Pioneer Prairie
22 November 2008
After a 3.5 year break from 4-wheeling (I got burned out and took up photography as my all-consuming hobby) and much prodding by club president Brent Kalemkiarian, I finally broke down and joined the club on an afternoon run down to their private ORV area near Firth. The "Pioneer Prairie" is about 40 acres of private land available to the Pioneer 4-Wheelers, an all-brands 4x4 club based in Lincoln, NE.
PP is much smaller than the Tuttle Creek ORV Park near Randolph, KS, which is where we've usually gone in the past. It's also in its early stages of development as an ORV park, so there's still a lot of empty land. It does have some good ravines that always have water, and the P4W folks have already done a great job improving it. They've dug a mud drag pit in a low spot and brought in a lot of rocks, concrete, and logs to form crawling obstacles. There's much work yet to be done, but they're off to a great start. It's not too hard to kill a couple hours at the Prairie, and since it's only a 20 minute drive from the edge of Lincoln, you can easily take some time to play there without committing an entire day to the outing. The park-building fund is augmented by a $1 donation every time you get stuck.
My six year old daughter, Noelle, hadn't been wheeling with me since she was just 2.5 years old (read about it here), so she joined me on this outing. The really enjoyed wheeling and looking for milkweed pods, but she didn't care much for standing around watching other people traverse obstacles. She is becoming quite the little photographer, though, and took a number of good photos while I was helping direct traffic.
The weather was sunny and warmer than average for November, so we had a good group of about 20 vehicles. We met for lunch at the Garage, a bar near 48th & Hwy 2 in Lincoln, then all caravaned down to the Prairie just east of Firth around 1:30pm. You can see the entire park from just about anywhere within it, so after we lined up for a group shot, we aired down and scattered out own separate ways.
I started out with 6-8 other vehicles by the rock garden. It's a wooded depression that's been filled with rocks and concrete scrap. It's a short strip with several exits and little chance of body damage. The easy lines are passable for most drivers, but there are some lines that were too hard for even the best equipped vehicles in our group. Noelle was a little nervous at the angles my Jeep took over some of the larger chunks, but when we finished, she immediately wanted to do it again.
After the rocks, we wandered through some of the numerous muddy ravines. Even in a dry month, there were plenty of muddy spots, and several vehicles needed help getting back to high ground. I stayed clear of the mud drag pit. We wandered around the entire park several times, making several more runs through the rock garden. Around 4:30pm, we started airing up and headed for home. All in all, it was a fun little run. I'll probably head down again with my sons once the weather warms up a bit.
You can read about this run on the P4W forums here.
You can view Noelle's and my photos from the day here.
These were taken by a P4W member who goes by "lilblackjeep":
Last updated 26 Nov 2008 Obi-Wan (obiwan@jedi.com)
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