Brandon Fuller

That’s One Way to Recycle

Today, I went to the season kickoff of the Colorado Hummer Club. This is my first full season since I got my H2 so I went to learn and train with the club pros. Our class was small so we received lots of individual attention. Here are a few of the rigs. Mine on the right.

Our first exercise was meant to teach you how to better understand where your truck is on the trail. Trails often have obstacles that you need to either target or avoid. The goal is to get your tires in the right places. So in this exercise, 3 soda cans were lined up on the pavement. Then you drove your truck up to them and attempted to smash the middle of the 3 cans with your left tire. I did well. You can cheat a bit by glancing out the window to help line up.

Then came the right side — and that is a different ballgame. No visuals. You just have to line up as you approach and keep it straight. Harder and more challenging but I got the hang of it. In the next progression, we had to hit the outside can with the front tire and then far inside can with the back tire while leaving the middle can unharmed. You really begin to develop a better sense for where your tires are by doing this a dozen times.

Our next exercise involved learning all the hand signals that spotters use on the trails to guide trucks through the terrain where you cannot see it yourself. The driver just had to do what the spotter motioned. You had to trust their judgment. Not a lot at stake here in the parking lot but on the trail it should be much more intense. We did pretty good as a class instructing each other through all the different mazes of cans.

We spent the afternoon going over winching and recovery. After hearing a dozen stories on all the ways that you can kill yourself during winching and recovery, we got the hint that safety is a pretty important thing. The main issue was equipment breakage due to improper use. Heavy metal objects flying through the air after cable or chain connections go bad cause bad things to happen. We learned lots of little tidbits on how to connect things the right way.

It was a big day full of information. I hope I can remember 1/2 of it. The instructor, Dave, was great. You would have paid good money to hear all the info that he had to share. It was all from years of personal experience. Priceless. As a tribute, here is Dave and his BlueHummer helping out a fire truck during last year’s blizzard.