Jeep Cherokee XJ build/trip, Part 4:
Our strategy for getting away from the crowds starts by avoiding National Parks (except Death Valley) and anything on a map that says Waterfall or Hot Springs. Next we look for roads that aren’t quite technical enough to pull in the hard core wheelers but have enough short scary sections to keep most of the overland crowd at bay.
We start our weeks tackling what we hope are moderate tracks (see video) at the beginning of the week when we’re heavy. Then mid week we might try a harder road, always traveling from bottom to top so we can back off if needed. Then we get more conservative as our food and water starts to dwindle. Driving every day gets draining so we try to find places with 2-3 days of interesting side explorations.
Just like boating, judgement, not gear, is what keeps you safe. For example one day we drove 120 miles to replace a damaged tire and the next day we blew another tire. If we were driving on the spare we would have been stranded. The most dangerous situations we got into were trying to reach a connecting road where the track got slowly worse until we were so deep that turning around would mean burning all our gas on a very rough drive back to the starting point.
I’m not going to say we always made the best choices in these situations, but one time turning around saved us from running out of gas trying to find a road that literally never existed (you can’t trust your map) and one time we didn’t had me driving and praying for an hour on a deep sand road with the engine floored in 4LO and the Jeep tilting 30 degrees.
A paper state atlas combined with gps-enabled closer detail electronic maps makes a good navigation combo.
We learned you can generally drive anything rocky that looks remotely sane to drive. Sand on the other hand is a lot harder to judge and most of our close calls were on sand. 2 locking axles and 33 inch tire would help here, but I don’t have 10k to spend on a 5k Jeep!
Generally we just try to be careful because while getting stuck with lots of extra food and water probably wouldn’t kill us, the cost of extracting the vehicle might!
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See the original post and discussion here.
