Taking care of Business, Richard Jenkins in the Four Corners Region

Talk about being born into the sport!  Richard (Rick) Jenkins has almost forty years experience and he just turned 40 this year.  A player in the 4 Corners area, Rick has been instrumental in elevating Chokecherry Canyon and the Farmington area into the iconic wheeling area it is. Stick around and learn more of his history, from being in the crib in the back of an International Scout2 to leading Jeep Jamboree in Ouray and trail leading at EJS. If it’s in the Four Corners, you’ll find Rick out taking care of business.

6:45 – 4WD weren’t being built for wheeling, but to get where they needed to go

9:11 – on Intimidator, it took 8 hours to go one mile, and that trail is still one mile

15:12 – the Gladiator waterfall stands your rig straight up and down

21:55 – inclusivity on the trail

34:22 – let’s talk about Jim Peterson

44:51 – Off Again is my family

53:14 – Shut your face and let’s go wheeling

58:40 – we didn’t hold back, we filled that room

1:08:45 – what do you do when you aren’t wheeling?

1:17:32 – like 3% of that group uses the four wheel drive functionality

1:24:21 – we had a really good upbringing and lifestyle

1:31:00 – there were probably 15 families that really put the whole EJS together

1:39:06 – getting started competitive rockcrawling

1:45:39 – She (Jewell) really wants to run unlimited 

We want to thank our sponsors Maxxis Tires and 4Low Magazine.

www.maxxis.com

www.4lowmagazine.com 

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• 21:13 (Cont.) Taking care of Business, Richard Jenkins in the Four Corners Region

Transcript

[00:00:00.470] - Speaker 1

Welcome to The Big Rich Show. This podcast will focus on conversations with friends and acquaintances within the four wheel drive industry. Many of the people that I will be interviewing you may know the name, you may know some of the history, but let's get in depth with these people and find out what truly makes them a four wheel drive enthusiast. So now it's the time to sit back, grab a cold one and enjoy our conversation.

[00:00:28.520] - Speaker 2

Whether you are crawling the red rocks of Moab or hauling your toys to the trail, Maxxis has the tires you can trust for performance and durability four wheels or two, Maxxis tires are the choice of champions because they know that whether for work or play, for fun or competition, Maxxis tires deliver. Choose Maxxis. Tread Victoriously.

[00:00:55.200] - Speaker 3

Why should you read 4Low magazine? Because 4Low Magazine is about your lifestyle, the four wheel drive adventure lifestyle that we all enjoy, rock crawling, trail riding, event coverage, vehicle build and do it yourself tech all in a beautifully presented package you won't find  4Low on the new stand rack. So subscribe today and have it delivered to you.

[00:01:19.460] - Big Rich Klein

Alright. On today's episode of Conversations with Big Rich, we have none other than Richard Jenkins, anybody that's in the Four Corners area all the way. I'd say from Moab to Farmington to Las Cruces, Arizona, southwestern Colorado, you're going to know Richard Jenkins, if you wheel. He is an integral part of the wheeling community here and has been since he was just a child. And he grew up with some of the iconic people of our history that are no longer with us. And we're going to talk not only Richard's history, but we're going to talk about some of those icons that he grew up with or grew up around.

[00:02:01.000] - Big Rich Klein

So Richard, first of all, I'd like to thank you for all the hard work that you have done to get WE Rock and our rock Crawling series back into Farmington over the last few years and the friendship and the writing you have done for our magazine and all that. You're just a stand-up guy and we really appreciate it. So thank you for coming on board.

[00:02:23.600] - Richard Jenkins

Well, it's definitely a pleasure to be part of this. And I got to say it's very flattering to actually be part of the podcast as well. It's like the last piece of the WE Rock, 4Low magazine and on the podcast with you is just really flattering to be part of that.

[00:02:44.800] - Big Rich Klein

Well, thank you. So let's get started right at the beginning. Where were you born? And where did you grow up?

[00:02:52.240] - Richard Jenkins

So I was born in Plano, Texas, at Plano General High School. Sorry. At the I was going.

[00:02:59.490] - Big Rich Klein

Wait a second.

[00:03:00.060] - Richard Jenkins

Sorry. I was born in Plano, Texas.

[00:03:04.220] - Big Rich Klein

That's a different type of home ec class. Okay.

[00:03:07.650] - Richard Jenkins

Yeah, 

[00:03:08.960] - Big Rich Klein

I digress, Let's go. Okay.

[00:03:09.990] - Richard Jenkins

Yeah. At the Plano General Hospital in that hospital. Doesn't exist anymore. In fact, my oldest daughter, the hospital she was born in doesn't exist anymore. As interesting as that is. But we moved to Farmington, New Mexico, 1982, and I was pretty much just born into the back of an international Scout, 2, so to speak. I was just always running in the back of a scout. They had a crib in the back of the Scout. So when we'd be out four wheeling, I'd be trying to stop myself from falling asleep.

[00:03:45.380] - Richard Jenkins

I'd fall over and get right back up and try to see everything we were doing. But still, it's back in the day when the seatbelt laws, there weren't seatbelt laws and stuff like that, but it just shows how far back it goes and everything for me.

[00:04:03.380] - Big Rich Klein

Right. Let's reference that time period, if you don't mind, how old are you?

[00:04:08.490] - Richard Jenkins

Not at all. So I'm 40 years old.

[00:04:11.090] - Big Rich Klein

Okay. Okay. We'll do the math. So let's talk about more about that early time. You your parents, some of the people that they hung out with, like Harold Off and all that and the others. Let's dive into that a little bit. And then we'll get back into your history.

[00:04:32.900] - Richard Jenkins

Oh, sure. Yeah. When I was a kid. So it was 1982, when we moved to Farmington in 1983. We had been four wheel driving with Jim Peterson and a few other people like Leroy Riley and Bobby Harrison, Harold Fos, Don Sisson and that's Garrett and Matt Sisson. Dad, they used to compete in UROC and Arca. They were the they were the Skyjacker competitors.

[00:05:05.730] - Big Rich Klein

Absolutely.

[00:05:06.730] - Richard Jenkins

So we used to four wheel drive with them. Harold Off came around a little bit. He was around but came around. We went with all of us a little bit later, I think. But in 1983, Jim Peterson pulled my parents into the club because dad was really good at doing all kinds of different land use stuff. In fact, it was through the 80’s and 90’s that dad was a delegate for United Four Wheel Drive Association and doing some of the lobbying and stuff in Washington, DC just to make sure that the Department of Interior still recognized and wouldn't do anything with our ability to four wheel drive in the public lands.

[00:05:48.260] - Big Rich Klein

Right. And that was specifically in this area, or was he working nationwide, keeping trying to keep public lands.

[00:05:54.690] - Richard Jenkins

He was working nationwide early on when four wheel driving sport utility started to he wrote for them and worked with Mark Workmeister and Harold Ogden and different people like that. And so we would all end up four wheeling together. In fact, when Southwest Four Wheel Drive Association started, the first annual meeting was basically held at my parents house. Everybody registered and came in and we had a big meeting and then the rest of it was held in Choke Cherry Canyon. We were basically representing for the first time to people that we had this really great area that people had been building four wheel drive trails in the San Juan four wheelers since the late 60s.

[00:06:45.420] - Richard Jenkins

And that's around the time late Sixties is around the time that Harold Off change the name of San Juan Auto and Truck Dismantlers to Off Again. And since 1948, Off Again. Or the Auto and Truck Dismantlers were working on Jeep vehicles and four wheel drive vehicles. But then when you were building a vehicle like that, you weren't. You weren't necessarily building it to drive on the trail, to go out and do what we do now for fun. You were building these rigs so that they could get to well sites.

[00:07:24.110] - Richard Jenkins

And at that time, the Basin was just kicking off to the San Juan Basin. So a lot of, like your Willys Jeeps and stuff, they would get drilling implements added to them. And, you know, different other PTO devices. And we were having to build a lot of the stuff. I should say Harold and Charlie Off, were having to build a lot of the stuff that was going on all of these four wheel drive vehicles just so that they could get to where they needed to get the pad done and put together the well site.

[00:07:59.070] - Big Rich Klein

Okay.

[00:08:00.310] - Richard Jenkins

Interesting. It was a lot different. You didn't have these lease roads that were maintained back then, right?

[00:08:09.240] - Big Rich Klein

It was really wild catting.

[00:08:11.840] - Richard Jenkins

Yeah. It was very cross country. You had a plot and you had to figure out how to get there through a section that was considered a right of access.

[00:08:24.400] - Big Rich Klein

Okay. Okay.

[00:08:26.560] - Richard Jenkins

So later on, though, as the club grew, it really turned into one of the hot spots. Or, I should say, Farmington turned into one of the hot spots. It was the early nineties when we were breaking Waterfall Trail and Intimidator. And then later on, about five, five or so years after we were really breaking those trails that the Gladiator Trail came in. And at the time, they were growing into being some of the most iconic trails in the country. They weren't the top trails necessarily. But they were within the top three when we launched Intimidator, hardcore trails.

[00:09:11.820] - Richard Jenkins

Yeah, really hardcore trails. And remember, back then, you didn't really have much more than a 33 inch tire. If you had a 35 when they came out, that was just nuts. But when we broke Intimidator trail, I want to say that was probably 94. 95 somewhere in there. And we had six Jeeps, and it took 8 hours to go 1 mile. And that trail is still 1 mile. And it is not it's not much faster. Now if you have a 4600 car or a 4400 car, I think Kyle Roach, ran it in seven minutes, and we had somebody in a 4600 car run it in something like twelve minutes.

[00:10:02.780] - Richard Jenkins

So there wasn't much difference. You really have to slow down. If you overdrive, you'll end up driving off a cliff. And we really did on Intimidator. When I moved back here, in 2005, the week after I moved back, we had two fatalities on the Intimidator trail where somebody was they just dipped down must have stepped on their brakes too hard or something. And the Jeep started rolling downhill and it went off a cliff.

[00:10:28.900] - Big Rich Klein

Wow.

[00:10:31.290] - Richard Jenkins

That was a really rough time for some of the people that were here. We have a competitor that was out this weekend. Isaac overwrite. It was his dad's best friend that went off with another passenger in the vehicle. And Mike is barely getting back into four wheeling today.

[00:10:52.360] - Big Rich Klein

Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah. Just to reference it when he says this weekend, it was the We Rock Grand National Championship here in Farmington. I choke Cherry Canyon at Brown Springs 21. Absolutely. 2021. So let's talk about some of those trails that are out here real quick.

[00:11:16.660] - Richard Jenkins

So in so Cherry Canyon, we have 21,000 acres of recreation area, 3800 of those acres are completely open. Meaning if you see a cracker climb, you can drive it. Now the club will anybody in the club will yell at you if you're running over trees or going cross country or something, if you right. And we're really these days, in a lot of open areas around the country, we are getting tired of which side of the tree do you want to drive around it? There's a main path.

