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Difficulty:
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Terrain:
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Size: 
(micro)
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I left Highway 4 at Vista Hermosa Road. Roads in this area are all
dirt, may become very chalenging when wet. Parking at the bottom of
the grade is recommended for all but high clearance vehicles. At
Zuni Kids suggestion I upped the terrain to a 3.5 even though my
Jeep never hit 4WD.
About Jeeps
There are many explanations of the origin of the word "jeep," all
of which have proven difficult to verify. Probably the most popular
notion holds that the vehicle bore the designation "GP" (for
"Government Purposes" or "General Purpose"), which was phonetically
slurred into the word jeep. However, R. Lee Ermey, on his
television series Mail Call, disputes this, saying that the vehicle
was designed for specific duties, was never referred to as "General
Purpose," and that the name may have been derived from Ford's
nomenclature referring to the vehicle as GP (G for government use,
and P to designate its 80-inch. "GP" does appear in connection with
the vehicle in the TM 9-803 manual, which describes the vehicle as
a machine, and the vehicle is designated a "GP" in TM 9-2800,
Standard Motor Vehicles, September 1, 1949, but whether the average
jeep-driving GI would have been familiar with either of these
manuals is open to debate. Many, including Ermey, suggest that
soldiers at the time were so impressed with the new vehicles that
they informally named it after Eugene the Jeep, a character in the
Popeye cartoons that "could go anywhere
Words of the Fighting Forces by Clinton A. Sanders, a dictionary
of military slang, published in 1942, in the library at The
Pentagon gives this definition: Jeep: A four-wheel drive vehicle of
one-half- to one-and-one-half-ton capacity for reconnaissance or
other army duty. Early in 1941, Willys-Overland demonstrated the
vehicle's off-road cability by having it drive up the U.S. Capitol
steps, driven by Willy's test driver Irving "Red" Haussman, who had
recently heard soldiers at Fort Holabird calling it a "jeep." When
asked by syndicated columnist Katherine Hillyer for the Washington
Daily News (or by a bystander, according to another account) what
it was called, Irving answered, "It's a jeep." Katherine Hillyer's
article was published nationally on February 20, 1941, and included
a picture of the vehicle with the caption: LAWMAKERS TAKE A
RIDE- With Senator Meade, of New York, at the wheel, and
Representative Thomas, of New Jersey, sitting beside him, one of
the Army's new scout cars, known as "jeeps" or "quads", climbs up
the Capitol steps in a demonstration yesterday. Soldiers in the
rear seat for gunners were unperturbed. This exposure caused
all other jeep references to fade, leaving the 4x4 with the name.
Willys-Overland Inc. was later awarded the sole privilege of owning
the name "Jeep" as registered trademark by extension, merely
because it originally had offered the most powerful
engine.
Additional Hints
(No hints available.)