Matroosberg July 2011
After a late Saturday evening packing everything but the kitchen sink into my little KK, I was off to bed. Which seemed like ten minutes later, I was awakened by my six year old son pulling at my arm. “Wake up we going to miss the snow”, yea right, my thoughts it’s not going anywhere. However I was up in a flash maybe more excited than my son. He was a six year old who has never seen snow, but I topped him, a 42 year old who has never seen snow in real life.
After loading everybody including my sleepy one year old daughter, we were off. As we drove to the, One Stop drinking coffee, I was wondering if the KK will actually make the pass. You see I read the previous post about Matroosberg the night before and the words “Wranglers bouncing over rocks” and “ we were committed and could not turn back” played over and over in my mind. Adding Craig’s words that the KK should, not will, but should, make it left me a bit uneasy. I eventually drew some confidence in the fact that my KK was fitted with a 2” lift courtesy of Maniac and this should at least assist me in getting half way up the mountain.
Well things got worse when I pulled into the Engen garage on the N1, our rondevu point, I was surrounded by Wranglers, some with specialized tyres and suspension lifts, which in my mind would put any monster truck to shame. Ten minutes later we left the Engen One Stop following Vaughn who was leading the convoy to Matroosberg.
After completing the compulsory admin, paying the necessary fees and brief from Vaughn we started preparing our vehicles, well the only prep we did was reduce the tyre pressure and then we were off.
It wasn’t long before we came across the first loose rock obstacle and as the KK managed to find its way through the rocks I become more and more confident in her capability. We were about half way up when we started encountering snow and after many compulsory stops, taking pictures, we were suddenly in at least 30 cm deep snow. Slipping, sliding and bouncing we made our way to the top and were met with picture perfect snow on the plateau.
We all spent a couple of hours up there doing the compulsory snow ball fighting, snowman making and meandering up the slope before we started heading down. I forgot to mention, I had a couple of anxious minutes when I saw Arrie in his Commander attempting to drive further up the mountain. Luckily he did not make it, for there was no way I was going to even attempt to go further. So with dignity in tact we started the drive down.
Well this should be the end, but the drive down was far more nerve wreaking than the drive up. Vehicles in front of us started sliding on the ice and touching the brake pedal, as I quickly discovered, made things worse. In one particular area I had to act quickly, follow Vaughn’s advise to drive into the embankment, nope don’t have steel bumpers or push the “Please help me button” you guessed it, I used the “Hill Decent Control”. Ok, it was not that easy, in my mild panic I pushing every button even the seat warmers, however my wife came to the rescue and managed to engage the right button. Thereafter things started to calm down as the traction control slowed us down to a crawl and brought the Jeep under control, all I had to do is steer. Well done to Jeep for designing this feature, just don’t hide it.
Enjoy the pictures mainly taken by my wife as she is 100 times better than me.
Cheers, Andre
