Well the annual S. Padre Island cleanup was today, and it was not pretty, drizzle on and off and around 44 deg. the sand was not good ether, our group went 46 miles down the beach for a 92mi round trip (they always put us on the long runs for some reason) each group walks and picks up 1 mile of beach, leapfrogging the vehicles along the way.
The first 7 miles of course is always good, to lure you into thinking this will be a milk run, and the last 5 or 6 miles was pretty decent, everything in between was pretty soft.
The leader had a new 4X4 truck with nice wide tires and he was in a hurry so we slugged it out with the sand.
We drove for about 30 miles at 35MPH in really soft sand, I was intentionally dogging the truck in 5th and 6th gear to see how the transmission would handle it, full throttle somewhere between 2000 and 2500 RPM, and then I would guess his trans light came on and he slowed down considerably for the last few miles.
The 6L80 worked flawlessly, I was monitoring it on a laptop during the run and the highest peak temp was 212 deg. not too bad considering it was running out of TC lock most of the time we were slugging out.
On the return trip of course pretty much everyone was on their own so we went into low range and ran out of there at 20-25 MPH in 6th lockup at around 2600 RPM and the trans ran 145-150 deg all the way out!
The turnout was pretty good considering the weather.
This was about half of what we ended up with, then on the way back there were several groups that did not have enough space, maybe no trailers and so we picked up another bunch of trash already bagged up, same deal the truck/trailers would just leapfrog (my word of the day!) each other.
Wish I had taken more photos.
Several vehicles got stuck but their was plenty of help, again should have taken more pictures but those were areas I was not comfortable stopping anyway.
The Trash is actually quite heavy as most of it is filled with wet sand.