As we entered the Student Center at what appeared to be an extremely small, rural college, Aaron and I were taken aback to here some very high quality rap music emanating from the dining room. As we entered the dining room we were amazed and delighted to find that a live rap group called "Natural Born Skillas" direct from New York City was getting ready to play a concert there that night! As it turns out, Unity College is a rather highly rated undergraduate environmental studies college with a sophisticated, and very hip I might add, student body. As Aaron, Peter Jr. and I bellied up to the bar at the Student Center for some veggie burgers and Guinness on tap (and some chocolate milk for Peter, Jr.), and high quality rap music to accompany the meal not to mention numerous Land Rover owners with whom to dine, we all knew the Winter Romp was getting off to an excellent start!

After a sumptuous meal, we all decided to head off for the Friday night trail ride mission. We piled about 25 cars onto a Class 4 road which eventually turned into a logging road, which eventually turned into nothing but 2 feet of snow and, unfortunately, a lot of waiting. Since everyone was feeling pretty tired after traveling so far that day, we all decided to pack it in and head back to the cabin for the evening.

The following morning we arose to a cold but beautifully sunny day and headed off to breakfast at "Big G's", a local eatery with portions reminiscent of the Flintstones. After having omelets the size of a Range Rover muffler, we headed back to Bruce's for the scheduled event for the day, Rover Polo. Once back at Bruce's, Chris Komar and Mike Smith of East Coast Rovers as well as several other brave souls attempted to "clear" Bruce's field by driving over it only to find that the snow was just too deep (2-3 feet in places!) to clear the field enough for the polo tournament, so we decided to do the next best thing and go for a trail ride. As it was approaching lunch time, the bulk of the participants headed back to Big G's for some lunch before the trail ride while the BSROA contingent, still full from our muffler-sized omelets, headed out into the woods to start the mission. I had the dubious honor of cutting the trail in my 1988 Range Rover.

As we approached the point at which the leaders the night before had given up, after testing the traction of the snow, Aaron and I both decided that the best way to blaze the trail would be to give it lots of welly and just hang on! Accordingly, we buckled Peter Jr. into his car seat in the back and just hit the 2-3 feet of snow in front of us as hard as we could and made excellent headway until we came to a clearing where the snow had drifted to about four feet thick and the whole posse came to a grinding halt. At this point it was decided that the best strategy would be to winch my way across and thus forge a trail for the others. The only problem was that the nearest tree was about 135 feet away. Luckily, we were able to employ my 50- foot extension of Masterpull winch rope at the end on my 90 feet of out-spooled winch rope and a long yellow treestrop at the end to winch across. It was at about this moment that Gary Schroeder looked at me an exclaimed, "You have far too many toys!" It was only about a month earlier when I said the same exact thing to Gary.

After getting the Range Rover through, we worked to get Rush Hambleton's Series III through. It was then that we were joined by the main group of cars having returned from lunch, which group was headed by Jesse Ware of York Harbor, Maine, in his fully equipped Defender 110 with super-swamper tires, huge tire chains and complete underbody protection. Jesse asked me if he could take over cutting the trail and I gratefully accepted his offer knowing that I had been easily "out-equipped." Jesse then came steam-rolling through in his 110 with, quite frankly, the coolest sounding exhaust I have ever heard. The exhaust, replete with headers and a flowmaster device with pipes routed through the body work, sounded like an old wooden lake boat taking off from a dock in full flight.

As Jesse went ahead to forge the trail, he was a little ambitious and put too much strain on his center diff lock causing it to mis-engage. After I yanked him back with a kinetic recovery rope a few times, he decided to take it a little slower and cut the trail in 10-foot increments. As Jesse went ahead to keep blazing the trail, I waited behind to make sure that the 40 or so cars behind me were all getting through and we progressed swimmingly until we got to a turn around at the end of the trail at about 8:00 at night. It was at this point that the confusion, inevitable with 40 cars on the same trail, ensued.

When we got to the turnaround, we thought that we had all of the cars filed onto a wide section of trail and began to take the last car in the group, turn it around, and head out the way we came, only to hear on the radio that about ten cars had been stuck behind a 1982 Right-hand Drive Perkins Diesel Range Rover which would not start after it had been shut off. I went back into the trail to investigate and came upon BSROA member Brian Jackson on his way to the turnaround leading the ten cars and the restarted '82 RR. Brian latched his winch cable onto my RR's rear recovery point and we performed a cool winch-enhanced 180 in the trail. But once we started back towards the turnaround, the other 30 cars were on their way out and we had 30 cars facing ten cars on a trail with no apparent turnaround. After much deliberation we decided that the best thing to do would be to simply make a turnaround using my Range Rover with about 15 people pushing it to and fro through the deep snow on the side of the trail, back all of the 30 cars up enough so that the ten cars could advance enough for the ten cars to use the turnaround to come about and then head out.

This scheme actually worked very well and we managed to turn all of the cars around and continue onward, but when we came to a creek crossing that had been iced over on the way in, we found that, after 40 cars had crossed over on the way out, the ice had broken through and damned up and the creek. The creek was now 3-4 feet deep with a very steep uphill on the exit side. When I arrived at the crossing, Jesse Ware and about five other vehicles, including Graeme and Gavin in Graeme's Range Rover were working to get up the icy hill coming out of the water. It was at about this time that Chris Komar, Mike Smith and BSROA member, Dan Pero, set up an intricate winching system to rapidly winch the cars up the steep icy slope while BRSOA member Scott Preston ingeniously managed to crack a hole in the ice damn in the creek so that it could drain to a manageable level. All of this work was being done, by the way, in temperatures quickly dropping to 0 degrees!