[00:11:56.870] - Richard Jenkins

Take the main path. If there's not an obstacle, there's no reason to drive any which way around a tree, right or a rock in the road.

[00:12:07.000] - Big Rich Klein

You're out there rock crawling in a four wheel drive, and you'll see all of a sudden the trail is 20ft wide, and there's a rock sitting right in the middle of it that everybody is driving around either left or right.

[00:12:19.010] - Richard Jenkins

And Moab is a very good example of that. But here what we've done is put together a mapping system. And it started with car sites pretty much everywhere. And the BLM always worked with us really well. We did have a few years that I know you felt where we had a regime that they weren't the best fit regime for recreation, in my opinion.

[00:12:47.480] - Big Rich Klein

Correct.

[00:12:49.120] - Richard Jenkins

And we'll get to that in a minute. But the trail system, we had a lot of markings, but it was really hard to get people around. And for a while, I think it was on purpose. The club didn't want people just running out there. They wanted to guide people in the Canyon, because early on, we would have people get lost out there. And we were the first call for search and rescue, which would be the Sheriff's office really calling the cliff hangers to go out. And we would go out at night sometimes when I was a kid and we'd be out there two, 304:00 in the morning.

[00:13:26.460] - Richard Jenkins

And we'd have three jeeps going one direction, a couple Scouts and Broncos or whatever go in a different direction. And you've got a few other guys going running point on the from the wash. Sometimes we didn't find them in time and stuff like that. And I'm not saying they didn't that they passed away. We just didn't find them before they walked all the way somewhere, like to apply a highway or found light plant road or something like that.

[00:13:56.910] - Big Rich Klein

Right. And when you said Arsenite steak just for those east coasters that do not know what a car tonight steak is that the for Service and Bureau of Land Management use for trail marking whether the trails open close that kind of thing. And it's kind of a paddle marker. Okay. Go ahead. Sorry.

[00:14:17.800] - Richard Jenkins

The Canyon. So we call it the Glade Run Recreation Area or Choke Cherry Canyon, that we have 16 main trails from the nine that have stuck. And what's surprising is what we were doing with the vehicles back then is still pretty difficult to vehicles today. Like, for instance, last night we had two of the competitors on the run. I took them on roll over, and we did recoveries last night. We had to do an end over end recovery last night with two inches.

[00:14:55.780] - Big Rich Klein

That was Bill, wasn't it?

[00:14:57.780] - Richard Jenkins

Well, no, Bill, actually, he rolled down. It was interesting. When Bill rolled, he was down in a Canyon. He went over backwards and they kind of just pulled him up against a rock to where he could just start the truck and back it up.

[00:15:12.430] - Big Rich Klein

Okay.

[00:15:12.870] - Richard Jenkins

But Chad and Megan went over backwards on the Gladiator waterfall, and then we pulled him back over. He pulled up to it just got a little bit of a different line, sucked his tires into the top, and it pulled him right up. And so if you don't know the Gladiator Waterfall, a lot of people have seen it on TV. It stands your rig straight up and down, and it's literally 90 degrees up and down. And your tires, you just kind of wiggle your tires between the slot at the top and it pinches them in.

[00:15:46.820] - Richard Jenkins

And once they're pinched in, you've made it. There's a big undercut at the bottom, but the front tires just suck you up.

[00:15:53.570] - Big Rich Klein

Okay.

[00:15:54.200] - Richard Jenkins

And it's definitely one climb. That a lot of people they want to come here, and they've got their hit list for Farmington minutes. One that's on the list usually.

[00:16:03.960] - Big Rich Klein

Okay. And now you have some kind of a mapping system or something that you're using. That is UPC (QR) code.

[00:16:13.150] - Richard Jenkins

Yes. Going Donald. He took a bunch of information that Phil Collard and myself put together. Phil Collar and I multiple times through different RMPs would run through the Canyon and do the marking, or we would do the mapping. And what we were doing when we were doing the mapping is we were grabbing at first one of the GPS devices from the BLM. They were some of the first people to have them, but those things were horrible. You would map your trail and you might be on the trail, and it would show the trail, like, 50ft away from you.

[00:16:47.730] - Richard Jenkins

And you knew you weren't going to be driving there because it's off the 300 foot cliff. So Glenn took all of that information he compiled it, went out and added more to it, and then added a bunch of obstacle names and put it together in a mapping system. Matt Anthony, myself and Glenn and a few other people put together some ratings, and we took the rating system and based it half on MOABs rating system and half on Sand Hollows rating system. And now we've got basically a one to ten and one to ten plus out here.

[00:17:32.560] - Richard Jenkins

There's definitely some trails that have never been finished. Like, for instance, kicked up dust. It's a new trail that Robert, one of the guys we want to get into the club because he's just such a great guy. He put together this full trail and it is for rear steer. In fact, the Johnson Valley Crawlers were here with Dana and Robert and James from Tread Works, and they just threw the kitchen sink at the guys. So now they're going to plan a week here every year. But anyways, there's a bonus line that Lauren Healy was asking James if anybody made the bonus line because some of the craziest trail wheelers were here this week and nobody made the bonus line yet on KD.

[00:18:22.660] - Richard Jenkins

So there's still some stuff that's broke, but we haven't really labeled anything as the eleven through 15 yet, but there's probably going to be a lot of that coming.

[00:18:33.560] 

Cool.

[00:18:34.380] - Richard Jenkins

In fact, if you look on Instagram, there is one drop that Jeremy on the rocks. He was dropping, and it's really not a bad drop. Your tire drops about three 4ft and they're in formal steerings, but you're looking straight off of a 300 foot cliff. And the whole thing is it's the exposure that get you and the same thing at the competition when you're here in Brown Springs and you're in one of those bowls and you're sitting at the very top and you're having to turn around at the top and your tires are hanging over the edge.

[00:19:09.930] - Richard Jenkins

It can be intimidating, to say the least.

[00:19:14.850] 

Yes.

[00:19:15.520] - Big Rich Klein

Yeah. The stuff here at Brown Spring is the the biggest stuff that we have available in the comp scene right now, at least for We Rock.

[00:19:28.400] - Richard Jenkins

Sure. So we finished off this mapping system in this year. The cliff Hangers has spent a little over $5,000 on making the major signs that you see on the main road and the kiosks and stuff like that. So game and fish BLM and the cliff hangers work together to do it. But we use the cliff hangers money to do it. And there have been times where we've had to spend our money on the BLM with things we didn't want to.

[00:20:01.000] - Big Rich Klein

Oh, really? Okay.

[00:20:04.190] - Richard Jenkins

So around 2009, you came here, you brought We Rock, and it wasn't the best time, was it?

[00:20:14.070] - Big Rich Klein

No, the experience was not. The competition was great. We picked a bad weekend because the weather sucked. But, you know, the the relationship with the local office at the time was below par.

[00:20:32.970] - Richard Jenkins

Well, we were having the same issue.

[00:20:35.640] - Big Rich Klein

Okay.

[00:20:36.360] - Richard Jenkins

We were going into meetings where they were talking about canceling motorized use in the Glade. And before it all started, the city was having kind of Council meetings. And it's not the city Council, but put together Council myself. I represented the four wheel drive group. There are a few people from the bike community, a few people from the equestrian, a few people from the hiking community, the motorcyclist. They showed up, too. And they're really the guys that we're cutting a lot of this long distance stuff here way before anybody else.

[00:21:12.720] 

Right.

[00:21:13.470] - Richard Jenkins

And the idea was to figure out a way to move motorized use. And I just stood in front of them and said, look, if you want to move motorized use, then you need to move the 1600 Wells that are using Motors to pull oil and gas out of the ground. And the BLM stood up and said, Well, we can't do that. That's where our budget comes from. And that was exactly my point. But I put together about a 14 or 16 page document when everybody went up to talk about why they should still be in the Glade, they really only talked about themselves.

[00:21:55.590] - Richard Jenkins

And the document I put together was it consisted of mapping, marking action and enforcement. And when we talked about mapping out the trails and stuff, it basically goes by size. And the people below, you all can still be on your trail. Like, for example, if you're on a single track, that's going to be your motorcycles and your bicycles. And if you're on a 50 inch trail, that's going to be, you know, your ATV, you're not really your side by side. And then it moves up to, like, 72 inch and in four wheel drive.

[00:22:35.680] - Richard Jenkins

Well, when you get to the four wheel drive level, everybody from an equestrian to, you know, a bike rider or a four wheel drive, whatever, they can all be together on the same trail. We're not going very fast when we rock crawling and choke Jerry Canyon.

[00:22:50.700] 

True.

[00:22:51.160] - Richard Jenkins

So there's no reason why we can't pull up to a group of horses and just shut our engines off and maybe even have a good chat. I mean, everybody works together here. We went through that. And I did have a big point about the questions. They were never represented. Well, they never had good areas because of different things. Like, wherever we might be in a recreation area, they wouldn't allow shooting some places they would go. There would be a bunch of shooters out there. And so they wouldn't know exactly where to go and how to deal with it.

[00:23:25.080] - Richard Jenkins

So I had some proposals for that. And then as far as marking the trails. We were already doing that since the 90s. And then action and enforcement was really where it came down to the problems in the Glade. First of all, one of the mountain bike riders stood up and said that the four wheel drive guys or the guys that are dumping out there, the four wheel drive guys are the guys that are getting all the tickets. Well, we had secretly invited Daniel Web, wanted to share us to the event just to speak if he had to.

[00:23:55.700] - Richard Jenkins

Well, he stood up and said the only ticket that's been issued there was a mountain bike rider who closed lined a kid on a four Wheeler, and his brother had to come back and wrestle him off of this kid, and he ended up getting arrested for false imprisonment of a minor. Wow. So needless to say, that doctor left town and he was a soccer. Yeah.

[00:24:25.620] - Big Rich Klein

Mountain bike rider that did this to a kid.

[00:24:28.260] - Richard Jenkins

Wow. He took it really far. And I'm sure that the kids probably were doing something right.

[00:24:36.650] - Big Rich Klein

Yeah.

[00:24:37.180] - Richard Jenkins

But you definitely don't do what you did out there. So anyways, we're the guys that are cleaning up the Canyon once or twice a year at the time, and we were known for organizing it from the events on. We've always had these Canyon cleanup. So to say, we were dumping out there is kind of like we're just going to go dump and pick it up later. Just had a problem with that.

[00:25:03.400] - Big Rich Klein

Anybody in their right mind should have a problem with that.

[00:25:06.800] - Richard Jenkins

Right. So when it comes to action and enforcement, the action comes from the users. If you're out there and you see something going wrong, do something about it. Call me call. You know, if you have to call the Sheriff, call somebody and we'll get you with the right people. The other day, there was someone that was going and dumping out there, and the person called me and said, hey, I need JJ or Cole's number. I gave them both. They called and they got the person caught because they followed him.

