After about 20 years of serious 4-wheeling I’ve been on lots of
trails and witnessed lots of vehicles. I wheeled mostly here is sunny AZ where the rock crawling trails are legendary,
but I’ve been on most of the popular ones in CA, NM, and UT.
The last Moab trip we witnessed an early Toy pickup, running in a different group, that was
clearly opened axle. He was thrashing so hard on a little ledge climb that the locked-up
vehicles just drove right up without spinning a tire, that we thought he was going to break
something any second. That was at the beginning of Pritchet Canyon. There’s no way he
went through Pritchet Canyon with that vehicle under its own power.
I don’t know what “sections” you wheel on but I believe that even with my 1985 shortbed,
set up and modified for very serious wheeling there were trails that I struggled to get
through without some thrashing and bashing.
There is no way an opened diff early Toyota pickup is going to go over the common trails
that I’ve seen, and I don’t care if Ivan Stewart himself were driving.
When I first bought my 1985 shortbed, I took it out on a very rutted dirt road, I had just
bought it and was curious how it would handle without power steering. In 4-wheel drive I
didn’t go more than about 30 minutes and a quarter of a mile and I went home and started
planning the modification process to make it a serious rock crawler.
So MattG… I would guess that the “reaction” by guys I wheeled with for over 20 years would be different.
Gnarls.
