I tagged it on Friday and caught it on fire by the following Sunday.
I had just gone to lunch at Sonny's. The very generous waitress offered us to-go drinks, I accepted this offer for myself and my lunch companion. We get in the car with our to-go drinks and begin our journey. First stop, Academy Sports for some ammunition. After Academy I think to myself "Hmmmm, I haven't taken this thing off into the trails yet!". I head toward the wilderness with the sound of my rod knock creating the suspense of whether or not we'd make it back alive. After a few close encounters with death being that I am a woman driver we reach our second stop, the trails. Heading into the trails not knowing what our fate may be we are having a blast. I make it half way through the first trail and suddenly my gauge cluster is getting jiggy with it. Instantly I know that I'm having an electrical short. While driving through the woods with my Jeep unknowingly on fire trying to reach the exit of the trail, the Jeep shuts off. I will insert a photo from Google below to give you an idea of how this went down. As the Jeep rolls to a stop smoke begins pouring out of the hood. Quickly I jump out, pop the hood, retrieve my fire extinguishers (the fire extinguishers being the to-go drinks), and put out the fire. The Jeep is now disabled and we are stuck in the woods with no cell phone reception. At this time it will be dark in about 30 minutes, our survival instincts are now kicking in. We dumped our only source of hydration on the fire so we find a small creek a few hundred yards away and begin collecting water. Secondly we need dinner, so we retrieve the ammunition we bought prior to this event. Unfortunately we did not have any guns with us so we resorted to throwing the ammunition at the game we were hunting. Surprisingly this did not work in our favor. As we fail at our hunting efforts and we are running out of water again we decide to go back to work on the Jeep. The main wire running to the starter had been poorly routed by the previous owner along the frame rail. The Upper control arm ripped it in half and it grounded out on the chassis creating the fire. We taped the frayed end up with electrical tape. Luckily the night before I had ran an 8 gauge wire to the back and had about 2 feet of extra wire tucked under the back seat. We cut that out and use it as a jumper from the battery to the starter. Finally the Jeep is running again, we begin our trek out of the woods. As we're thinking luck is finally in our favor we encounter a lion blocking our path! Scared not knowing what to do we began throwing bullets at it, surprisingly it didn't injure the lion. We remained silent until it moved on and continued on our path until finally reaching civilization. After the grueling feat we dealt with in the woods we were just happy to be out of the trails before it got dark.