[00:25:41.050] - Richard Jenkins

And so that's the kind of action we need so that we can have enforcement come in. So it's working its way out. San Juan County has put together an app called Clean Up San Juan. And so you basically go into your cleanup San Juan app. You take a picture of the dump site and enter some information and the picture you need to have your GPS data on. When you take the picture and they'll come out, they investigate it, and then somebody else comes out and cleans it up.

[00:26:13.170] - Richard Jenkins

So that's why we're having less and less of the trash that's coming into the Canyon. First, it's because of option and enforcement. But second, it's also because we have some people coming out and picking up individual dump sites. And to give you an example of the clean up that we did just before Four corners, four by four week, which was this week we filled 325 yard containers with trash when normally we would fill six. So that's an accomplishment there.

[00:26:44.350] - Big Rich Klein

Absolutely.

[00:26:45.060] - Richard Jenkins

And then for we rock, we filled another 25 yard container full of sticker bushes so that we could have everybody parking and camping. Parking is really important to me if we can't get the spectators to the event, people around here are going to be disappointed.

[00:27:06.720] - Big Rich Klein

Right?

[00:27:07.170] - Richard Jenkins

They love it.

[00:27:08.060] - Big Rich Klein

And you were up this year as far as attendance increase in attendance over 2019.

[00:27:15.970] - Richard Jenkins

Wow. That's huge.

[00:27:18.270] - Big Rich Klein

Yeah, it is. And the number of States that the people came to watch us from was amazing. I mean, we had just about all the Western States covered, and that's just going off of our pre ticket sales, which are electronic. So we have that data.

[00:27:39.590] - Richard Jenkins

Sure. Sure. Yeah. So the Glade has really come around having an active mapping system and having a lot of these signs up. We do have every now and then somebody that's driving a four wheel drive rig or side by side runs over the car sites or whatever, and you have to go back and place them. But now that we have this active mapping system, these things are within inches of where you're at, which is beautiful so you can get there. You can see what you're working with.

[00:28:14.220] - Richard Jenkins

And when you get on to the trails, you're seeing what kind of difficulty it is and you can keep moving. Now. I did get told this week during fall crawl that our sixes are more like an eight. So for anybody that's out here, our easiest trails are more like MOABs hardest trails. There are bypasses, though.

[00:28:37.190] - Big Rich Klein

That's good. So the ad is the Glade is solid for years to come. It appears the Bureau of Land Management here in this area is phenomenal to work with and especially Jake. Yeah. Jake McBride, the new recreational planner that we're working with. And I hope others get to work with him is just off the hook. The guys on it, he's sharp. He loves motorized recreation, so he makes it. He makes it easy. But we still have controls. So right.

[00:29:16.020] - Richard Jenkins

Right.

[00:29:17.420] - Big Rich Klein

The promoters that that organize events like we do need to make sure that they do what they say they're going to do, and that's anywhere we go, whether it's private land or public land, is that those being honest, being forthright and having follow through is key. And that goes for clubs as well.

[00:29:42.800] - Richard Jenkins

Right. Because they're going to come and check up on your post use report. If you write a post use report and it's not accurate, you may not get that permit next time.

[00:29:53.150] - Big Rich Klein

Right.

[00:29:53.680] - Richard Jenkins

And fortunately, this year, both we Rock and the Cliff Hangers Four wheel Drive Club ended up with a five year permit.

[00:30:02.800] - Big Rich Klein

Yes, that is correct.

[00:30:06.120] - Richard Jenkins

The Cliff Hangers Four wheel Drive Club is talking about putting together a plan to do enough events to carry year round insurance.

[00:30:18.660] - Big Rich Klein

Nice. Really.

[00:30:20.780] - Richard Jenkins

So not per event, but we would have year round. What that does is, let's say Monster Energy wants to come and do an event and choke Cherry Canyon. They want to run it, but they need a permit and a group with insurance that can take care of it as well as be whether it's the guides or show people around and get them set up to where they can guide. It's a big deal because they can actually come here and pay a price to the club, which would still go right back to our land use funds and operational funds and stuff like that and marketing.

[00:31:04.980] - Richard Jenkins

Don't get me wrong. We spend money on marketing. I think this year for Four Corners, four by four week, we were somewhere around $15,000, but we knew we had to spend that kind of money to be able to get enough people to show up. As New Mexico started pushing the mask mandates and public buildings and stuff, we had multiple clubs dropping out. So we are really pushing for those, you know, those Jeepers and buggy drivers and people that were like, okay, I'm going out there to camp, I'll go to a store and maybe we're a mass, but I'm not going to be in public buildings.

[00:31:44.700] - Richard Jenkins

I'm going out there to wheel and camp and stuff like that. So you kind of one of the things that I think is just awesome about the work we've done with gaming, fish and the BLM and everything is that we have a ten space camp ground out at Brown Springs with faulted toilets, and every camp spot has its own little Pavilion, has its own grill. And we have a yeah level parking. Exactly. And then we also have a Pavilion that has parking, including handicap parking and another vaulted toilet.

[00:32:25.880] - Richard Jenkins

And it's got two different types of skills courses. There's a big mile long skills course for 50 inch wide and below. And then there's a flat skills course that they open up for kids to learn how to ride four wheelers side by sides, motorcycle stuff like that. And then we have a little tiny round track inside of where everybody parks at that area. And we've cleared areas across from the campground and then across from Brown Springs. So that when we have a big event like this, everybody can camp right up at the event, and it I feel like it really makes everybody feel like when we rock comes to town or Four Corners, Four by four week is happening that everybody's a community every year that we've had fall crawl.

[00:33:18.470] - Richard Jenkins

We have people that stay in touch and plan out what trails they're going to do at fall call together the next year, which I think is just really cool.

[00:33:27.380] - Big Rich Klein

Absolutely. Absolutely.

[00:33:29.450] - Richard Jenkins

One of the things we did this year for the competitors was if they wanted to come out on a fall crawl trail they didn't have to register. We would put them in. And they would be like either what we would call like sponsor drivers, because we allow two Jeep vehicles or two four wheel drive or two buggies, whatever you want to call it from each of our sponsors, our major sponsors, to be on the trails for both the Labor Day Invitational and fall crawl. Okay, so excellent.

[00:34:05.140] - Big Rich Klein

So let's jump into back into the beginning and some of the people that helped open this area up and the people that are no longer with us that, you know, some of their history.

[00:34:22.100] - Richard Jenkins

Let's talk about Jim Peterson. Jim Peterson, like I said earlier, he's the one that brought us into the cliff Hangers four wheel drive club in 1983. And when things started really gearing up and we started seeing a lot of built Jeeps, basically, around the time everybody was going to 33 inch tires and 35 inch tires. Gym started building really, like just a real nice looking Jeep. And where the Jeep impression was, he would put Jim So built by Jim, and it would be GMP. So every now and then, when I get an old picture or take a picture of the old sh, I use that as a hashtag.

[00:35:18.400] - Richard Jenkins

And Damon Peterson, his son, asked me the other day, what does that mean? Because he explained the story behind Jump, and we basically explained that's exactly why we were doing that hashtag. So he was building a lot of the Wranglers around this area and off again was two. And they were kind of the two competitors. But when they were off work, they were out in the Canyon together with Phil Collard and people like that. So Jim had this look and it was a super clean look.

[00:35:54.510] - Richard Jenkins

So you knew when you saw Jeep driving around town, if it was built by Jim Peterson, all of them had a specific build. They typically use the same tire, same rims. Most of them got a specific paint job, but it'd be, you know, a fancy paint job and the colors that the person chose. And you just knew it was Jim Peterson built Jeep vehicle. And back then, a lot of people in the club had a really good relationship with Frank Curry. And so the Curries would show up here and four wheel drive.

[00:36:35.340] - Richard Jenkins

And then they showed up here when the competition started and everything. And so typically, Jim would have a set or two sets of their axles going in build every time they showed up. So sometimes they would just bring the crates with them when they came, if they could fit them, which is pretty cool. Awesome moving into the all the competitions. As we got into Arca, Jim built the CJ for Amy and Amy drove and Jim spot. It kind of like what Joe and I are doing today.

[00:37:14.750] - Richard Jenkins

And it was just a really good looking rig. It was Orange on the front. There was kind of a triangulated flame look. And then it was outlined in yellow. But the rig was white and it was just a beautiful rig. And it really complimented Jim Super Jeep, but they were competing in it. So Amy would run a huge American flag off the back of the Jeep. And she had quite a few titles under about when she Hunger helmet up.

[00:37:51.210] 

Right.

[00:37:51.960] - Richard Jenkins

And when she hung the helmet and steering wheel up, her husband, Steve continued. And Jim built like one of the first, I would say, aggressive buggies around here, which Bob Bar now owns. Doug Loyd took both the she and then Blue Two is what he called the second one, and he resurrected them. So basically they tore him completely down and put them back together as if they were new. I just saw the other day that Trail hero posted a picture on Instagram of the original CJ. And of course, like I said, Bob Barr was at the competition with a different Jeep, but he does have Blue Two, and I believe he came and asked you about what it needs to compete for next year.

[00:38:50.280] - Richard Jenkins

And I think he told him just a fire extinguisher. And he's good to go. Right.

[00:38:54.170] 

Correct.

[00:38:54.760] - Richard Jenkins

So he's already got one in there. But he needs to have a couple. So at the same time that Jim was building all these rigs Herald off was building a lot of rigs. And because they had all of this different tooling and stuff to do, fine machining for implements and different PTO shafts and stuff, they were building drive lines for stuff that you'd never imagine. I mean, little tiny EU joints on little tiny drive shafts and just weird odd stuff that you never see anywhere else. And so they had all this tooling and they had a full motor shop.

[00:39:40.580] - Richard Jenkins

They were doing all of these different things. So it was easy for them to bring in out of the salvage yard. Like, let's say you had direct Camaro. They could pull the motor, stick it in the Jeep with a good built transmission, and they go through the motor and tune it up a little bit and just really kick out some amazing rigs. And at the same time, I shouldn't say at the same time as Jim, because actually, Harold started earlier.

[00:40:12.300] 

Okay.

[00:40:13.120] - Richard Jenkins

I want to say it was the early Seventies, maybe late Seventies, when he made the Navajo break system. So basically, this would give your CJ a brake system with about 800 PSI. You would eliminate your proportioning valve and the rear brakes would go to the front of the master cylinder. The front brakes would go to the rear. And the way it was designed is that if we would get the vehicles up to about 25 miles an hour, there's like a prescription for this. And we go off road at this one spot.

[00:40:49.140] - Richard Jenkins

You get to 25 miles an hour and you lock up the brakes and CF. All four would lock up at the same time, and you would make your adjustments from there, and then you do the same thing at 10 miles an hour and make sure you didn't see anything different. And the Navajo break system today still sells. I want to say they're probably selling just under a hundred break systems a month right now. Maybe that's because there's a lot of Biden Bucks still out there.

