Only a mile long, it took us two hours going up because I had to strap down my roof rack that got loose. Stopped right in the middle of the trail once, blocking it for over 20 minutes, because if I had continued, the rack would have slid right off the car with half the camping equipment/cooler/lanterns. (Needed loctite in the screws that held it to the factory rails and I didn't do that.) The trail jostled stuff waaaaay too much.
Videos will follow after I get them edited, as usual. After getting to the bottom on the way out this afternoon, I just sat on a rock for 10 minutes to decompress. Really put the ol' girl at risk this weekend - just so we could be seen where only Jeeps, horses, and hikers normally tread.
The trail was the Coyote Canyon "bypass" road from Lower Willows to Collins Valley in Anza-Borrego Desert state park. About six mostly sandy miles from the paved road to the rocky hill climb, including three river crossings about a foot deep. Each river crossing had a few vehicles parked where folks gave up and started hiking. And nobody brings stock SUVs on the last mile of the bypass road, which was bulldozed in 1988 to keep Jeeps out of the riverbed habitat which was the original trail path. Coyote creek is the only year-round water source in the region. The trail hasn't been maintained since it was built, and is closed every summer for 4-5 months to protect the bighorn sheep. But there's evidence of a lot of manual rock stacking that have filled in some of the largest ruts. We only needed to spend about 20% of our time on the trail doing additional rock stacking, and I had predicted ahead of time that we would spend an hour stacking to get an hour's worth of driving. Could be worse, I guess.
Ready to go:
The Collins Valley - traversed in 1775 by the Anza Expedition that brought the first outside settlers to the coastal area: (pic taken after we climbed the trail to get there)
View from the bottom:
Descending at the end of the weekend, done mostly at 1-2 MPH, half walking speed. You simply cannot do it any faster carrying any gear:
My boss' non-lifted Jeep, who took a 2" dent in his gas tank's skid plate which also dished in his gas tank. He's now seriously considering adding a lift and larger tires, which I recommended the day he bought it. He said he would not have gone on this trail at all with his equipment, but since I was going, how could he not go? A clear case where a decision made by two people jointly is inferior to the decision either one separately would have made.
