The pictures and videos here are from a snow wheeling trip on Sunday, January 26th 2025. The trip was organized by the Larimer County Four Wheel Drive Club and there were about 18 vehicles that participated.
Here’s some of the trail from the perspective of the hood of our Jeep, sped up 8X…
We started around 9AM from Fort Collins and drove to Cherokee Park Road. The group stopped at a rest stop on Cherokee Park Road to air down tires, disconnect sway bar links, and anything else folks do to prepare themselves for snow wheeling.
I forgot my air pressure gage, so instead of borrowing one I just eyeballed how flat my tires looked as I let air out. Later, I discovered that I had a pretty consistent 14 PSI all around (I normally run 26 PSI on my 33″ KO3s). I never put chains on this go round, but we managed to not get stuck. We did hit a few spots where I had to take several passes before I could force my way through the snow.
On this trip, Lee brought a friend along – Zach. I cautioned that our little Jeep TJ would not be a comfortable ride in the backseat and offered to take our Ram 1500 Rebel instead (which probably wouldn’t have made it as far). But Lee and Zach both wanted to take the Jeep. This meant putting the backseat back in and deciding to leave some gear behind. Somewhere in the shuffle of gear I didn’t get my air pressure gage back in the Jeep, but I think we had everything else that we ended up needing.
From the rest stop, we broke up into three groups. I was in “group 1” with eight total vehicles. This group planned to take the easiest starting route up Pratt Creek Trail (and general area). The lead vehicle in this group was a GMC Envoy Denali driven by Darin. Originally, we planned to hang towards the back, but I ended up following directly behind Darin. Cherokee Park road was plowed for a while but then got into some deeper snow as it got into an area where it’s not maintained in the winter. We then turned onto the unmaintained trail where the snow drifts got more challenging.
As the lead driver, Darin was pushing through heavy snow drifts up to a couple feet or more that had not been driven on yet since the last snow. For the most part he was able to push through fairly easily, but we stopped at several sections where he had to stop and get several running starts before pushing himself through. Twice he got stuck and we used a tow rope to pull him out from behind. Eventually we hit a drift that we realized would take too long to punch through.
From there, we all turned around, so our Jeep was then the second to last vehicle in group 1. We backtracked to a split in the road where we had lunch and followed another route until we got to another difficult section. We were the last vehicle in the group after leaving for lunch. We were behind a Tacoma (2008 I think) driven by Travis and Jessica and a 2024 Jeep Wrangler Rubicon. Since we were at the back, we did a lot of waiting without seeing what was going on as vehicles got stuck and eventually punched their way through various snow drifts.
When we almost arrived to the point where we would stop for a while, the Rubicon (two vehicles in front of us) slid off the road. After a while, a driver from another group, Joe, caught up with our group and drove around our TJ, the Tacoma, and the stuck Rubicon. Joe’s TJ had tractor tires with studs and was handling the snow drifts with ease where others couldn’t pass. Joe’s TJ helped pull the JL out ahead of us.
After the JL was pulled out and got through the difficult section, the Tacoma followed, and then our TJ. Just past that point, groups 1 and 2 stopped. Lee, Zach, and I got out to stretch our legs with the rest of the group and I walked over to a group that was looking at a 2004 Jeep Wrangler TJ on the side of the trail just past the spot where the JL was pulled out of.
I noticed a bright red lower control arm sitting on the dirt next to the TJ, which you usually don’t remove from your Jeep during a trail ride. So I asked what happened. I was told that the control arm bracket on the axel broke off. A poor weld job and a little stress from the trail led to the break.
Luckily, there was a resourceful group of participants that managed to MacGyver the broken TJ back to health. They strung together three vehicle batteries, some jumper cables, and some welding rods for some impromptu welding work. One unlucky guy volunteered to help do the welding on his back in snow/mud mix, which took some time. We hung around to witness most of this very impressive trail repair, but headed back ahead of the group with one other vehicle that needed to get back to Fort Collins. By the time we left, the bracket had been welded back on and they were working on re-attaching the control arm.
We headed back with Travis and Jessica in their Tacoma following us. This turned out to be a very fun stretch of the overall ride. The snow on the trail had been packed into tight tire tracks through the deeper parts that needed to be pushed through on the way up. So the ride back was a roller coaster ride, mostly downhill, where the tracks helped keep our vehicle on the trail at faster speeds. Unfortunately, I forgot to turn on our action cam that is mounted to the front of the Jeep for this part.
Back at the Cherokee Park Road rest stop, we aired back up, reconnected our sway bar links, and headed back to Fort Collins. We got back right around 5:30 when it was just getting dark.