Presidents' Day Weekend - Trip 2!

With the holiday giving a lot of people the day off, the 14ers got together and went for our second trail run of the weekend. This time we headed South to Rainbow Falls. This trail network is between Deckers and Woodland Park. If you have never been in the area, this is a huge network of trails. There are tons of trials and spur road to explore. Please make sure to abide by all posted signs. All of the trails are very well marked, so you should have no problems knowing if a Jeep is an acceptable vehicle on a specific trail in the area.

We met up at 11am and hit the trail by 11:30. The sun was out, but the temps were definitely not as warm as Saturday. The wind wasn't blowing too hard, but it was bone chilling! The trail was in good shape, with most of the snow pretty packed down by other travelers. The first couple spur roads we took had a fair amount of snow, but nothing really challenging.

The views from this trail were even more incredible that the views from Lefthand.

We played around a bit before finding a couple good rocks to pose on.

  

The whole trip we were in search of some challenging stuff, and our maps said "Moab Hill" was the most difficult thing in the area. After a fair bit of searching, we finally fell upon Moab Hill. The hill was a few slabs of red granite just like Moab. Although in dry weather this provides great traction, the hill was covered in snow ice and mud, making it very challenging.

After Moab Hill, there was just a lot more snow to bash through. We completed a bunch of loops and had another great day of wheelin. Halfway through the day Vince did back into a tree  and damage the driver corner of his JK pretty bad, but in his words, "Oh well. I guess that's wheeling."

Check out all the trip photos here!

Presidents' Day Weekend - Trip 1!

On super short notice, patrol 14 gathered a few troops and met up with a group of folks from CO4x4, a local off road forum, and headed up to Left Hand Canyon near Boulder. It was a perfect day for winter wheelin! The sun was shining and the temps were warm enough for a t-shirt and no jacket! This trail is very mellow from the staging area all the way to five points. There was not much snow on the ground for this part of the trip, but there was certainly a lot of mud.

Since the conditions were pretty favorable, we decided to head over to Fireman's hill and see what it was like over there. The hill was dry, so we started up the steep climb.

If you have never been to this trail, I highly recommend it! At the top of fireman's hill, there is a wicked rock garden on the left. You can also bypass this garden to the right.

The views from on top are just incredible!

Once we were in the trees and on a northern facing slope, the snow got a lot deeper but we made it down to another fork no problem. At this point we met a small group that had just come up the other direction from five points. they informed us that the slope was very snow packed and very slippery. We opted to turn back the way we came and call it a day.

For the first wheeling trip of 2012, It was a wonderful day and the only damage for the day, was a screw that Ryan found in his tire while airing back up. 

Check out more photos from this trip in our album!