ACE 2008. The TNT Off Highway Club out of Grande Prairie puts on a large event each year to raise awareness about the 4 wheeling community in Alberta. This is only the 2nd year of this event, but it is already a big event and is growing fast each year. The whole TNT club is heavily involved in the event, but the main event coordinator is Corey Kruchkowski. They get the Sustainable Resource Development of Alberta (SRD) involved as well as the whole town of Grande Cache. The TNT club invites members of select clubs from Alberta (listed above) to attend, and both clubs that I am in, EJC and NA4WDA were invited to the event. They keep the event invite only because it is largely about showing Alberta, Grande Cache and the SRD that responsible four wheeling can be done without any negative effect on the environment and trails. In fact, they were pleased last year to find that the trails were left in better shape than they were before we showed up. A large effort is put towards trail clean up, and it shows. We were to be on our best behaviour, and having the event open to the public would prove to be difficult to oversee.

There was a small fee to come to the event, but it was largely put towards an amazing prime rib meal saturday night by a local business called the Vegas Bar and Grill. The meals were huge, and the food was fantastic! Several sponsors were helping out the event including Take It Off-Road, Fas Gas in Grande Cache and Vegas Bar and Grill. Take It Off-Road even offered up some amazing prizes for most garbage collected, and most unique piece of garbage found. Everyone had at least one garbage bag on board. The SRD of Grande Cache even opened up some previously closed areas for us to wheel in! I also need to put in a thanks to Tom Ward who owns the Fas Gas in Grande Cache. Him and his wife opened up their home to all the members of EJC for the weekend. We littered their lawn with tents, got to use the shower in the mornings, and some of us even slept inside on the couch and spare bedroom. They sponsored the event with a huge wiener roast, tons of water and pop, chips, cookies and other snacks, and generally treated us like royalty. They are something else, thanks a TON to the Ward Family!

We met at the ball diamonds early friday morning and had a gathering and meeting about the day’s events. I’m not sure the exact numbers but I would guess that there were 50 or more rigs and at least 100 people there for the day of wheeling. There were 4 trail leaders and 4 trails for the day, so we split up the rigs into groups and headed out for the day. The group of rigs I was in for friday was the largest of the four I think. We had 18 rigs, and were headed for the Kaw Ridge trail. TNT classifies it as a 3 out of 5 for difficulty, mostly due to a couple steep areas, and the possibility of some real difficulties if the trail was wet. The weather was 30+ celsius however so it was very dry, and I felt that there were no obstacles over a 2 rating myself. This event is not about the toughest trails you can find however and I knew this before the event started. When you have a group of rigs as large as we did you can’t go out and just tackle very difficult trails because of all the different types of rigs and people you get. This trip was about awareness, meeting new people, trail clean-up and the amazing scenery.

On the Kaw Ridge run, the trails were a good mix of small water crossings, rocky climbs, wooded trails, and high altitude slopes. The whole trail could be run by a stock jeep in dry weather, but the incredible views on the mountains easily make up for the easy trail rides. There were large descents into canyons that quickly jutted back up the other side. We had a large enough group that from the front of the pack you could see all the way down the trail and back up the other side, rigs lined up on the trail the whole way. It was quite a sight to see!

We got to the top of Kaw Ridge and saw mountains as far as the eye could see in all directions. To the south we could see Mount Robson, the highest point in the Canadian Rockies (middle right in the photo). As we headed back down towards town, Robert from Take It Off-Road who is also a professional photographer went on ahead to catch some great shots of us coming down for the upcoming ACE article in 4WD Magazine. When we got back to town we all had a huge wiener roast, had some drinks and enjoyed the great weather.

The next morning we woke up at the same time for another great day of wheeling. For this day, Corey mentioned that if we wanted to go on a guided run like the previous day they would have trail leaders for that… but if we wanted to go out and explore we could do that as well, as long as we stayed on the marked trails of course. EJC has a club member that lives in Grande Cache (Kyle Ward, Tom’s son). We decided that it would be fun if he showed us some of the trails in the area and headed off towards Grande Mountain. We took the easy way to the peak which is basically a rough gravel access road. Any 4wd vehicle could get up there in dry weather. Once we were at the peak we stopped at the radio towers for some good shots of the town below and a couple good posers shots of the jeeps at the top. Once again the view up here on the top of a mountain never ceases to amaze.

We headed towards Grande Cache from the top, down the North Face Trail. It’s a pretty tight trail mostly used by quads. There are some very steep sections, enough so that most people won’t traverse the trail. We went down it to the bottom of the mountain and got ourselves a much wanted taste of some difficulty. Once we got to the bottom, we stopped off at Kyle’s place for a quick break and decided that we didn’t get enough and had to go back up the difficult trail. Earlier in the weekend Corey and the TNT guys (who are all 35″ tires, mostly 38″) told us that they turned back on this same trail once when it was not dry. We figured with the dry weather and the good traction we were getting on the way down we would not have any issues. The climb back up, especially the very bottom and very top sections were extremely steep, but we did not have any traction difficulties despite a couple rigs in our group running with open differentials. We made it to the top in an hour flat which was a good 45 minutes faster than it took to get down.

We started to make our way back down the gravel road towards town and came up to a large group of rigs from the ACE event. They were making their way to the top of Grande Mountain when they spotted a car that had been abandoned and tossed off a cliff down into a valley. It was about 200 feet from the trail down a steep face. They decided that it would be a good idea (and a shoe in for the garbage contest) to haul it out of there. They used two winch lines and a bunch of recovery straps for length to hook up to the car and winch it up to the trail. They had just gotten it up and were getting ready to drag the car back down to the road so they could fetch a car hauler and take it into town for proper disposal. They hooked two rigs up to the car, one on the front and one on the rear. One to do all the work, and one to keep tension on the back so it would stay on the road. The car had tires still but they were all unseated and non-rolling. Once they got it back to town, they parked the car hauler outside the Vegas Bar and Grill for everyone to see. They contacted the police and we all had a wicked dinner at the bar. I’m not sure of the full story here but the poilice pulled the VIN and managed to bring the kid that owns the car who was also responsible for sending it over the cliff to the bar. They had a long talk with Corey and the TNT guys about the $6500 in tickets that such an offense would warrant. I guess the police decided to go easy on him because of the work that the ACE guys put forth to retrieve it. The police said that if he could work something out with them, then they would drop all charges. Kudos to them for being able to work something like that out, and not turning the event into a story about how some local kid got in huge trouble because of all this. That was definitely not the intention. The car was taken to the local dump for a fee of $150 which the kid payed I assume, and that’s that. It was mostly the ECO club that was there to retrieve the car, and they used jeeps and a car hauler from ECO members to bring it to town, so they were awarded with the prize of $500 credit at Take It Off-road.

We stayed over night and headed home Sunday morning. The weekend was a complete success, and we all had an amazing time. I’m not sure what sort of impact the event will have on the SRD guys or the press, but I am certain that it will be positive. Kyle did catch an article in The Grande Cache Mountaineer news paper, which was very positive. You can check it out here and here. Thanks for inviting EJC, and thanks again to our sponsors, Tom Ward, and Corey Kruchkowski with the TNT guys for making an event like this possible. I will be coming back every year for this one, I had a blast! Please check out the full gallery for this one folks, there are some pretty amazing scenic shots in there worth checking out!

I’ve also got a pretty cool little topographical map that shows all the trails that we ran saturday on Grande Mountain. Thanks imbezol for the image! Check it out here.

-Davin (Raskull)