[00:41:20.780] - Big Rich Klein

Biden Bucks gotta love.

[00:41:23.300] - Richard Jenkins

But yeah. So we had another name that doesn't come around anymore. Chip Monk. He used to be a dig into a lot of stuff, and he always had these extreme builds like his Skittles build, and they would build some of it. But Harold would do a lot for them, too, and they had a good relationship. I remember one time we went out to Comes Wash, where we were down right inside of Cones Ridge, camping right by Hotel Rock and Arch Canyon, and they both brought their competition rigs.

[00:41:59.850] - Richard Jenkins

Well, actually, Chip brought Skittles. Harold brought the Pepto Bismal Jeep, and that was his original Scrambler that he competed in.

[00:42:09.000] 

Right?

[00:42:09.540] - Richard Jenkins

I think in 1997, he competed one event in the Violated Scrambler. And the Violated Scrambler has a unique story. He got one of the first scramblers that came off the line and immediately cut the back and bobbed it. And there were a lot of people in the Scrambler community, as well as just the Jeep community that were disappointed about that. But it proved to be just a really awesome four wheel driving machine. And years later, Warren came to off again and did a bunch of R and work on the Black Diamond suspension system.

[00:42:52.640] - Richard Jenkins

And so they were doing the development down here just to have different terrain than they had in Washington.

[00:42:58.370] 

Right.

[00:42:58.760] - Richard Jenkins

Right now, the Violated Scrambler still has that rear control arm set up where there's a bushing at the frame side. That just I mean, the end of the control arm is a Bolt with with bushings on either side. I took it to an event with Jeeps West, and this was years ago, and I'm driving. And this is after Harold passed away. I was driving it, and I go down the side road to the freeway, and the back of the Jeep would just kind of wag its tail.

[00:43:36.220] - Richard Jenkins

And so we started playing with it there, and I tightened everything down as tight as I could, and it's still just kind of like to wag along. And if you remember this system, they ran a sway bar across the control arms, the lower control arm. You had a sway bar across the. And I don't know if that ever became problematic when you drug a rock in between there. But obviously it was over the drive line, so it probably never got hit too much. But it just it's an interesting set up.

[00:44:11.690] - Richard Jenkins

And the coil overs that they used for the original Fox single coil coil over. So it was an interesting build. We just took the violated Scrambler and we put a six in it. So it's got an LQ motor in it. And the next step is we're going to correct those control arms. We're going to put up to date control arms because the geometry was great. We just need to put the tabs and get those control arms on the violated scramble should be going to events again.

[00:44:51.280] - Richard Jenkins

The reason I got involved with all of the Jeeps off again is my family. But the reason I got involved with all the cheap. In 2012, I came back Heraldo passed away in 2011, and so I I had come back and I had left off again in 2010. And right after I left, he came down with pancreatic cancer and he was gone within a year. And in 2012 I came back. I got all of the jeeps running some of them. I had to pull the tank.

[00:45:29.950] - Richard Jenkins

I had to pull the fuel line. He had line running the fuel that wasn't even supposed to. You shouldn't even have fuel going through it. The upper plans, the injectors and everything were gummed up. So I took the upper half of the motor, basically cleaned everything up injectors stuff like that, replaced all the fuel lines on on the Pepto Bismal Jeep and Pinky. And then the violated Scrambler just it didn't need a whole lot. It had metal fuel line going all the way down or stainless fuel line going all the way down the frame.

[00:46:03.510] - Richard Jenkins

So that wasn't too bad, just having to replace a few sections and just really get it to run. But what I had done is because Harold was gone and nobody was driving the Jeep. I started taking each of the Jeeps out to events, giving them some exercise, giving them some love, letting them go play and then bringing them back in 2014, a bunch of people we're wanting to buy Pinky. And so the family came to me and asked us to buy it so that we could keep it in the family.

[00:46:37.320] - Richard Jenkins

And so we took our Defender 90 and sold it and bought Pinky. And that's how we ended up with Pink.

[00:46:44.870] - Big Rich Klein

Okay.

[00:46:46.070] - Richard Jenkins

The Pepto Bismal Jeep RTZ off road. Julio or Julian from Italy, right? He came and picked up the Pepto Bismal Jeep and gave Phil Is the price she agreed to. He shifted to Italy and never paid for it.

[00:47:02.240] - Big Rich Klein

Oh, really?

[00:47:03.820] - Richard Jenkins

So there's people that Harold Brand with like Walker Evans and Jim Sims and John Bundy and people like that that if they saw the guy, he probably regret his actions, regret it. I would say so very disappointed that that happened. But to do that to a widow right after her husband dies, I just crazy. I mean, it's within a year he stole that Jeep and it's over in Italy. I believe so, because the last I heard is it was seen in Italy. And I'm not sure what the heck he was doing with it because he used to take Harold's designs, and he would put them in his booth at Easter Jeep Safari, and that would be he would show it as his suspension system with RT off road, and I would see it there and he would have it flexed out and he'd have price Tags on stuff.

[00:48:16.880] - Richard Jenkins

He put a suspension system on my 2000 TJ that we call the Cheeto. It's been around for a long time. I can't believe how many people know the Cheeto, but we go to SEMA, and it was the coolest thing. I mean, I can't remember what the award was at sea with it. It was just out front as a featured vehicle. It was an okay system, but for some reason, the way the geometry worked and it was basically a four link with radius arms in the rear and a three link with radios arms in the front.

[00:48:54.920] - Richard Jenkins

And I noted that a lot of people that we put the system on for were breaking control arms. So I started cutting them down to see what was going on, and I could not figure it out because he was using quarter wall tubing and some pretty strong stuff. It was like inch and three quarter quarter wall tubing, but for some reason, right behind where the radius arm came off, they were breaking. So it had to do something with axle rap and geometry, I would imagine, right.

[00:49:27.740] - Richard Jenkins

You know, of course, I took that suspension system off right away, and Harold and I just kind of swapped together what we thought would work and it really did work. And that was pretty cool. But so my experience it off again. I came into off again thinking I knew everything about Jeep, and I knew how I was going to fix every Jeep. And I was known to be pretty good at fixing Jeeps out on the trail because people break out here a lot, and I usually carried enough tooling to get people in.

[00:49:58.310] - Richard Jenkins

We could pull an axle shaft, we could take links off and get chain falls going both ways to hold the excellent place, whatever it took. And I came in and I would get a Jeep to work on because I was a sales and service manager. But Harold was having me there to do the planning and the build because he didn't trust some of the mechanics at the shop to do a lot of things. So after hours, I would work on people's vehicles, and he treated me well for that.

[00:50:31.620] - Richard Jenkins

But when we had a vehicle come in that had something wrong, he would tell me to fix something, and I would argue with them. And I told Pat Gremillion this story one time. And so about six months goes by me just going, okay. I'm not going to argue with Harold. I'm going to do what he says. And then we'll go on a ride. And if it didn't fix it, you know, we'll work on the next piece. And it got to be to where we would go on a ride together when the Jeep would come in.

[00:51:04.450] - Richard Jenkins

And Harold would say, okay, Rick, what do you think it is? And I would tell them I'm going to check bushings times and maybe a carrier or something like that. We might have a rattle or something weird. And so you say, okay, come to the office and check in with me when you've checked all that. And we'll come up with a plan. Well, it started getting to where he just let me loose on all of the Jeeps that he had built. That would come in. I mean, Walker came in one time, Walker Evans, and he needed a new steering column.

[00:51:41.500] - Richard Jenkins

So I was in the back, got him a new steering column, had my steering column mechanic go through it, make sure everything was freshened up, all the bearings, everything we slapped that thing in. We had a new steering column and Walkers rig. I want to say, within an hour and a half, fully rebuilt inside and out. And Harold wouldn't let him pay. So Walker walks out the front door, comes back through the garage and put $400 in my pocket, and he goes, Put that in the drawer.

[00:52:13.770] - Richard Jenkins

So I snuck it in the drawer. And when Harold didn't want to take money from you, he would take a fence if you gave him money. And he took a sense that day. But what was really cool when, like Phyllis and some of the other girls. So Phyllis and Phyllis would get together and Jan Gremillion and they would get together and they go upstairs in off again. And there were a bunch of Kachinas and a lot of old Indian art and stuff like that. And they would like in all the ladies would be buying, selling and trading together within their circle.

[00:52:54.680] - Richard Jenkins

So they always had stuff to do. Like, for instance, this year, if Pat and Janet showed up to Easter Jeep Safari, Phyllis would have come up and spend the day with them, like, she'll drive 3 hours just to spend a day with the ladies and then drive back 3 hours.

[00:53:12.570] 

Right.

[00:53:14.200] - Richard Jenkins

There is just such a close relationship. And when it comes to the rat pack, which was a lot of those names I mentioned, you know, some of them are big names, but they all had this really close relationship. And Pat Gremillion told me that Harold was like, the glue. He was like, the chairman. And what you had was some of the guys, maybe they were from California or somewhere that were more Liberal. And some of the guys were more conservative and they would get in these arguments.

[00:53:47.720] - Richard Jenkins

And Harold would get in the middle of the arguments and say, look, we're out here to have fun together. We're friends. This stuff doesn't separate us because we have common ground. So basically shut your faces and let's go wheeling. And Harold was very stern with everybody. And when Harold passed away, basically, Pat was telling me, you know, things just kind of fell apart. You see, Walker wheeling with people that, in my opinion, some of the people know real well. But some people that deal with them, they might be spotting him in his older age and just they don't know, they really have to get a hold of Walker.

[00:54:33.700] - Richard Jenkins

Like, there was one time I know the people that were with him know him really well and everything. But he drove up the crack, the Devils crack on Marium and then drove off the end of it almost like one tire was hanging off the edge instead of going right.

[00:54:51.560] - Big Rich Klein

Kept going to exactly right.

[00:54:54.440] - Richard Jenkins

And that was an evening, wasn't it, too? Yeah, it was in the evening. But, I mean, when you with Walker, and the same thing happens with one of our club members with Walker, my understanding from Harold was you had to, like, basically almost yell at me, stop, stop. And Walker was a good driver. He could creep and crawl. And in his competing days, he would really throw down on some of these crimes.

[00:55:24.440] - Big Rich Klein

He want to Championship with Cal Rocks.

[00:55:28.140] - Richard Jenkins

Yeah. So he brought some really interesting vehicles here. And a lot of those vehicles we saw inside of off again. It might be just the little things, but we got to play with a lot of those rigs, which was pretty cool. So after Harold passed away, a lot of us have really felt him not being around the same thing with Jim Peterson. It's just different in this area. And when my dad passed away in four, you know, dad was doing a lot of the land use stuff with Phil.

