My wife and I just spent two weeks out West, in Moab and Ouray...Here's Part One of our adventure.
We took the Salt Valley Road out towards Klondike Bluffs, then cut west on the road to the Marching Men. The road is known simply as the Arches Four Wheel Drive Road, and comes out near Balanced Rock. The NPS suggests that this road be driven from the north to the south due to the amount of sand along the route.
The first part of the trail was a series of rock ledges that looked a bit daunting at first (for a guy from Ohio in his daily driver). In fact, we aborted from this trail two years ago since we didnt want to try it without skid plates. They turned out to be a wise investment.
We aired down to 25psi but still got hung up on this little sand dune. I busted out the little folding entrenching tool and dug us out (the tool was the first item placed ceremoniously under the seat when we bought our Liberty, after an unfortunate incident with a rental Liberty and a snowbank near Crater Lake, Oregon...but thats another story.) My wife backed out of the dune onto slickrock, took a running start and plowed through it. The rest of the trail was mostly sandy and posed little problem.
This rock was fun, mainly because you couldnt see either the ground or your spotter through the windshield.
We followed a decked-out Wrangler that had passed us on the Salt Valley Road earlier. They were at Balanced Rock when we came out and seemed surprised that we followed them the whole way. One guy we met along here in a rental Jeep said we'd better turn around and head back the way we came as we'd obviously never make it through the sand. Yeah, right.
Taken near Eye of the Whale Arch. We also saw a guy heading north driving a stock rental Cherokee who didnt appear to speak English too well...we told him it was rough and sandy, but he just smiled and nodded his head...we jotted down his license plate just in case, but fortunately we later saw that he had changed his mind and headed back south.
Our '06 Liberty. The front skid plate acted as a grader when we drove through the sand, and was packed with sand. We left a little trail of red sand from Moab to Cleveland. We dug most of the sand out, saving it in a gallon ziploc bag...feeling guilty about that, I asked the ranger at the Arches visitor center if I was in violation of the Antiquities Act of 1906. He said we were in the clear and didnt want the sand back.
More tales to come...I shot about 3500 images that I've been plowing through for the past week. Next up, two days on the White Rim Trail
