Toyota FJ Cruiser Forum banner

Pics and Trail Maps of my first year of wheeling in Colorado

60K views 127 replies 62 participants last post by  DangitBobby 
#1 ·
UPDATES: Thread is up-to-date on trail runs + photos as of 8/18/2015

So I've probably talked everybody's ears off already with the story about why I'm here in Colorado. For those of you who don't know, here's the short, short version:

  1. I came to Denver in the summer of 2009 for work, and drove a rental car to the top of Pike's Peak before catching a plane.
  2. In May 2010 I brough my '99 TJ up and spent 3 days in the mountains, then promptly went home and told my boss to transfer me to the Denver office or I'm gone.
  3. In December 2010 a buddy of mine from a Denver telecom asked if I wanted a job in Broomfield, and I said "hell yes". I got the job on a Friday, and bought my FJ the following Monday (March, 2011). I moved up here on April 2nd, 2011.
  4. I've spent the weekends since going wheeling all over the state.
So rather than do a build-up thread for my rig, I figured it would be neat to do a "here's where I've been in the past year" thread instead.

For each offroading trip I run a GPS + Photo track using either Video Voyager (iPhone) or EveryTrail (Android). Both of these apps track the GPS coordinates of where I've been driving, as well as the GPS location for each photo taken.

Last Monday went back through all of the GPS tracks for the year, then got on Shutterfly and put together a picture book:

PICTURE BOOK - Colorado Offroading Adventures - Year 1

To help people see where I've been for the year, the 3rd page of the photo book is a map where each photo was taken:



Here's the dates, TrailDamage links and GPS+Photo Track links to this year's trails:

2011:

04/16/11 - Gross Lake - GPS+Photo Track
04/23/11 - Hwy 6 / Blackhawk - GPS+Photo Track
04/30/11 - Mt Falcon Park - GPS+Photo Track
05/07/11 - Loveland Pass - GPS+Photo Track
05/15/11 - China Wall - GPS+Photo Track
05/21/11 - Yankee Hill - GPS+Photo Track
05/29/11 - Guanella Pass - GPS+Photo Track
06/05/11 - Miller Rock - GPS+Photo Track
06/12/11 - Metberry Gulch - GPS+Photo Track
06/18/11 - Chinns Lake
06/25/11 - Chinaman Gulch - GPS+Photo Track
07/08/11 - Tincup Pass - GPS+Photo Track

2011 FJ Summit:
07/21/11 - California Pass - GPS+Photo Track
07/22/11 - Imogene Pass - GPS+Photo Track
07/23/11 - Engineer Pass - GPS+Photo Track

07/30/11 - Red Cone - GPS+Photo Track
08/20/11 - Slaughterhouse Gulch - GPS+Photo Track
08/21/11 - Mosquito Pass & Halfmoon Creek - GPS+Photo Track
09/11/11 - Chinns Lake - GPS+Photo Track
09/17/11 - Marble Canyon / Crystal River - GPS+Photo Track
09/18/11 - Marble Canyon / Crystal River - GPS+Photo Track
10/15/11 - Lefthand Canyon - GPS+Photo Track
10/22/11 - Lefthand Canyon
12/31/11 - Slaughterhouse Gulch - GPS+Photo Track

2012:

01/15/12 - Mount Baldy - GPS+Photo Track
02/12/12 - Chinaman Gulch - GPS+Photo Track
03/24/12 - Lefthand Canyon - GPS+Photo Track
04/07/12 - Geneva Creek and Goose Creek Road - GPS+Photo Track
05/13/12 - Metberry Gulch (scouting run) - GPS+Photo Track
05/20/12 - Metberry Gulch (camping run) - GPS+Photo Track
05/28/12 - Bill Moore Lake - GPS+Photo Track
06/23/12 - Red Cone Pass - GPS+Photo Track
07/02/12 - Devil's Canyon - GPS+Photo Track
07/02/12 - Cascade Creek - GPS+Photo Track

2012 FJ Summit:
07/18/12 - Denver to Ouray Convoy - GPS+Photo Track
07/19/12 - Poughkeepsie Gulch - GPS+Photo Track
07/20/12 - Imogene Pass - GPS+Photo Track
07/20/12 - Black Bear Pass - GPS+Photo Track