[00:56:09.660] - Richard Jenkins

Dad was helping fill with any side stuff that he needed to do. When Phil was setting up Arca courses, your courses and stuff like that. Mom and dad would always go with Phil Collard to some of those areas. And, like, Cedar City or Delta or wherever they were going to go. I don't even know if they hit Delta, but Cedar City for sure here lost cruises. Whenever there was going to be a competition, dad would usually wrangle up the judges. And that's kind of what I do now, too.

[00:56:42.150] - Richard Jenkins

I guess a lot of the things that dad did I've been doing, you know, just I guess the Apple doesn't fall far from the tree, does it?

[00:56:53.670] - Big Rich Klein

No, it doesn't. No matter how much the kids may say otherwise, at times, they don't.

[00:57:00.040] - Richard Jenkins

Yeah. And I enjoy it. I really do enjoy working on the land stuff and all of that stuff. And one of the things when I was doing the ramp after I put together the document at the city Forum when we got together, they did the little Council. That Council got crushed right away because everybody was mean, nobody is willing to work together. So later on, the BLM started their RMP process, and with the club, they're really pushing hard on us. They were putting their thumb down right on the club.

[00:57:45.500] - Richard Jenkins

And at that time, basically, we were the bad guys to the club. And this is around the time that you guys first started showing up with we rock.

[00:57:54.860] 

Right.

[00:57:55.260] - Richard Jenkins

And so we hired no Jim Sims, Jim Cooper, and we ended up spending about ten grand. But the thing that the BLM will do is throw a bunch of acronyms, which turns into a bunch of jargon that you don't understand. And you really got to dig in to, like, the NEPA process, which is the National Environmental Protection Act. You got to look at that process that's written into that act, and you've got to find all this jargon. But the the acronyms aren't spelled out there. They've just made these acronyms over the years and we didn't understand what we were talking about.

[00:58:40.660] - Richard Jenkins

Sometimes the BLM invited us to the BLM office and they said, we only need a few people to come. We're talking about what we're going to do with the Glade. And one of the options there was like an A, B, and C. One of the options was to close the Glade for motorized use accepted. Right. It was unacceptable. We had already discussed it at that forum with the city. So now we had to do it again with the BLM, even though the BLM was present in the other forum.

[00:59:11.960] - Richard Jenkins

So we didn't hold back. We brought in people. We had people drive down from Canada, we had people coming in from California. A bunch of people showed up and they decided they were just going to go wheeling in the Canyon and make a big event out there without a permit as a protest. And all of those people showed up in that room. That room was standing room only, and it was a big, kind of like amphitheater kind of set up that the BLM had in their office at the time.

[00:59:44.030] - Richard Jenkins

Like, it's multiple stairs. I think it was a training room or something, but we filled that room. So they knew right then and there what was going on. And the funny thing is, our club was very much. I'm not going to name the groups that we are paying into, but we're taking club money each year. And multiple members were also signing up with these groups that supposedly help with motorized use. And we're putting a bunch of money into when we reached out to the groups we put the most money into to help us with paying Cooper and getting all of the stuff lined out and everything and then also getting even comments in for the comment period.

[01:00:31.160] - Richard Jenkins

It was like crickets. They weren't even there. I was so disappointed. I reached out to a friend that all of us know really well who's gone all over the place with one of these groups. And I was like, you know, I told you this was coming and you know, what's going on. And he's like, Rick, it's out of my control. I go around all these events and I promote the group, but all of this is higher above me. And if they're not pushing for a comment period, then they've got a reason to do that.

[01:01:07.660] - Richard Jenkins

So the club stopped supporting those groups, and we continue supporting our own four wheeling efforts here. So now because of these events, we keep locked away a specific amount of money, and it goes up every year because of legal costs. What they're going to be. Lawyers cost more and more every year. But we keep this specific amount of money aside in case we ever get into a situation again.

[01:01:42.780] - Big Rich Klein

Good. I think you're good right now with the group that's in there and even the regional and the directors up higher, there was some of those out here this last weekend. And I will say I really loved what they were seeing with our event, at least. And I praise you guys and what's been done out here in their office and everything.

[01:02:08.840] - Richard Jenkins

You know, there was one thing that still hits me a little hard as Rick Fields passed away, and he was the head of the Farmington Field office. He was diagnosed with cancer and gone within a few months.

[01:02:29.280] - Big Rich Klein

Right.

[01:02:30.000] - Richard Jenkins

And he was very close to our club. And we were we're very sad to lose such somebody that was just so much into just all of the uses. And I mean, we're talking even minerals and stuff like that. Just what a great guy. He protected the Arc site, but he didn't overprotect him like we've seen in Lost Cruises. Our Arca sites are marked and they're all, like, not March. Those people can go and just trample on them, but they're marked for basically for reasons that you can't get into them and stuff like that.

[01:03:13.430] - Big Rich Klein

Right. The areas out here have been are basically fenced off now.

[01:03:19.960] - Richard Jenkins

Yeah. Out at Brown Springs, especially because we're getting such traffic out there, no matter what group you're in, you're going to have that one. They're going to drive cross country over, maybe a burial ground or do something crazy that. But most people won't do correct. We see that every year we've even got one to fiber that that shows up at the downtown takeover, the offroad downtown takeover. And we talked about that. Yeah. I'm just it's time to kind of start changing our rules for coming to that event.

[01:04:04.550] - Richard Jenkins

But, you know, the Four corners, four by four week has grown. This is the eleven year. But really, it was redo for year ten because we lost 2020, and it's grown so much. And when we rock came back, I mean, you are not going to come back. And I took a phone call from Doug McKim, who was just above the recreational management planning position at the time. But filling in for those duties, you weren't going to come back. But when you did, it gave the club an opportunity to take the downtown deal that was called Fall Crawl a long time ago and make Fall crawl for wheeling in the Glade and turn the show into the off road downtown takeover.

[01:04:55.000] 

Correct.

[01:04:55.800] - Richard Jenkins

And we've done everything we can to make it exciting. I mean, we send trailers out to the comp site and we'll pick those drivers up. And then a couple of hours before the show ends, we'll take them back. But they still got to be part of the party. They get to have a beer and hang out and do things. They put on a good show right alongside of the four X four car show and the vendors and the flex ramp. And we try to put them right up next to the flex ramp because that's where all the people are, right.

[01:05:30.220] - Richard Jenkins

And so they get to watch the action and they don't have to leave their rig. And also you get so many people just in and around the the rigs that it works out really well.

[01:05:44.560] - Big Rich Klein

I remember the first year we came back and we did that. There was some teams that were like, yeah, I'm not going to do that. That's dumb. And then when, you know, they couldn't see beyond their nose, basically.

[01:05:59.300] - Richard Jenkins

Right.

[01:06:00.440] - Big Rich Klein

Everybody came back from down there and they saw pictures and heard the stories and you know what they missed out on now nobody misses out on it.

[01:06:09.340] - Richard Jenkins

Yeah. I mean, we got guys like Randall and Dave, they drove a big trailer down with both rigs in it.

[01:06:17.780] 

Yes.

[01:06:18.230] - Richard Jenkins

And I think it was both their first year to be there. And man, seeing those two show up was like, I don't know, for me was huge. I mean, I've worked really hard on this event with Alan Elmore, and this year I lost Alan. And so I had to put everything together and then just hand certain things that I couldn't take care of while I'm doing my daily business and I have it all set up and I'd have them knock it down. And Caleb Corn. I mean, if it wasn't for him, a lot of this wouldn't be going on because he was in town to get the paperwork into who they needed to get in into setting up the insurance and stuff.

[01:07:05.510] - Richard Jenkins

And he's the one that is spearheaded for the club, the availability to get year round insurance and came up with the idea. So I think that's going to sell as far as the club and will be hopefully a bonus for other groups come into the area if they want to have an event.

[01:07:22.180] - Big Rich Klein

True. That's awesome.

[01:07:24.380] - Richard Jenkins

Yeah.

[01:07:25.160] - Big Rich Klein

Caleb did a good job working with Shelley as well on various things with around the event and your guys event in our event, the coordination good.

[01:07:33.980] - Richard Jenkins

Good. And then we also have this raffle that we put on. And Cody Thomason really spearheads that there's Black Bear and Limited reached out to a bunch of manufacturers and got a bunch of stuff coming in. But Cody Thomason, he really brings in a lot as well, and he organizes all of it for the raffle. And I want to say this year we sold 700 raffle tickets and most of them were sold on site at the off road downtown take over.

[01:08:06.460] - Big Rich Klein

Excellent.

[01:08:07.310] - Richard Jenkins

I think before we had just 300 tickets that, you know, the club has sold before that. But the fact that 400 more tickets sold at the show, that's just beyond what I expected.

[01:08:22.920] - Big Rich Klein

Right. Awesome. So let's talk about Rick.

[01:08:30.210] - Richard Jenkins

Alright.

[01:08:31.630] - Big Rich Klein

Your what you do when you're not wheeling, and then we can talk about a little bit about your daughter as well.

[01:08:40.840] - Richard Jenkins

Sure.

[01:08:41.510] - Big Rich Klein

The one that's wheeling. That is the one I need. Yes.

[01:08:45.580] - Richard Jenkins

So I am a regional manager for Southern Territory with Northwest Instruments and Controls. I take care of a lot of plants. Power plants, refineries, Midstream, gas plants. I take care of pharmaceutical manufacturers, breweries, food manufacturers. In fact, Latrino Cheese is a good customer of ours. Molson Coors. Is a very big, big customer of ours.

[01:09:16.520] - Big Rich Klein

Really?

[01:09:17.460] - Richard Jenkins

What's that?

[01:09:18.400] - Big Rich Klein

I said. Oh, really? Yeah. Awesome.

[01:09:20.970] - Richard Jenkins

Yeah. We've got two power plants here. One coal fire power plant that's about to close down PNM San Juan. Unfortunately, we are losing 1800 MW of generation there. We've got APS Four Corners, which is on the Navajo Reservation. They're a huge customer of mine. In fact, today, just before your call, we just got I want to say, a little over a quarter million dollar order that I've been working on for years.

[01:09:55.510] 

Nice.

[01:09:56.820] - Richard Jenkins

That's what I do. I regionally manage Utah, New Mexico, Arizona. I take care of Southern Colorado, West Texas, Nevada and Northern California. Right now we are growing into Washington, Oregon and Idaho. We cover Montana, Wyoming and all of Colorado, North Dakota, South Dakota. So we have a pretty big footprint for Northwest Instruments in a very small group of employees, which is kind of nice. I want to say we're a $20 to $30 million a year company. So we're not super huge, but we do very unique things.

[01:10:37.670] - Richard Jenkins

Just about everybody in every piece of the territory that I just told you that has a hydrogen cool generator. We're taking care of their hydrogen and making sure that it's safe.

[01:10:49.100] 

Nice.