At this point it was getting rather late in the evening and I had decided to put Peter Jr. "to bed" in his mummy sleeping bag with his teddy bear in the backseat of the Range Rover (his favorite bed, by the way) and check on a family that had been at the rear of the convoy on the way out but was now directly behind me. The family was on their first Land Rover outing and the father had only driven his brand new East Coast Rover 4.6 ltr Defender 110 a handful of times. I ended up giving him some quick advice on how to get through the waterhole which basically consisted of, "Don't be afraid of the violent bumps going through the river and keep the pedal to the floor in low, drive on the way out and don't let up until you are all the way up the hill." After doing just that, the father was one of only a few vehicles to drive out of the river without being winched. After congratulating him at the top of the hill, I saw in his eyes that we had yet another Land Rover "lifer."

It was at this time that the temperature, at 5 degrees below zero, became so cold that the snow lost almost all of its traction and the ridge between the tire tracks on the trail was hardening to the point where vehicles without considerable lift were getting hung up one after another. With the two-inch lift provided by my DAP Big Blue springs as well as the 235x85R16 BFG Mud Terrain tires, I found that my Range Rover was faring extremely well in these conditions, however, the family in the 110, with about two inches less clearance and a lot of weight was getting regularly stuck behind me. We decided that the best method for moving us through was to simply tether a kinetic recovery rope from my RR to the 110 and drive for as long as we could before either piling into the snow on the side of the trail or simply losing traction. This method worked very well for a couple of miles but then the snow quality became so bad that I was getting anchored by the 110 and was not able to keep them moving.

By now, it was approaching 2:00 in the morning and everyone, including the family behind us, was very cold, hungry and extremely tired. Jesse and Bruce had come back into the woods to help recover people and we ended up helping the family in the 110 winch themselves over the last couple of hills and both Jesse and Bruce were telling everybody to just keep it going the whole way out of the woods to leave nothing to chance. Aaron and I, anxious to go grab some food, looked at each other with gleam in our eyes, got back in the car and just nailed it the whole way out of the woods, literally catching air over several of the "moguls" that had formed in the trail. Once out of the woods, we headed directly to Cumberland Farms for some burritos and beer before retiring back at the cabin. Bizarrely, Gary and Todd had called me on my cell phone about an hour prior to that wondering where the hell we were and letting us know that they had managed to extricate themselves from the woods by going straight at the turnaround and had been back for hours. Joop had also followed suit and, when we got back to the cabin, they had the fire stocked and more beer waiting. It had been a 14 hour mission and there were certainly many tales to tell before winding down enough to actually go to sleep.

Sunday morning came quickly with Peter Jr. waking up at around 6:00 AM (having slept through most of the night in the range rover) asking, "Daddy, I'm really hungry, can you make me a camp sandwich?" So it was up again after about three hours of sleep to make Peter Jr. one of his favorite meals, an egg and cheese sandwich cooked on the wood stove, all of this while desperately trying to be quiet enough to keep from waking everyone up. This was certainly no easy task with Gretel barking for a piece of camp sandwich about every two minutes!

Once everybody was up and we had some breakfast once again at Big G's, we went to a car wash and blasted the blocks of ice that had accumulated on my wheels, axles and drive train the night before. Gary, Todd, Graeme, Gavin and Joop all decided that, since the trails were off limits while a couple of Bruce's friends went back in to recover two vehicles that had to be abandoned the night before, they would rather head home taking the coastal route. Aaron and I, determined to drive as much as humanly possible that weekend, patiently waited for the cars to be recovered and then headed back into the woods with several more vehicles for some more punishment Sunday afternoon. I tried to convince Scott Preston to join us, but he was fully entrenched in Bruce's warm living room and couldn't be budged.

There is always one point in every rover mission where decisions are made that define the remainder of the outing, either in a positive way or in a negative way. The night before it had been the decision to turnaround and head out the way we came in rather than go straight out of the woods as Gary, Todd and Joop had done. On Sunday night it was the decision to make a left turn off of the main trail and explore some snowmobile trails. This decision was made at about 5:00 PM and although the snow quality and traction was excellent at that time, by the time 7:00 PM rolled around we had to winch ourselves every time we fell off the compacted, snowmobiled portion of the trail.

Dreading another extremely long night, we all made the sound decision to pile into and onto the Range Rover and just head out of the woods the way we came in, inch by inch being extremely careful to stay on the compacted part of the trail. When we finally got out and headed to a local diner, we thanked God that we had made that decision when we did, since we were just about ready to fall asleep face down in our lobster stew!

Monday morning greeted us with yet another very cold but wonderfully sunny day and we headed back out onto the trail for the fourth time during the weekend to recover the Series II pick up owned by Bruce's tenant, Steve, which recovery was quickly accomplished with some snatch-block winching and a high-power turnaround at speed. After getting out of the woods and sending Steve off to classes at Unity College, Aaron, Peter Jr. and I cleaned the cabin from top to bottom, thanked Bruce Fowler for a great weekend and headed off with our cameras full of pictures, but more importantly, our hearts and minds filled with memories of another truly great Rover weekend.

- Peter Vollers