08/05/12 - Spring Creek - GPS+Photo Track
08/25/12 - Wheeler Lake - GPS+Photo Track
09/02/12 - Crystal River Mill - GPS+Photo Track
10/14/12 - Hackett Gulch - GPS+Photo Track
11/11/12 - Lefthand Canyon - GPS+Photo Track

2013:

01/28/13 - Lefthand Canyon - GPS+Photo Track
06/01/13 - Metberry Gulch (camping run) - GPS+Photo Track
07/07/13 - Ptarmigan Pass and McAllister Gulch - GPS+Photo Track

2013 FJ Summit:
07/18/13 - Poughkeepsie Gulch - GPS+Photo Track
07/19/13 - Black Bear Pass - GPS+Photo Track
07/20/13 - Imogene Pass - GPS+Photo Track

*** on 8/2 I broke my left arm, which sidelined me for 2 months

10/26/13 - China Wall - GPS+Photo Track

2014:

4/26/14 - Illinois Gulch - GPS+Photo Track
5/31/14 - Metberry Gulch (camping run) - GPS+Photo Track
7/14/14 - Top of the World - Moab - GPS+Photo Track

2014 FJ Summit:
7/17/14 - Imogene Pass - GPS+Photo Track

8/30/14 - Red Cone, Radical Hill and Deer Creek - GPS+Photo Track
9/28/14 - Jenny Creek and Rollins Pass East - GPS+Photo Track
10/5/14 - Argentine Pass - GPS+Photo Track

2015:

5/25/15 - Bunce School Road and Ironclads - GPS+Photo Track
6/20/15 - Metberry (camping run) - GPS+Photo Track
8/9/15 - Tincup Pass and Taylor Pass - GPS+Photo Track

Since I've been here, it has been my great pleasure to meet most of the Colorado forum members and get to know several of you pretty well. I'd also guess that only one person here has done more offroading than me this past year: FJess. In fact, she was on most of these ^^^ trips :rofl: and I know she did more wheeling besides.

To all of you: thanks for welcoming me to your state and this community, thanks for being so friendly and constantly helpful, and - most importantly - thanks for letting me bring up the rear, so I could see your line before picking my own :rofl:

Enjoy the photos!

James







































 
See less See more
21
#2 ·
More photos, feel free to ask me where any of them were taken.





























Top of the World, finally!





I actually got wet taking this photo of @weavinfj hitting the first river crossing on Imogene Pass with some speed:









 
#3 ·
Love it, and the entire idea of it!


Sent from my Autoguide iPhone app
 
#5 ·
Those pictures are fantastic!! I went through a couple of the links- awesome! Thanks for sharing!

-OC
 
#9 ·
Well done! Good job keeping track of everything. I wish I had the patience for that!
It was actually pretty easy. The phone does all the work, and at the end of the day I post the track to Facebook with a couple of the choice photos for my friends&family to see. So compiling the list just meant going back through my Facebook feed to last April.

Although after building the list of trails at the bottom of that first post, I'm kinda sick of HTML tagging now... :rofl:
 
#12 ·
I moved up here from Dallas. The summers are *amazing*, and the winter isn't too bad at Denver/Colorado Springs elevations.

When are you coming up in the summer, for the FJ summit?
 
#18 ·
This is awesome! I too grew up and live in the DFW metroplex. And I hate it. I've been coming to CO almost every summer to get away from the heat. About a year and a half ago I bought a second home in Ridgway. I work out of my house and travel so if it were just me I would be living there but alas my wife still keeps me tethered to the metroplex. Maybe some day. Will explore your pictures and trails. Just installed EveryTrail on my Android and will try it out. Would love to wheel with you some time. I will definitely be at summit again this year. Always good to meet like minded people.
 
#20 ·
Just installed EveryTrail on my Android and will try it out. Would love to wheel with you some time. I will definitely be at summit again this year. Always good to meet like minded people.
The main thing to worry about with EveryTrail is your battery life, that's it. So keep an eye on that and you're set. I did have one photo of one track screw up the GPS location, but it's easy enough to delete photos associated to tracks.

Look me up when you come to Summit, I posted my trail times in the other thread (Thursday - Poughkeepsie, Friday - Imogene, Saturday - Black Bear, all times 9AM). There was only one other all-green FJ at last year's summit that I saw, but I imagine that number will go up a bit this year. But mine is still pretty easy to spot...
 