[01:10:49.970] - Richard Jenkins

And that's just one, for instance. And then one of the major brands for continuous emissions monitoring or manufacturers, I should say we're basically the go to for anybody that doesn't have an internal account. So if you are buying this manufacturer, you have to go through us. So that's all taken care of by territory and stuff like that. So it's kind of neat. I get a drive around and I go to some of the neatest places. I get into some of the craziest mechanical design and do a bunch of programmable logic, programming, programming, flow meters and just setting stuff up for customers.

[01:11:34.700] - Richard Jenkins

And that's not my job. But I think a lot of people know how I am. If I sell you something, I'll help you fix it or put it together. If with my customers, if I sell it to them and they need a little training, I'll come and do it just because they bought it. And I've always lived with a mindset when building a Jeep or maybe putting a D Super heater in a power plant or something like that. I'm worried about what I put in there for the next 20 years.

[01:12:10.930] - Richard Jenkins

And I have not been with the company for 20 years. So there's a lot of equipment that I've sold over the years that I check on it all the time. And I was the same way with my Jeep builds. Typically, if you got a brand new Jeep and you had brought it to me and we did a little bit of planning and we got the stuff in and we put it all together. You get a phone call from me probably about a month later, and I'd say, Are you hearing any new noises?

[01:12:36.320] - Richard Jenkins

How does the Jeep feel? Are you liking it? And can you bring it in for a retort? And I do the same thing in this business today. And the way I got head hunted into this company is they were asking people who they should hire, and mainly they be looking for instrumentation, electrical tax or engineers. And a bunch of the guys at the plants here locally because these are some of our biggest customers were basically saying, you need to find Rick Jenkins, because not only does he have a good mechanical aptitude, he also is very into his customers and very interested in their satisfaction.

[01:13:24.580] - Richard Jenkins

So they called me. They interviewed everybody one time. They interviewed me five times to figure out if they could take a guy that was in the print advertising industry and make him an instrumentation and control salesman. So my territory at the time was just Northern New Mexico, and it was bringing in about, like, 280,000 a year. I came in in the middle of May and to December, I did 800,000. So they're like, okay, this is the right guy. We can grow with him system unique things within the business.

[01:14:04.280] - Richard Jenkins

We fly into Houston. I'm with the vice President, and it's my first training, and we decide one night, let's go downtown. And so we walk in the doors of the Hyatt, and there's three guys there, and I'm wearing my super chip shirt. There's three guys. They are going Rick, and he's looking at me like, what the heck? And we're right next to the Enterprise building. What just happened to be that the Enterprise guys that I work with around the country. We're all having a meeting there.

[01:14:32.810] - Richard Jenkins

So they brought myself and the vice President in. And if we didn't have to drive anywhere, if we were staying at the Hyatt, they would have had us so driven into the ground where we wouldn't have been able to with drinks to go to work the next morning. But it's happened over and over. I flew into Florida for an all hands meeting in 2013, and I was telling Jim again with Super Chips that I couldn't. He was at RMI Atlanta at the time, but he was working for super chips, and he needed me to do some statements.

[01:15:10.240] - Richard Jenkins

And I told him I didn't think I could because I was going to stay at SeaWorld in Florida. And he goes, oh, okay. You know, well, we somehow they figured it out when we were getting out one night and we're all walking out. It's a group of people from all over the country that were pushing this specific manufacturer they were representing, I should say, not pushing. We walk out and this limegreen Jeep pulls up, that's all built and everything. And they basically say, Where's Rick Jenkins and it was unique because I was chosen to be a leader of one of the groups.

[01:15:52.040] - Richard Jenkins

We had four groups that we split a few thousand people into. And I was a leader of one of the groups and sort of a bunch of people in that group going, oh, he's walking out like, right behind us. Here he is. And the employees of my company are like, what the heck is going on here? So we went out with the guys from Super Chips, and they took me out for Italian, and we hung out. And I got to meet the President of the company.

[01:16:14.920] - Richard Jenkins

And this was before Power Tech bottom, and it was almost right after that. The Power Tech bought super chips. But we had a really good time. They brought me back and everybody just wanted to hear the stories. And I'm like, well, there's not really much to tell. I mean, I went out and had some drinks and had some Italian with the guys. And, you know, we just talk shop. And so that was a good time. But it happened again when we flew into Boston. We landed and some of my friends that coincidentally put my wife up when we had Jewel.

[01:16:52.470] - Richard Jenkins

She was seven and a half weeks early. So they gave her a room and a truck for a month while she would drive back and forth to the hospital every day. And they just happen to be getting off the plane as we're getting off the plane. And the company is like, Why is it that every time we go somewhere with you pretty much within the first few days, you're running into people, you know. And I think, you know, that happens to a lot of people in our community because we get to know people all over the place, which I think is awesome that we meet so many people from so many places because of the unique things we do, right?

[01:17:32.700] - Richard Jenkins

I mean, people that have four wheel drive vehicles, it's something like 3% of that group even uses the four wheel drive functionality, the vehicle or something like that turn that towards Jeep and Ford Bronco now and stuff like that, they're even more it's more of a niche group because they're not just using four wheel drive functionality to drive in the ice or snow or to get the back fence to the farm. They're using these vehicles. A lot of people are to go out off road and be on an adventure.

[01:18:12.390] - Richard Jenkins

So that's pretty cool. Yeah. Exactly. So that, you know, this business has been good to me. It has allowed me to compete and race. I was racing with four corners four by four, and we started with the Every Man Challenge and Race Dirt Riot for years and enjoyed every bit of it. I went all over the place with Dirt Riot. And the cool thing about it was when I came to the company, I said, Look, I'm coming on in 2012. I just started the season, and I said, hey, I'm committed to this racing, and they said, Well, we'll take a look at it.

[01:18:55.780] - Richard Jenkins

If your numbers are good and they don't drop because you're doing this racing thing, then we'll continue this. And what happened was, I think the biggest one. It was every time I went away on a Dirt riot trip, I'd be sitting in the passenger seat and have my little hotspot. And I'd be reaching out to all my customers that I wasn't talking to because I'm really trying to push new business or new quotes or whatever. So I would go to close old quotes and a lot of them would be like, oh, shoot, I need to have that here by October.

[01:19:30.420] - Richard Jenkins

How many weeks out is it that kind of thing? And so I get all these POS. So after the first couple of trips, the CEO calls me and says, hey, you want to go on vacation, be my guest. You can go as long as you want. You go. The kind of money you bring in when you're on vacation is ridiculous. In 2015, we are going to Goldendale, Washington, because what we wanted to do is take a 4600 car. What we're trying to do is help the we Rock mod stock class.

[01:19:59.350] - Richard Jenkins

There's one East Coast driver and us. And what we're trying to do is show all the 4600 drivers that they could take that rig that they built for 4600 class, and we could all go out and compete. And we rock. And one of the points that we were trying to make is that it was a lot less money to run rock crawling than it was to race. And so some of the guys were just dropping off with the 4600 cars not coming to dirt, right to alter for anymore.

[01:20:27.510] - Richard Jenkins

And so we were like, hey, you still have your car. Let's go do this. So we're on our way to Goldendale, Washington. And I want to say on the trip there and the trip back, I had done about a quarter million dollars in business. And so after that, the company was like, okay, so you're going to become a regional manager. You're going to teach people to do what you do. And if you're away or you're here, it doesn't matter. We know you like to see your customers.

[01:20:55.690] - Richard Jenkins

We know you're going to regularly see your customers. I have basically an open schedule for doing the four wheel drive stuff. Now, don't get me wrong when I'm four wheeling in certain places, like, we just finished, we rock yesterday Wednesday, we drive to Ouray because our family puts on the Ray Jeep Cambree for Jeep Cambree, my sister and my brother in law. So Julian Tory, they work for the corporate office with Jeep Chamber. And then we have a few other things that we do for Jeep.

[01:21:32.860] - Richard Jenkins

We're going to be putting on some of the Jeep adventures for customers. I think it's more of a legacy customer that we're going to have. So they may be a little bit older and stuff like that, but good customers to the Jeep brand, but that's some cool stuff. But we're going directly there this Wednesday. I think we've got a couple of weeks off. We go to Trail Hero. A couple of weeks off, we have the Moab Jeep Chamber, and then we go right into one of the Jeep adventures.

[01:22:04.150] - Richard Jenkins

And I think our season pretty much ends there. But with the start of the we rock season to basically the very last week of October, that's our main season for doing what we do.

[01:22:20.360] - Big Rich Klein

Yeah, that's pretty much what mine is. Ours goes through the because we always go to sea. That's where we get to meet our partners and make sure that they're happy and hopefully introduce ourselves to potential new partners. That kind of thing.

[01:22:38.970] - Richard Jenkins

So right. Right.

[01:22:42.320] - Big Rich Klein

Excellent.

[01:22:43.440] - Richard Jenkins

As far as growing up, the best part of growing up here, dad, love to explore. I mean, we were not home most weekends of the year. I mean, if it was not like, you too rough weather to get out, like, even in the snow, we'd be going places. And we still do. If you watch videos on the Four by Four Tricks YouTube channel and go to the choke Cherry Canyon Playlist, you can definitely see a video called There's No Fun, like Snow Fun. And we shoot these walls out here in the snow.

[01:23:22.050] - Richard Jenkins

And it is a blast, because usually, even if you slide down a wall sideways, you don't roll unless you're mad. Anthony, I think when he was club President, he ended up laying it over because he was on snow and just caught the smallest patch of melted off a slick rock. And it just popped his Jeep on the side. But he had come off a big wall sideways, but it's really cool because we have such a great area, and we're so close to so much action. The San Juan Mountains.

[01:23:58.840] - Richard Jenkins

We're 80 miles from Silverton, Colorado, 100 miles from our we're 170 miles from Moab and like Arca Canyon comes Ridge comes wash the campground down there. That's about an hour and 40 minutes from my door.

[01:24:19.560] 

Nice.

[01:24:21.600] - Richard Jenkins

Those are places that we would go. And we would. Dad was a history buff, so we would be looking at railroads, mines, mining towns, ancient ruins and petroglyphs and stuff like that. He loved the Southwest. We would do California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, pieces of Texas, Colorado, a lot of Colorado. And we just really had a good upbringing not only with the off road lifestyle, but also just being outdoors and understanding what to look out for and what to do if something happens. And so as we join the cliff hangers, it couldn't have been any better because there was a bunch of kids like the Jeep dealer here, Steve My.

[01:25:14.400] - Richard Jenkins

They were in the Jeep Club. They had kids my age. James Walden and Nancy Walden had kids my age between Lindsey Amex now, but Lindsey Maloy and a few of the other kids that were running around with us. You know, we had this group of kids that were always together, and we still are really good friends. And my dad had the same see around like a donut. So if you were leaving, he'd say to the kids, see around like a donut today, if you told any of those kids that like Amy Peterson and Lindsey Amex and Melissa Walden, if you told them that you might bring a tear to their eye because there were certain things that dad did for the kids.

