Epic overland trip that started with the AZ Run

I managed to process and upload my drone video to youtube from our first campsite on Alstrom point.

Thanks for the flipoffs and moonings!

Here's a drone shot of the sunset from the first night (picture). It didn't come out very well, but I thought I'd include it:

Sunrise pictures from the next morning came out fantastic though:

Here's the trailer all packed up and ready to hit the trail again:

We headed out from Alstrom Point and into Kanab to fuel up and pick up anyone that skipped the first night. Here's a few shots of scenery along the way:

From Kanab we headed back across the border into AZ onto the beginning of the Arizona Trail. We cruised up the Kaibab Monocline and through some forests in Northern AZ heading towards Jacob Lake. Here's a drone shot with us all lined up waiting for a straggler at an intersection:

We topped off at Jacob Lake and headed to the campsite for the second night, elevation 7720 feet:

An aerial shot of the second campsite:

We really didn't take many pictures on the second day, we were finally starting to wind down from the hectic buildup of the truck and trailer prepping for this trip. I do have some drone footage I need to process, hopefully I can get that up later tonight or tomorrow.

Wow, I didn't realize that drone was so far up for those pics.  Very cool. 

It maxes out at 400ft above wherever it took off (per FAA regulations).

Holy shit....good thing you didn't have your "spontaneous total loss of altitude" during that Alstrom Pt. video.  

Ever figure out what the problem was?

I have not figured it out.  It did it 3 times total during the trip, no idea why.

Alstrom point is the only time I took it over the cliff, not only did I have the issue the next day, it was the only day there was no wind.

It's been a couple days, but I finally got some time to upload some more video and pictures. I'll start with the video from the first day of the AZ run, it shows the drone crashing it the beginning (not sure why it decided it needed to land). That was the first time it has ever done that and it did it two other times on the trip. I'm glad that didn't happen over Alstrom Point...

The second day of the AZ Run had us running out to Toroweap, the narrowest point in the Grand Canyon and the first overlook for the run. We stopped off in Fredonia for fuel and headed out to Toroweap. You can see the stucco look covers the body damage on the S-10 pretty well:

There was beautiful scenery everywhere you looked, even if we were just parked on the side of the road waiting for people to catch up:

They made us drop our trailers at the ranger station, something about 20 foot max length.  We wouldn't have had any issues, but the guy with the badge makes the rules...  I wish I would have known they were going to do that, I would have left it in Fredonia instead of dragging it 95% of the way to Toroweap.

After lunch and taking a boatload of pictures, we headed back through Fredonia through Lookout Canyon to our night 2 campsite in the pines at 7200 feet.  We watched a movie that night so I had the screen up.

I flew the drone in this canyon and it did the crash landing thing on me 2 more times.  I chalked it up to loss of GPS signal, but that shouldn't have happened the first time.  It never happened again after getting out of this canyon:

I still need to edit the video from the drone, maybe I'll get it up later today or tomorrow.

Epic stuff.  Hope you don't mind my sharing the youTube links for my handful of spaceface friends.

Nope, go right ahead, they may get shut down because of the music though.  I'm not sure how any of that works anymore...

More pictures!  I was a little gun shy after crashing my drone for the 3rd time, so no drone flights for this day.  Day 3 of the Arizona run.  We're now heading straight back to the Canyon on the north rim, we're going to hit numerous lookouts here, but first we had to get down the very muddy Lookout Canyon and met back up with someone that had to head back to town for the night:

Then we were into the Kaibab National Forest going to various points on the Rainbow Rim Trail:

The S-10 and trailer were fully stuccoed by this point, hardly any white paint showing:

The first point we hit was Parissawampitts Point, then on to Fence Point, Locust Point, North Timp Point, Stine Point, Fire Point and Dog Point.  I honestly don't remember which was which so just enjoy the pictures:

We all split up and just hit whatever points we wanted to, some went straight to camp, some just hit a few points, but we hit all of them.  The plan was to camp on Fire Point, but we decided to camp on Dog Point instead.  We had a nice spot in the pines with a good overlook.  Movies were watched, beer was drank, wood was burned, but no pictures were taken until the next day (by us anyways)...  Here's some shots from a nice little field we stopped in on the way to camp though:

One more day of pictures for this weekend and a drone video. I'll get more up later this week but I need to get away from the computer for a bit.

Day 4 of the AZ Run, today we hit the aptly named Point Sublime and Swamp Point (not so aptly named thankfully). We never got a shot with camp setup, but here we are packed and ready to head out. You can see we've scraped some of the stucco off so we didn't get completely filthy just using the trailer:

On the way to Point Sublime we ran across a wild buffalo herd, that's a first for me:

Then we moved on to Point Sublime.  We spent quite a bit of time here just looking in awe, this is a must see spot, if there is any way you can get here you should add it to your bucket list for sure:

We took quite a few panorama pictures, but this is the only one that turned out halfway decent.  180° doesn't even come close to capturing the whole view from the point:

Drone shot to give shape to the point:

This is probably the best subject matter my drone will ever capture.  I was a bit nervous flying it as it was fairly windy and it crashed twice the last time I flew it, but the video came out pretty good:

After we hit point sublime we headed out to Swamp Point, it was incredibly green out there:

After hitting Swamp Point we headed back to camp near Fire Point.  I'll continue from there next time.

excellent writeup so far.  Can't wait for the rest.

Apparently I screwed up the link for the day1/night1 video and posted the Alstrom Point video a second time.  This is the one I meant to post:

On day 5 of the AZ Run we actually cruised into the main part of the North Rim National Park (the back way of course). We hit Point Imperial and Cape Royal, but more importantly some of us managed to grab a shower at the campsite in the park, it was glorious!

On with the pictures (I think this is Cape Royal):

It was pretty humorous driving around the park with a big group of muddy trucks (we all split up and hit all the spots we wanted to hit and regrouped later).  Everywhere you went people were pointing, taking pictures and coming over to ask were we had all been.

Lunch with a view:

I think this is Point Imperial:

(Pre shower pictures):

Then we headed just outside the main entrance of the park for our night 5 campsite.  There was another herd of buffalo grazing in the fields just outside the park, but it didn't seem as cool as the one we ran into in the forest.  It poured on us for about an hour then let up so we could set up camp.  Some of the mud got washed off anyways:

Amazing how small the people and trucks look from 'just' 400 feet up.

It's a very wide angle lens, but it does a good job of not making it fish eye.  You can see it best when I'm climbing out of the forest with the camera pointing straight down.

We headed out in the morning for the last campsite through some beautiful canyons and woods:

We made a stop for lunch before we dropped off of the Kaibab Plateau:

Then we dropped down out of the pines and into the high desert:

Marble Canyon in the distance:

When we arrived at our final campsite, right on the edge of Marble Canyon, a storm blew through so we all hid in our trucks for an hour or so till it blew over:

Once it dried out enough we set up camp in the best campsite ever:

Awesome views out all 3 windows on the tent. We just laid in there and enjoyed the view for a couple hours:

We had a friend guarding our camp for us:

Double rainbow!

A couple drone shots for perspective:

We had different trucks come and leave throughout the week and you can see our group was pretty small by this point, those that left early missed the best campsite.

I uploaded another drone video, but they cut the music track off so I'm going to find a different track and re-upload it. I'll post it later.

Here's the Marble Canyon video with music that hopefully won't get deleted: