Joined up with some friends from the Tacoma World forums for a quick weekend trip. Started by camping near Mountain, WI in the National Forest. Weather was excellent and bugs were not bad at all for this time of year. Didn’t take too many photos because we were just enjoying the drive. Tried to sneak in a candid photo of people airing down tires but Dave caught me and gave a big wave hello.
Right now, the Pipeline trail we usually explore is closed but many other forest roads remain open. I don’t know exactly where we ventured today – some roads were within the National Forest but I wasn’t watching the map at all; too busy enjoying the scenery and being somewhere in the middle of our 12 vehicle convoy. The only notable obstacle was this rocky vertical climb. View from the bottom gives the most realistic perspective.
Here’s how it looks from the top. Very deceiving from this angle, almost looks flat if you didn’t know any better but that’s how cameras can play tricks with elevation. My feet as I stood taking this photo were about level with the guy on the right’s head. I am very bad at estimating heights but this has to be somewhere between 30-50 feet from bottom to the very top (or more). The dirt was dry and powder-like giving some slippage and causing a few challenges but nothing we couldn’t overcome. Had it been wet it would have been very difficult.
Only photos of my truck are screengrabs from a short video courtesy of Jonathan. Here’s the action going up. I’m not sharing the video because like an amateur I forgot to switch on my rear locker and spent a few minutes spinning between the rocks. That’s on me.
Wouldn’t ya know, turn the locker on and up up and away we go! Pretty easy when the driver isn’t making errors. Tacomas are almost idiot-proof. Almost…
Here’s a short video showing how it’s really done courtesy of Dave. He cranked the tunes up to drown out our spotting advice and ran it flawlessly. We were jokingly calling him “honey badger” because he just didn’t care and sent it. What a legend.
Not pictured: dinner at a local bar/restaurant which was pretty good but quite chaotic due to our large group size and relatively small bar. Afterwards it was a very late night enjoying good conversation and cocktails around the fire. Never a bad time visiting this area!
(Please also note the GPS coordinates below are not correct, I just marked it somewhere near where I think we were. Also since we bounced around locations it’s impossible to accurately mark them all out.)
Lat = 45.2481956 , Long = -88.7009964 -- Show at Google Maps