[01:26:06.770] - Richard Jenkins

We would show up in Silverton, Colorado to Camp and South Mineral Creek, and our whole club would show up. But we would have a group that would show up Thursday night, and we usually did that. And we'd wheel Friday and then a group that show up Saturday night that had to be late because of work or whatever. And then everybody would go home Sunday. Well, we do Black Bear and Imogene on Friday, and then the next group that showed up wanted to do Black Bear and imagine Saturday.

[01:26:33.950] - Richard Jenkins

So that trail for our family got really just overrun. We'd like to run it once a visit. We'd be there eight weekends or nine weekends out of the season and running Black Bear. And I'm Jen all the time. Yeah, it's great exposure, crazy trail. But for us, you're running it all the time. It gets really boring. And dad was the type of guy that if there was a road that he saw that he hadn't driven down, he had to do it. And when he passed away, I ended up with maps with thousands of archaeological sites marked huge, huge maps that would cover your wall and so it was a cool thing because he would write about all the stuff that he was driving down and what he found and stuff like that.

[01:27:26.490] - Richard Jenkins

In fact, he used to write funny poems and stories for four wheel drive and sport utility. And I want to try and find one and share it soon to see if I can find some of his old stories and sharing because they're still funny today. It's all about camping and four wheeling and stuff like that stuff that happens, right? So when we would do these black Bear imagine trips the second day, dad would get all the kids together and maybe one more driver and we would pile in the Jeeps and we would go a different direction.

[01:28:03.680] - Richard Jenkins

And we had a few areas that dad always had these secret areas that we go to. And one of them was this big, like crack that somebody has scooped out looking for a vein golden. And in this crack, there's a bunch of quartz Crystal just sticking out like teeth. And you can literally just pull the quartz out of the wall like teeth. And they're nice big crystals and everything. So us kids would all come back to camp with bright Orange pockets because of all the iron and everything and the rocks up there.

[01:28:36.500] - Richard Jenkins

And our pockets would be full. We'd bring sweaters with pouches just so we could carry more stuff. And we all would go home with stuff that who knew where we were going to put all these crystals and stuff like that. So a lot of them ended up in the yard, in the garden or wherever for each of the families. But dad was always the person that wanted to do stuff with the kids. And that's kind of what I do now. Like last night, I had two girls that have both been in rollovers in four wheel drive vehicles.

[01:29:09.340] - Richard Jenkins

And basically they weren't going to ride in a vehicle. They were going to walk each obstacle and then just riding the washes and stuff. I grab both of them and put them in pink. And we drove down a big wall and came up kind of a side climb and then did a nice big climb, and I talked him through it. And just we did an inch by inch. And one of the girls came up to me this morning when I was checking up and grabbing trash for We Rock and taking it out.

[01:29:41.480] - Richard Jenkins

She thanked me because she felt a lot more comfortable in vehicles. And she said, I have to be honest, I saw more rollovers yesterday than I've ever seen in my life. She was at We Rock. She saw the rollover there she was watching Jewel Jewel had her Endo, and then Bill rolled last night. Chad rolled last night. So it was just a funny thing. So that's something that, you know, that that I love to do, too. I try to get all the kids together and really do what dad did because you're not going to grow the sport without those kids, and they're very important to the sport for sure.

[01:30:24.430] - Richard Jenkins

And we're seeing it in these four wheel drive clubs. A lot of these older guys are fallen out and the younger guys don't want anything to do with the four wheel drive clubs anymore. And in my opinion, in the 80s and 90s to four wheel drive clubs were the backbone of four wheel driving across the country. If something was going to get done, it took a pool of members to create a good account to be able to pay and handle some of the hours and logistics and the money true, that's huge.

[01:31:00.960] - Richard Jenkins

So we started going to Moab shortly after my sister was born. We joined the club before my sister was born. She was born in 1984. Shortly after she was born, we started going to Moan. And around 986, we started gunning and leading trails there. And back then, there was probably about 15 families that really put the whole Easter Jeep Safari together. And so we became one of those main families. And we had a group of families that was called the family. And we would take a couple of weeks every year and go somewhere.

[01:31:37.810] - Richard Jenkins

But going to my lab and putting it together, all of the kids of these 15 families, like you look at the Mac Haines, Doug and Karma, their son, Jeremy, he is a major part. He's been a past President multiple times and has done a lot for the club. And we've got Ron and Linda Brewer, their son, Eric Brewer, who passed away a while back. You know, they were all people who are doing things for the club, pushing them in the right direction. And we do have a lot of the older members that are still in office still doing the stuff.

[01:32:18.140] - Richard Jenkins

If you get a registration at the Easter Jeep Safari, it's because Ron and Linda Brewer, if you're at the vendor show, that's because of Doug and Karma. But Karma, she does so much work for the event. It's ridiculous. And knowing her very well as a family member, and I say a close friend, close family member. She does not sleep for two weeks before the event and does not sleep during the event. She goes to bed, but she's a very restless person and she's just worried about something going wrong.

[01:32:58.640] - Richard Jenkins

And growing up with that group taught me a lot about what we do. Now. If I didn't know Ron and Linda and Doug and Karma and some of the other people that put a lot of the background stuff together, I wouldn't know what I know to put together four corners, four by four week. And so now you've got maybe over 900 members, associate members to to the Red Rock four wheelers. Mom has stepped down from leading trails. Now my sister Julie, she has some trails. She leads and guns on, and I have trails I lead and gun on.

[01:33:44.160] - Richard Jenkins

I think next year I'm on for escalator to hell on Sunday, I'll be tail Gunning Monday. I'll be tell Gunning on his revenge Wednesday. Here's an interesting story about this trail Wednesday where I'm going to mid gun for my sister on Tiptoe through Hell Friday. I lead late start steel Bender, and then I am one of the big Saturday trail leaders. I lead a gold bar room, and mom had passed that down to me, and I think some of the club members were disappointed about it.

[01:34:12.650] - Richard Jenkins

But I can tell you, I have been picking up trash in the Moab area since I was five years old, and I have created some major trashpiles to fill into trucks and stuff like that. So they were very happy to give it to me. And nobody was going to argue per the President. From what I heard.

[01:34:30.300] 

Good.

[01:34:31.160] - Richard Jenkins

So tiptoe through help around 1991, if you were driving a vehicle without lockers, you couldn't do Helser bench. You were not allowed to sign up for it, per the BLM because the rollovers on tip over challenge and rubble trouble. So what dad proposed to the BLM was he would take those two climbs out and call it a tip to version. The following year, they allowed them to do it. And so from that year on, we've had the tip to through Hell Trail, and a lot of people don't see it.

[01:35:06.250] - Richard Jenkins

They need to Mark the little calendar. That Hell Revenge is being run that Wednesday because they don't market that way. They show it as running tip to through Hell. So we have a ton of vendors that will get in front of us, and we've got sometimes 50 rigs and they'll just stop and they won't get out of our way. So we have to go up and say, look, we have the permit for the trail. Do we need to call the Sheriff? Can you guys please just let us buy?

[01:35:32.140] - Richard Jenkins

And we're in the middle of a photo shoot or whatever. It's gotten better over the years, but because they don't show Hells revenge going, they give us a lot of grief when we're leading the trail and sometimes cause a little bit of off trail driving that I see out there as well. When some of the side by sides come through, they're doing a photo shoot. Those guys will just keep on buzzing along. They don't care.

[01:35:57.610] - Big Rich Klein

Yeah, exactly.

[01:35:58.380] - Richard Jenkins

And I'm not saying all side by side by the way, we're the one to five. So you know, I enjoy every bit of what I do there. I work very hard for the Red Rock four wheelers. It was for about a decade. I helped put on the vendor show there. What was unique, I guess to the drivers of the trucks is I would show up. I would collect money, collect prizes, make sure everybody was doing okay. And for, like, Advanced Adapters or some of the other companies.

[01:36:36.490] - Richard Jenkins

If they had something in their trailer, I would have the Rover. I would have their keys. I knew their part number systems really well because of working it off again. So I could go in and grab a transfer case off of the trailer to bring up to the counter. Or if it was a transfer case, like the Red Rock version of the Atlas transfer case, I would bring that stuff to the table, the stage that they have up front where they put all the prizes and stuff.

[01:37:04.400] - Richard Jenkins

But I had a great time with a lot of the vendors. I met a lot of manufacturers that I still know, the people from those manufacturers today, right? I think I just saw Trent got a new job. He was with Daystar forever, and I can't remember what the job was, but I always liked that guy. He always grabbed me aside, and it'd be like, given me. No, no, I'm just kidding. But now there's a lot of those guys, a lot of those manufacturers, like, for instance, Tom Allen with PSC, right?

[01:37:41.770] - Richard Jenkins

He always saw how hard I worked out there and everything. And there were a few years where he would just now one year, he knew I had the Cheeto. He knew I needed some stuff. So he just gave me a $200 gift card. He's, like, here calling because I don't know how much you need to spend, but here's a couple hundred Bucks, and it covered every bit of what I needed, which was really cool. And today he's helping Jewel out. And I'm hoping that Randall continues, because now that Randall is taken over.

[01:38:15.530] - Richard Jenkins

But he knows Jewel. And I know Rachel doesn't work for the company, but she's been doing a lot of the media stuff for PSE, and so I'm hoping they stick together. But all of these guys saw really what we were doing and just meet people. And, you know, I wasn't just that dorky kid. That is just one of those guys. That the Red Rock four Wheeler event, you know, you know, trying to help everybody out. They really treated me like I was a family member, which was really cool.

[01:38:52.970] - Big Rich Klein

Excellent. So let's talk about Jewel and the opportunity that's facing her now.

[01:38:59.320] - Richard Jenkins

Yeah. So we've been.

[01:39:03.180] - Big Rich Klein

Well.

[01:39:06.420] - Richard Jenkins

I'm gonna back up, too. So we've got Pinky 2018 Iran, the Grand National with Tori, my brother in law, Tory Cortez, and myself. We ran the Grand National Tory spotted for me. And if anybody wheeled with Pinky back in the day, that thing, if it touched a pebble, it would lift a tire. And it always just had a hard time wheeling some of the lines that we would have a competition. Because even after competition, when I first got it, I would take it out and run all the lines and try to run the big, big lines and stuff.

[01:39:51.280] - Richard Jenkins

And Jewel did the same later on. But after that competition, Jewel asked her to first. Meaning uncle. She said to, Can I can I do rock crawling competitively as a high school sport. And he knew exactly what she was asking. And he said, if you get straight A's and you do everything your mom wants before she asks, I'll be your fabricator. So she knew what she needed. Ahead of time, she had been watching the sport, studying the sport, and I didn't know. I didn't know that she was really that into it.

