Suggestions/Help Wanted: 10 day trip out West

Thank you too all who enter.

My wife and I are going out West in November, the 16th-26th to be exact. It is not ideal but it is the only time we could both get 10 days off together with work and school (wife going back to school). The trip starts in Macon, GA, we first must go to Belgrade, MT to pick up our camper and we plan to explore as much as we can before returning to Macon, Ga.

I am looking for suggestions on routes and places to explore in the MT, UT, CO, and AZ areas. Ideally the routes/locations would be close enough together we could "tie" them together for the trip since we have a limited amount of time. I had some ideas of what I wanted to do but most routes start closing that late in the Fall.

General ideas, before pushing the dates back so far, were to site see in Yellowstone and go south to UT/CO maybe do the alpine loop (closed in NOV) or the enchanted rockies trail (road closures in NOV) submitted by lifestyle overland. We were also hoping to offroad in the Northern rim of the grand canyon, but it also closes for Winter. Some areas of interest were Yellowstone/Grand tetons, Moab area or nearby, Grand canyon, Alpine loop. We are completely open to suggestions and are hoping to primitively camp for the entirety of the trip. We understand it will be cold this time of year and its not ideal but we want to make this trip happen and we believe we will still enjoy it as long as we prepare properly. We will be camping in our camper that we pick up (GFC) and have plenty of gear (fridge, toilet, water, etc). We will be driving a 2017 Tacoma TRD Offroad with a full lift kit and all terrain tires. We have been offroading for 5+ years now, starting in a Jeep TJ in offroad parks rock crawling and now in the Tacoma doing more mild/intermediate trails.

Again, thank you and I look forward to ideas from this wonderful community.

 

I don't have any tips or suggestions, but I just wanted to say that I'm very jealous. Most 'west' I've been is Chicago. Traveling out west is certainly on my bucket list. Be sure to take tons of pics and post them up here.

 

Before retirement, we had similar constraints - Love the southwest but live on the east coast (northeast NC). For us it worked better to pick a single area we wanted to spend time in, push really hard to get there (driving 18-20 hrs/day for a couple of days), setup a base camp and explore out from there daily for 5-6 days and then bust our butts getting back home with more marathon drives. Moving camp every day or two just took too much setup/breakdown time and you can do a lot more exploration without having to worry about where to drop the trailer.

Moab should be decent in November and there's plenty of options in that area to keep you busy for several days. Another thought would be to head down to Big Bend National Park on the US/Mexico border in Texas. That's our all time favorite NP. Not crowded at all, plenty of backroads with camping options (or three Park Service campgrounds that are all nice). I can make specific recommendations for either of these areas if it would help.

 

Good advice there. The west is a HUGE area and even though things look "like a short drive away" on the map, you could spend hours and hours jumping around. It would suck even more with a trailer since the open road highways allows 80mph cruising, but you sure won't be doing that with a trailer behind a tacoma.

Moab is a great area. I'd seriously consider that as my basecamp. Enjoy the trip -- it's great out there.

 

Here is my Trip thread I started.

https://www.tacomaworld.com/threads/exploring-moab-over-thanksgiving-week-join-us.507295/

Yellowstone will be closed so we will spend as much time as we can in Moab and maybe peak at the Grand Canyon.