UPDATE: First posted in 2010, this is a follow up to the post below which shows my family’s first jeep, a somewhat modified CJ-5.

One fine, sunny, beautiful Saturday during the summer of 1975 (or thereabouts – no family member can quite remember the exact year) my father drove his CJ-5 up a chuck-hole filled hillside trail at Icicle Creek, near Leavenworth, Wa.  He didn’t make it to the top; instead, he rolled his CJ-5 down the hillside.  Herein is the story and images.

I suppose it is appropriate that the images of dad’s wreck in the WWJC Scrapbook aren’t as clear as I had hoped, because the memory of it is also fuzzy.  I’ve tried to color correct and sharpen the pictures as best as I could, but even the clearest of pictures can’t really tell the story of the impact of his tumble down that hill.

It was a club weekend on the ‘east side of the mountains’ in Leavenworth, Washington.  For Washington Jeepers, the east side of the mountains means anything on the east slope of the Cascade Mountain range, where the surroundings transform from western muddy trails, deep dark green of cedar trees, and gray, drizzly, cool weather into Ponderosa Pines, sunshine, sagebrush, and dust.  Within an hour of Seattle, you could (and still can) transform your jeeping experience entirely.

This particular weekend I remember, and  say this without certainty as these are more like flickers of a 10-year-old’s memory, that we were staying in some kind of community-center-like building where we all slept on the floor in sleeping bags in a large open community room (I later learned this was a University of Washington property).  For the club, it was one big campout.

For me this seemed perfectly normal as the club really was a big extended family — these were people I saw more than my own aunts and uncles, grandma and grandpas.

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Chris Holmes posted this photo to the PNW4WDA Facebook group the other day. The first thing I spotted was the brown jacket worn by the man to the right of the group; it’s the color of the Wandering Willys Jeep Club. Looking closer, I realized that guy was none-other than my father! Apparently, he had taken part in the shuttle of special needs kids into the Woodland Park Zoo in North Seattle.

Looking more closely, I realized that the front of our CJ-5 was pictured just to the right of Dad’s back. one tell-tale sign is the horseshoe welded to the front of the winch plate. Given the jeep pictured was before Dad’s topsy-turvey roll down the hill at Icicle Creek outside of Wenatchee (summer of 1974 or 1975), this photo was likely taken in the early 1970s.