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The east side of the United States has no lack of great off-road opportunities. Unfortunately much of it is either prohibited for motor vehicle use or privately owned, and as such it takes ingenuity to find a legal way to get some dirt under your eastern 4x4.

We recently hooked up with a small group of four-wheelers from upstate New York who figured out that forming a club not only gave them a group of guys to wheel and wrench with, but also gave them some bargaining power with local landowners to help find places to run their Jeeps. The Adirondack Jeeps club approached those deed holders and offered to clear and maintain private trails for the owners in exchange for the permission to run said trails on given weekends. This of course requires a bit of secrecy of the actual location of these trails, and a diligent "pack it in pack it out" trash policy, but luckily we were invited along to enjoy a rainy weekend with the club.

So how can this club's experience be applied to your neck of the woods? Of course we would first and foremost want as much public land as possible open to responsible wheelers, and after that we love to support local off-road parks, but finally if your hometown has neither of the previous, maybe it's time to form a group, and approach those with the land to see if they have an area where you can go play. It will probably come with certain rules-clean up trash, no partying on the trails, and a bit of trail maintenance-but it's better than sitting at home watching your truck waste away in the driveway.

Looking for some friends to wheel with in the Albany, New York, area? Check out www.adirondackjeeps.com on the web.

We got hooked up with the Adirondack Jeeps club through the crew at Rockcrawler Suspension. Jeremy Purick and Terence Barton brought an '07 Jeep Rubicon Unlimited out to play with a prototype 5 1/2-inch suspension system. With the factory 3.8L V-6 and Rubicon gears and lockers, the Unlimited had just enough power for running 37-inch tires on the messy trail. Unfortunately this brand-new ride came home with a few door dings from trying to wrap the 115-inch wheelbase around some trees.

Though we wouldn't have chosen all-terrain tires for this type of messy terrain, Mike Clark's 35-inch BFGs worked great all day. The throttle-body spacer and intake had the I-6 grunting happily all the way down to the Truetrac and Electrac-equipped Dana 30 and 44. Protecting the belly of this yellow ride were skidplates and armor from Warn, Poison Spyder, and Skid Row.

Michael Wescott's Cherokee was built on a budget, and driven like it was free. Running 35-inch tires and an Aussie locker helps Mike throttle up the trail like a pinball in a muddy shoot, but this same driving style sent him home early with a broken Dana 30 front axleshaft. At least he didn't smash another window like his previous trips as a cold drive home wasn't appealing that rainy weekend.

Of course Scott Pignatelli wasn't about to be outdone by Mike and almost simultaneously backed his Jeep into a tree and exploded the rear glass liftgate on his hardtop. After an initial bummer session, Scott figured his parents wouldn't kill him and kept on wheeling.Though on a college-student budget, Scott's TJ has a Detroit soft locker in the rear to help keep the 33-inch BFGs spinning.

Stephen Sforza owns a body shop and is building a Jeep TJ, but when he realized it wasn't going to be ready for our run he threw this clean Cherokee together in just 30 days! We kept waiting for the fresh orange pearl with gold flake paint to be left in streaks across every tree Stephen squeezed between, but in the end there was no orange crush, only a busted front U-joint in the Dana 30. Suspension duty is done by a 4-inch lift so the Aussie lockers can spin 33-inch MTRs.

Steve Alheim is both club president and trail leader for the day we were there. Steve may be undergunned with just a four-banger in his '99 TJ, but he's lucky enough to work close by these private lands and can sometimes sneak out from the office for a lunchtime trail run. Alas his experience didn't help him when his Jeep slipped between two trees in such a way that both forward and reverse movement were impossible. A winch cable got Steve out, but we're sure his next lunch break will have him back here trying to outwit this obstacle.

Sometimes you need to ask your family for help and that's exactly what Chris Doerr did when the frame of his old Jeep rusted away. Rather than find another East Coast rust bucket he convinced his brother out west in Washington to build him this '67 Toyota FJ-40. The engine is a small-block Chevy 350, and an SM465 truck four-speed follows it. When mixed with 35-inch Goodyears and dual ARB Air Lockers Chris made it easily over every obstacle we found.

The 5 1/2-inch Rockcrawler suspension under this silver Rubicon and the graceful driving by pilot Kevin Peters made for quick work in a terrain that was short on traction but big on slop and proved once again that Jeep Rubicon's are hard to beat for out-of-the-box wheelers. These types of trail days demand a mixture of throttle for greasy climbs and steady nerves for crawling off-camber slippery rocks. The tight trails didn't have many-if any-death-defying cliffs, but since most of the four-bys with us were daily drivers, rollovers into trees or off big boulders could have still resulted in a rough drive to work on Monday.