#19 ·
This EveryTrail looks very intersting and this is very timely. I am leaving tomorrow for a conference in Las Vegas next week. A couple of my friends from Germany will be coming to the conference and we will rent a car a do a big loop tour through Utah and Arizona after the conference next weekend. We'll be stopping at Bryce, Monument Valley and the Grand Canyon. This should be a great opportunity to try this out.
 
#25 ·
Makes me glad I live in Colorado! :bigthumb:

Very cool thread James. Looking forward to tagging along this season and hopefully getting some of my own pictures just 1/2 as captivating as yours. Great job.

:cheers:
 
#27 ·
Very cool thread James. Looking forward to tagging along this season and hopefully getting some of my own pictures just 1/2 as captivating as yours.
The funny thing is that the vast majority of those photos were taken with an iPhone 4. The rest were taken with a Galaxy Nexus smartphone. There are a lot of folks here who are big into photography who could take much better photos with superior gear, I think my advantage is just that I wheel more :)

Would like to come south and go with you guys someday if I can keep up.
Keep an eye on the Colorado forums, we plan trail runs all the time once the snow melts. I'm looking at doing a big wheeling + camping event in late May (the Metberry Gulch run that got 17 trucks last year), I'll probably be typing it up some time in April.
 
#28 ·
where was the pic with waterfall and mine shaft in the back ground? I still owe you 12 :D
 
#29 ·
That's the Crystal River Mill east of Marble, CO. I went with an FJ buddy from work and camped near there in September, this summer the plan is to go back earlier (July/August) and actually swim. Marble is a pretty long drive down I-70, but there's a great BBQ restaurant there for lunch.

When you get to the mill from Marble turn south and that takes you down to Crested Butte, then you can go past Taylor Reservoir, over Cottonwood Pass and through Buena Vista back to Denver via 285. It makes a nice 2-day loop.
 
#30 ·
Bump in case any of the new locals haven't seen the thread
 
#31 ·
Guess I'm a local now and just discovered your great thread. I've been on several of the trails and recognized many of the photo locations. You mention going back to Crystal in July and that's just where our club is going tomorow. Apologize for short notice but we are meeting in Marble at the BBQ at 10 on Saturday and your welcome to join us. There will be 4-5 of us and running to Crystal, Schoefield Pass (camping nearby) then on to CB and head home. More info is posted on Mud clubhouses, Book Cliff Cruisers.

Ace


Sent from my Autoguide iPhone app
 
#32 ·
You mention going back to Crystal in July and that's just where our club is going tomorow. Apologize for short notice but we are meeting in Marble at the BBQ at 10 on Saturday and your welcome to join us. There will be 4-5 of us and running to Crystal, Schoefield Pass (camping nearby) then on to CB and head home.
Thanks for the invite, but I've already got plans tomorrow. We're doing Red Cone on Sunday as well. Are you going to be at the FJ Cruiser summit in Ouray in a couple of weeks?
 
#34 ·
Yep, going to the Summit, my fourth. After that All-4-Fun Week in Empire where we will do Redcone and a bunch of trails nearby.

We found a new rockslide above the Devils Punchbowl that was a fairly serious obstacle but some rock stacking and strapping got us all over. Loose rocks/poor traction was the issue. Well, the long drop too. Later came down the rocks w/o difficulty.

Ace


Sent from my Autoguide iPhone app
 
#35 ·
Can't wait to see you again! I will be going to All-4-Fun next year. It's in a secret new location. :)

Thanks also for the info on Devils Punchbowl...we're heading there sometime near the end of September when the aspens are turning.
 
#36 ·
I was a bit disappointed that A4F was in Empire again so soon as it was there just three years ago so the new "secret location" sounds interesting.

I thought you said you'd be at this years A4F at least part of the time.

Ace


Sent from my Autoguide iPhone app
 
#37 ·
My original plan was to also go to A4F this year, but then Kokopelli's and the Rubicon came up (+ Summit) and I ran out of vacation days. :( I might still head up there at some point and see everyone. I know at some point I'll either be driving up my dad's Jeep or his RV and, of course, driving it back down.

A4F classically has rotated between Empire, Salida, and Silverton. I guess people were getting a little burnt out by the same places all the time so I've heard they're moving it. It's all supposed to be announced this year so I can't say where. Think you'll like it though - I know I will. :)
 
This is an older thread, you may not receive a response, and could be reviving an old thread. Please consider creating a new thread.
Top