Story time:
So last week I tell my wife i'm going for a ride to check out this Jeep Trail I saw on google maps, i've been to the trailhead before but have only dipped my toes in but I can see it goes on for a long way on the map. It started off with a good hill climb and set the mood for the trail right away. I had intentions of riding the Jeep Trail until it intersected with a Forest Road not too far out but it' looked like a good run maybe a couple of hours.
(We did this entire ridge line Graves Creek Jeep Trail till it intersected with Indian Gulch).
This trail was fun, it had many good elements too it (hill climbs, water crossings, fallen trees) it just kept going and going and started to seem like it was not going to end. At some point or another we reached the top of a mountain, and we go down the other side where there are some rocky shelves that we drop off of. They are about a foot or so down and a few in a row, something that I could not go back up easily or at all. We keep going as i'm sure we will intersect with this Forest Road on the map I researched earlier.
We keep going as now we've felt like we've past the point of no return and must keep going, but the trail keeps climbing and climbing in elevation. My wife is super worried at this point or maybe she was way before this point but now she's really worried. Just when the trail starts to go down hill and seems like we may be meeting with a Forest Road it started to climb again. The trail get much more intense at this point. It gets narrower, trees get tighter, brush is overgrown , there's no tire tracks on the trail anymore from anyone else. We see some "hoof" prints periodically as I believe this turned from a Jeep Trail into a Pack Trail. We never encounter this other Forest Road that we hoped to and this trail took us on one hell of a trip that we won't soon forget.
I was driving at inclines greater than 45 degrees most of the time, some with erosion up the middle of the trail so my wheels are straddling a crevasse of sorts while climbing and mowing down brush at the same time. Some had scree as well while some had larger rocks to avoid or bump over. At some other unknown point we encounter several pretty good water crossings, the deepest being up to the bottom of my front bumper in depth. One had some sticky mud in the bottom but most were hard packed rock and dirt that were flooded part of the trail. Others had tree stumps and roots under water that you could not see until you were feeling them as we were trying to cross. So many obstacles were all around us.
This trail we were on kept going up then down and up again and had us traversing this forest for 5 hours before we finally made it to a fork in the road. The fork then had and up and a down, where we drove up first then quickly realized it wasn't going to let us out so we backtracked. Then tried the downhill route and that led us for a couple miles to a locked yellow gate. On the other side of the locked gate was a main gravel road that would lead us out of the forest. One side of the gate had a steep hillside and the other side was a ditch that had several 12" or so rocks in a row across it. The ditch was the only option, it was barely wide enough for a short wheelbase Jeep, lol. I am not a rock crawler by any means or set up for rocks, but I was disconnected and aired down, I stacked a few rocks and I flexed my way through the gatekeeper. We hit the gravel and we were out of there! It was absolutely intense, I didn't take many pictures as it was nerve racking most of the time and my wife wanted to get out of there, but it was also fun and she did say she was impressed with the shit this TJ just got us through!
I do have a few pictures though of the area and of my TJ at the highest point of the trail where we reached a place no Jeep has been before!