Within a span of a week, we went offroading on a fast desert trail in a rented Can-Am Maverick in Tonto National Forest (Arizona/Tuesday), offroading on a rocky shelf trail in Moab (Utah/Thursday) in our ’22 Ram 1500 Rebel, and offroading on a snowy trail in Roosevelt National Forest (Colorado/Sunday) in our ’97 Jeep Wrangler.
This post has a video and some still shots for the Sunday offroading (22 December 2024), where Lee and I went wheeling again with a local 4x4ing group called the mountaineers.
We drove from Fort Collins to Crown Point. Without snow, this would have been an easy dirt road. With snow, it was more difficult. The trail alternated between dry and dusty to icy to deep snow drifts. We got stuck in the snow twice and had to be pulled out by other vehicles. The first time I was backing up to help another vehicle and slid my driver side into a ditch. This actually helped anchor me to help the other vehicle that was stuck behind me. They used their winch and me as an anchor to get out, then helped pull us out of the ditch.
Later we got stuck in a section with deep snow that most folks got stuck in. I think Lee counted seven times we helped other vehicles get unstuck by either pulling them out with a tow rope or using a winch. I had never gone wheeling with a big group in the snow, so it was interesting to see how you could get through some difficult sections like this. This was also my first time driving this Jeep in deeper snow (I had some limited opportunities to drive it in icy conditions up to this point).
Here’s some video where I edited out less interesting sections and sped up the video to 8X speed to give an idea of what the trail conditions were like…
I put chains on the Jeep at one point hoping to get better traction and avoid getting stuck. Here’s some still shots I took during the trip…
I think the group ended up breaking up into three smaller groups, turning around at different points on this out-and-back trail. We were in the middle group, so we missed out on the part that the some other folks did. The conditions were cold and a little windy, but overall very good weather for this time of year at higher elevations.