Wurm,
I need to apologize. Just found this on the wiki:

Quote Originally Posted by Borderlands Wiki
Killing Crawmerax is a trigger for scaling events, as such killing him while the player is significantly lower in level will cause subsequent content to scale to the level 60 range (i.e. Killing him on playthrough 1 while level 45 will cause DLC4 to scale to level 60 essentially making it impossible to complete without further leveling).

So our Crawmerax triumph basically scaled the game content way past where it would otherwise be.