Here is part 2 ...
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What goes up must come down, so here is a shot of yours truly and Steve coming down the backside of Murphy Hogback:
Here’s an “advertisement shot” for Outfitter campers with Candlestick Tower in the background:
For the second big obstacle, here is Steve & Ben coming up to the entrance of Hardscrabble Hill. This is much longer than Murphy Hogback, with a lot of switchbacks that are steeper in quite a few sections. You basically need to just keep on going up and up in 4-wheel-low (so not many photos got taken during this section):
Here is Steve & Ben coming down the back side of Hardscrabble where it’s getting pretty easy again:
And here is a long-distance shot of our second camp at Taylor Canyon (at roughly the 80 mile mark on the WRT). You can see our three trucks parked down near the wash:
It rained a bit on the night of 3/16, so while a bit damp, we did not encounter any significant mud on the remaining part of the WRT when we left Taylor Canyon that morning (versus the heavy rain that had been forecasted). Just when we thought we had put all the difficult stuff behind us, we ran into a really narrow shelf section of the trail with a rock wall on the passenger-side and a vertical drop-off on the drivers-side overhanging the Green River. We lightly tagged the casing of our side awning against the wall when we rocked a bit at one point (luckily it’s mostly a cosmetic crease in the outer casing). Anyway, here is a shot of coming up the side of the mesa on the Mineral Bottom Road leading up to the top of Island in the Sky (and you can see the Green River down in the bottom of the canyon):
Once we got on top, we saw that the rain we had down at the 5000 foot level on the WRT had turned to snow at the 6000 foot level of the mesa top. Here is a shot of that before we headed out the remaining 11 miles of the Mineral Bottom Road (or Horsethief Trail) before rejoining Hwy 313 and pavement.
I might add that Steve had kidded before the trip that he hoped to run into mud since he had bought a new set of ProComp M/T tires for the trip. Well, he got his wish on this road. The further we traveled on it, the worse it got. We were all throwing copious amounts of mud up under our trucks and all over the leading surfaces of our campers. You had to keep your speed up though and stay in the center, crowned part of the dirt road as things got pretty squirrelly and it would be easy to get bogged down. This ultimately led to an almost hour visit at a car wash place in Moab, where we must have sprayed off more than a 100 pounds of mud from each vehicle. Here’s a shot of that happy effort:
After fueling up and grabbing a quick bite of lunch, we headed into Arches National Park just north of Moab. We hiked around the Windows section getting a number of shots of the many arches in that section of the park. Here is one of Double Arch:
We then headed west on the Salt Valley Road, which is a sandy road in a wash bed that leads to Klondike Bluffs and then out of the park onto BLM land as Salt Valley continues westward. We scouted out a nice camp next to a rocky ridge on a side road for our last camp before we all split up and went our separate ways the next day on 3/18. Here is a shot of our camp for the night of 3/17:
To say the least, we all had a total blast and enjoyed each other’s company. The weather mostly cooperated, and the superb scenery was far better than our photos could do justice to. In many cases, the best shots of our rigs getting through the worst of the various obstacles couldn’t be had as we were busy getting through or over them.
For those who might be interested in attempting the White Rim Trail, you have to get on a waiting list with the park service for the dates you are interested in. It can then sometimes take up to a year to finally get your dates and reservations for a backcountry permit, as it is really a popular destination and the park limits the number of people that can go in on the trail at any given time. Fall and spring are the best (and most popular) times to go on the WRT, with the summer months being far too hot, and the winter being too cold and snowy for most people’s tastes. I would not recommend this trail for heavy, hard-sided campers, or DRW pickups. Going slow is the rule, with 2 to 5 MPH in the more difficult sections, and maybe 10 to 15 MPH when you hit “good” spots (the latter of which don’t last very long). Of course, with a pickup without a camper on board (or with smaller 4x4 vehicles), the trail can be run much faster and easier.
Again, this was nothing short of a totally fantastic trip with good folks. And it just goes to show how full-sized 4x4 pickups and campers (in this case, with pop-up style campers), can really go into some pretty amazing and rugged country and make it out.
By the way, I have future plans to get a hitch extension so I can flat-tow our modified Jeep TJ, so we can hit some even more challenging areas while using our Dodge 3500 & camper as something of a base camp. But for now, we are really enjoying taking our Dodge 3500 & Outfitter camper into some pretty cool and rugged areas.
Don
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Edit: Sorry folks ... if I had connected the dots, I would have added the second part of this write-up as a second post to the first thread instead of starting a separate thread (due to the 10 images per post limitation). If I have any posts in the future that exceed the limit, I will definitely do it that way.
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