Brian here, just signing on to the forum for the first time.
New to here, but not new to Jeeps.
Been at it since I got my license and my first Jeep back in '78 - (yeah, you do the math 
)
Quick story about one of my first offroad encounters:
For those of you old enough to remember '78 was the year of the great Blizzard, and also marked the loss of my first Jeep! (Valuable lesson here learned by me about wheeling alone - with only one Jeep.)
Rewind - some 35 years, and several weeks after the blizzard. A buddy and I were tooling around the Freetown State Forest & nearby Powerlines in the snow when my Jeep broke thru the ice into a giant water hole. She had canvass doors, and took on water like the Titanic. Sunk like a rock. Needless to say back in the day there were no cell phones, and I didn’t have a CB in the rig (because they were so damn expensive!) so my friend and I walked (cold and wet) about 10 miles to the nearest pay phone and called a buddy of mine with a 4WD pickup. We tried until dark to free her, and all we accomplished was partially ripping the rear axle off of the drivers side leaf spring. I visited her a few times over the next week or so, but the cold weather had her frozen solid into the ground. I had no job or no money at the time to pay for a real offroad recovery, so there she sat. People had already started to screw with her; windshield was broken and top was cut up. A few weeks later when the weather warmed up a bit a friend and I went back out there but she was gone. No idea what ever became of her. Stolen? Towed by the power company? Never heard from anyone about it ever again. I figure it must have been stolen because it was registered and the tow company would have wanted to find the owner to get paid. I just cut my losses on it. It was old and kinda rusted out, rear axle was damaged, windshield and top were trashed, I had minimum insurance coverage so nothing to collect, and I was only out $450 bucks. And, at 17 it really wasn’t that a big deal.
HELLO !!! 
- Had I known what I know today - I would have found a way to airlift that damn 1949 CJ2A out of there! I’ve kicked myself in the a$$ ever since! 
Hope to meet you all soon!
Brian