[01:40:29.060] - Richard Jenkins

So they both came to me and said, we want to you to spot and Joel the drive and start competing, and she wants to do that for high school sport. So sure enough, she's got straight as we're coming home. The whole house is clean and so, yeah, we're right into it. I think we put maybe about 30 grand into our first year because we had a lot of work to do. We had to get the complete, understood underside of Pinky and get stuff going and then go to the first competition, figure out what was wrong, come back, redo some of it.

[01:41:06.680] - Richard Jenkins

The first competition was crazy because Jewel pulls on to her first course within the first gate, and she's pulling up a rock and she's turned all passenger, and I told her to straighten out and come forward. Well, she just stepped flip the gas pedal and flipped it up in the air, and it went off of about a ten foot edge. It lands on the ground and ends up on its lid. Well, when it ended up on its lid, it had broken the engine cage on the driver's side.

[01:41:40.420] - Richard Jenkins

So we got it off the course. Pinky has a Premier power. Welder in it, thanks to pack a million. And so we got the leads and the stick from another competitor because I didn't have my pack with me that I carry for the Premier power. Welder and we had to re Weld the cage back together and get the area that held the shock tabs. All just basically reworked. And Weld it back together so that we could actually hold up the driver's side of the vehicle. And back then, if you look at Pinky, it had these kind of weird wings that came out like a little triangulated type wing to keep the body off of the rocks or really keep the fiberglass food off of the rocks.

[01:42:26.810] - Richard Jenkins

Well, one of them was up and one of them was down. So that was kind of funny. And Jewel and Tall Jack, who is also here this weekend for we Rock, jewel and Tall Jack would run over to Tacoma and ask for oil, and then we're all done. We got oil in it. We're trying to start it. We find a broken spark plug back to Tacoma and get a spark plug and everything. So she ran. We got it all welded back together and fixed, and we were on course right in line with our breakdown.

[01:43:02.190] - Richard Jenkins

Time to basically go on to the next course. We didn't miss a course, which was really cool. And a lot of it was because it's all Jack and Jason Kaminsky, they really worked, worked it as far as grinding, cutting, just getting it done while we ran around and found parts and then got it welded back together. So she went through that day. The last course were on, like, gate three, and she's complaining, her arms are hurting, her legs are hurting. She couldn't figure out what's going on.

[01:43:32.570] - Richard Jenkins

And I'm just telling her, I'm like, look, you have two more gates and the finished gate just come through back through that gate and come on down and she stars it through the gates off of the course, and she just shuts it off and gets out and I'm like, okay, take a break and I'll jump in Pinky. So I jumped in Pinky. I could not steer the thing. She had some kind of adrenaline going through her body where she was steering that thing. I had to basically have somebody wench the front and a Pinky around get it moving.

[01:44:04.590] - Richard Jenkins

And I just kept forcing steering, and I was only getting inches. So we drag it down. We put it on the trailer, and Joel said, dad, you know, we don't need to go home tomorrow. Let's stay and help judge, because our short judges. And her idea was if we help judge, we might be able to hear how drivers and spotters are talking to each other. And she got a really good view of a big picture there. And I did, too. So fast forward to last year, we went to one East Coast event and all of the West Coast events and the sportsmen B class that we're in.

[01:44:54.420] - Richard Jenkins

There's a lot of people that just have a nice lighter weight tube chassis, summer pro mod style buggies. And we're in a full frame, full body. And you guys had created the class to have this drag axle class because of sportsmen. It was mixed between rear steer and the drag axle. And so what we found is that the sportsmen B class became the biggest class. Yes, it did in sportsmen. So it was really cool having this young girl. She's 15 years old at the time, and she runs to the entire season and Bagdad.

[01:45:39.950] - Richard Jenkins

We had 25 competitors. And what was really cool is, I mean, she was close to the top and she was hitting podium and stuff like that. So it's really neat to see that. Well, at the end of the year, we won the season. And this year, as a 16 year old, she won the season again. So she's been wanting to run unlimited. Really bad. We left Cedar City Grand Nationals 2020, and we're going back to our condo and Brian head, and we stop at the gas station and get some drinks and stuff and some food and she gets back in the vehicle and just lets out this big side.

[01:46:26.860] - Richard Jenkins

And I asked her, I said, Are you disappointed that you drop from third to seven? And we had a pretty decent rollover. And by the way, she handles rollovers really well, if you get a chance to see her, she gets out all grins and smiles. But anyways, I asked her about that and she says, no, dad, I want to shoot out. And that just meant she wants to be an unlimited driver. She wants to do the top stuff. She had made the point a few times during the year that when we're four wheeling here at home, she'll shoot some of the big stuff that we use for the unlimited stuff.

[01:47:13.070] - Richard Jenkins

Maybe not the exact same line, but she's climbing those lines were Pinky. After we got it really settled out. Pinky works really, really well after Tori and I put together the suspension system and we're about to now that Pinky is retired, we're going to push the front out, roll the Ram up, because right now the Ram is sitting right under the track bar, and we tucked it up there as far as we could. But we're going to do that. And Pinky is going to be represented a recreational events.

[01:47:44.540] - Richard Jenkins

So it's going to go back to that old off again. Look, we'll probably keep the PSC hood, but it's going to go back to that old look, the unique thing that happened this year is George Soros came to Jewel and asked her to drive for him. And what that meant was she was going to have a prepped car, the motor home, the trailer, and him showing up to every event with Trevor Rich from Colorado as her spot.

[01:48:14.800] - Big Rich Klein

Who knows the car inside and out?

[01:48:17.620] 

Yes.

[01:48:18.100] - Richard Jenkins

Who does know the car very well. And that gives me the opportunity to put up some live videos and do some different things that we've never been able to do so that people can watch at home. We had a lot of viewers, I think when she endowed, I think we had 60 or 70 people watching from home. Super download. Yeah. And of course, on site, you have thousands of people, which was cool, too, but not watching just her. Obviously, they're watching people like Jesse Haines and Dave Long and Randall Davis and people like that, which amazing drivers.

[01:48:58.100] - Richard Jenkins

One of the things that George has pushed Jewel on is to watch those drivers. Some of them have Inca video. Cody Wagner and Randall used to put on these trash talk Tuesday videos. So she's been watching. And I want to say her watching Jesse Haines and watching Cody and Randall work together is why she drove the car this weekend, the way she did and seat time. Obviously, right before this event, she had a couple of weekends to drive the car. It wasn't like full days, because in the middle of summer here it gets over 100 deg sometimes.

[01:49:40.830] - Richard Jenkins

And the in the morning. Yeah. Like this week, you practice in the morning and you practice in the evening. So I am very proud of what she did this weekend. We ran through the first day. She was at the finish date and timed out twice on Saturday, had the Indo on a two. So she was dropping down a rock and went kind of sideways, but front end over. She tried to save it. She tried to drive it back onto the wheels, and she almost had it.

[01:50:16.130] - Richard Jenkins

And then she ran a three and had a couple of saves and rollovers. But she had a really smooth run. We're pretty proud to see what kind of a run she did there. And and then the car wouldn't run. So we had two courses that we didn't get to do, and we're still trying to figure out why the car won't run. We're assuming that maybe something's going on with the computer like it might have a cracked board or it might be a bad fuse block. We may have actually broken the fuse block in either the rollover or a drop on a three.

[01:50:48.830] - Richard Jenkins

We're going to get it back up and running. I think we're going to carry an extra fuse block assembly and also carry an extra computer. That way, if something happens, we're set there because we carry or George, I should say, carries just about everything for that vehicle.

[01:51:06.010] - Big Rich Klein

Excellent. Excellent. Well, I want to say, I really appreciate everything you've done for us. For we rock for Shelley and I and for for Low and everybody that ever wheels here in Farmington. You know, the things that you've done out here and you've done with Red Rock. You may not be one of the names that everybody knows in competitive rock crawling, but you those that participate in those areas that you have been at certainly know who you are. And hopefully you get that recognition because you have been a valuable asset to our lifestyle.

[01:51:57.080] - Big Rich Klein

And I want to say thank you for spending the time you have with us here on conversations with Big Rich and and maybe in about five or six years, we'll get Jewel on here and we'll talk to her about how she won her unlimited Championship.

[01:52:18.140] - Richard Jenkins

Yeah. We'll see how that goes. It's my pleasure to do everything I can for not only we rock for low and conversations with Big Rich, but also just the four wheeling community. I can't tell you the the kind of work that I put into it. It's not necessarily rewarded, monetarily, which is okay, because I'm putting the time into it. And I've decided to do that, right. But it is rewarding in a way when you see so many people show up to an event that you work so hard for months and months and months on.

[01:53:01.220] - Richard Jenkins

And you're always going to get those people that are going to tell you, hey, you should have done it this way. You could have done this. All these is better. Yeah.

[01:53:11.830] - Big Rich Klein

The ones that have never done it themselves.

[01:53:14.910] - Richard Jenkins

Yeah. And I mean, maybe they have and they have some good ideas, and maybe they haven't. And I will. Absolutely. From those people consider those ideas.

[01:53:24.770] 

Absolutely.

[01:53:25.580] - Richard Jenkins

And I want to make sure that everybody that comes has a good time and that it's equal for everybody from the least common denominator to the big dogs. Because, like, for instance, when we do fall crawl and I'll stop with this, I drive the LJ to lead the lower groups. And that's what I did growing up with dad. Mom and dad would always take. Even though they had a bigger built vehicle, they would always take something where they could show people that haven't been built up yet how to do what they're going to do and what they like or give them some enjoyment in what they came out to do it.

[01:54:13.600] - Richard Jenkins

So I try to cover everybody with all of it and also try to be the guide where our group doesn't always want to be. If you get Matt Nisa out, they want to take the drag axle group out of the rear steer group.

[01:54:27.960] - Big Rich Klein

So I get it.

[01:54:31.260] - Richard Jenkins

But thanks for having me on, and I really do appreciate that you guys came back to Farmington and that you continue to use these rocks because that's what they're here for.

[01:54:45.380] - Big Rich Klein

Well, we appreciate it, and we love this place. Really do. So, Rick, say say Hello to the rest of the family for us today. Maybe we can get together as a group before we drive out of here and head back to Texas.

[01:55:03.500] - Richard Jenkins

Okay.

[01:55:05.540] - Big Rich Klein

Again. Thank you.

[01:55:08.720] - Richard Jenkins

If you guys are available tomorrow night, give me a shout.

[01:55:11.850] - Big Rich Klein

Okay. Do that.

[01:55:13.800] - Richard Jenkins

Okay. We'll talk to you soon.

[01:55:15.250] - Big Rich Klein

Okay. Bye bye bye bye.

[01:55:18.610] - Speaker 3

If you enjoy these podcasts, please give us a rating. Share some feedback with us via Facebook or Instagram and share our link among your friends who might be like minded. Well, that brings this episode to an end. Hope you enjoyed it. We'll catch you next week with conversations with Big Rich. Thank you very much.