When we heard about the Best In The West XJ tour of the Southwest (“Cherokee Bash ’02,” in this issue) we knew we wanted to be part of the action. We decided the best way to get in was to build up our ’97 SE Cherokee to take part in the week-long rockcrawling trailride. This way we could kill two birds with one stone, cover the event, and get some much needed hardcore XJ tech. Check out what we did to our XJ to take it to the next level of off-road performance by building it for some tough trails where breakage is to be expected, and body damage a given. Was it easy? Heck no. We drove our XJ over 1,200 miles, lived out of the back of it the whole time, and barely showered for a week. Sounds fun, huh? It was awesome, except the no showering thing.
In our next installment, we will show you the things we changed after we found out the hard way what worked on the XJ and what didn’t.