Poison Spider and Fins & Things - 2024 Memorial Day Moab Trip

Recap of Memorial Day Weekend 2024 - Moab, Utah

A few weeks back I texted @LunarTaco13 about making some wheeling plans for the long Memorial Day weekend. I was incredibly stoked when he responded that he too was planning on hitting Moab for the long weekend. From there, I started watching & reading about the trails that we should hit during this trip. After much research, we landed on Poison Spider Mesa and Top of the World as the trails we'd attempt to explore during this trip.

I started getting more & more excited as the week leading up to the long weekend got closer to Friday. Luckily, I work for an awesome company who gave me Friday off as well, so I got an extra long weekend this year . Given I had Friday off, I decided to make my grocery run Thursday night & meal prep breakfast & some taco stuff so I could more quickly enjoy meals while simultaneously watching Theo. On Thursday night a buddy of mine texted me asking if I wanted to do something & mentioned I couldn't join for anything that evening, but he was welcome to join me for the trip to Moab if he wanted. He quickly responded & confirmed he was in for the weekend, which was awesome. He's in the market for a 4th gen 4Runner, so this outing to Moab was going to be a great intro to the incredible & expensive world of wheeling & truck modifications. Anyways, I got the truck all loaded up & meals prepped Thursday night.

Friday morning came & I woke up bright & early to walk Theo, make coffee, and throw some final items in the truck. My buddy arrived around 7:30 and we hit the road at 8:00 am. We got into Moab around 3:30 pm & immediately began the search for a campsite. Luckily, Ryan & his wife put together a nice list of sites that we could checkout. We started w/ Gemini Bridges, but unfortunately those sites were full. Beautiful drive back to them though! After that, we attempted the sites along the CO river on the east side of Moab. All were full... at this point I started to get a bit anxious & frustrated. One of my least favorite parts of camping in the summer is how busy sites get. I love that other are enjoying the outdoors, but it's so challenging to randomly attempt checking out a site just to find out it's full. To me, it just wastes so much of your time in whatever place you're trying to explore. Luckily, the third campsite location we checked out had site available - score!! It's a designated campsite, but I'm going to keep it secret for now since it seems to get a little less traffic .

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After setting up camp & before heading into town to meet up with the larger group for dinner & to watch the Mavs vs. T-Wolves game 2, I tried deflating my tires to soften the ride out of camp. I have the ARB easy deflator & it has worked great for me so far. Very simple tool that removes the valve core & has a built in pressure gauge that allows you to air down accurately. Unfortunately, one of my valve cores was installed way too tight or cross treaded upon install, so I always have to swap out the ARB easy deflator for an old school tire pressure gauge that has the tab on the back that presses the core in. Comparatively, it's super slow & not fun to use, haha. So this time I decided that I'd try to add some leverage to the easy deflator core remover by putting a vice grip on it to see if I could knock that core loose. BAD IDEA. I sheared the core in half and jammed it, which no longer allowed me to remove or add air. Luckily it was holding air. After breaking the core, I decided to not mess with it anymore since it was holding & just take it into a tire shop first thing Saturday morning. We ended the night back at camp & enjoyed some good times around the campfire before heading to bed.

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Saturday we woke up, made breakfast & coffee, and rolled out of camp around 8:30 am. Most of the tire shops were closed for the holiday weekend, but luckily Point S Moab Tire & Auto Service was open. Long story short, it took them like 3.5 hours to change the entire valve stem & TPMS sensor out. The TMPS sensor they swapped in didn't communicate with the other 3 tires & they couldn't reset the tire pressure dummy light manually, so now it's on constantly and I need to take it in to somewhere here in CO to get it fixed. Annoying to spend $85 on a half way / temporary fix, but I was happy I could get it fixed at all and also properly air down for the upcoming trails.

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Due to the late start, we didn't hit Poison Spider Mesa (6/10 rating on the RR4W website) until like 12 pm, which was not optimal. I felt bad I had burned so much of our day due to a stupid mistake, but the boys were super cool about it & we were stoked to hit the trail. We got to the trail head, aired down, and hit the trail. Man, does Poison Spider live up to the 6 rating. Easily the most challenging trail @LunarTaco13 and I have attempted to date. The trail starts almost immediately with a crazy ledge on one of the switchbacks. There's a single line that a Taco w/ 33s can take and it's narrow - about the exact width of the truck. One side has a 1.5-2' drop and the other is a 3-4' rock face that you could easily slam the side of your truck into. It took us a while to get thru this obstacle, but we made it without damage.

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As we continued, the trail consistently challenged our trucks. We did the mini wedgy & the large ledge obstacles further along the trail. I made it up the stair step ledge obstacle thanks to my front locker. Ryan attempted it as well, but due to his wheel base, which caused him to get hung up on the trans skid, and only having a rear locker, we had to winch him up. Kinda fun getting to use all the toys haha.

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Made it through tie rod flats, which is a head bobbling section of rock, to the first major obstacle called waterfall. This obstacle was a fun, but easy challenge for the trucks. After climbing up waterfall, we made our way through a narrow, steep rocky section to the most difficult obstacle of the day. It's not named anything specifically, but it's a steep and off-camber climb with some deep holes. Got a couple new marks on the sliders & the skids on this one for sure. My front locker again came in handy here. Ryan got up as well, with his A-Trac coming in clutch. That system works so well.

At this point, we had taken about 2.5 hours to get 1/3 of the way through the trail and it was nearly 3:00 pm. We started making our way to the v-notch, but instead of pushing on, decided to turn around, stop for lunch, and just head back down the trail. At the pace we were going, we would have been on the trail until late evening & we just didn't have the energy or the courage to put our trucks through the rest of the trail. Lunch provided some amazing views, but while were eating a storm rolled in. The winds picked up like crazy & it was like being in a sandstorm. Then it started sprinkling / raining. We got in the the trucks & made our way back down the trail. Luckily, the storm passed in about 20 mins and we got sunshine the rest of the day. We stopped for ice cream on our way back to camp. That night we enjoyed dinner at camp, some beers around the campfire, and some incredible views of the stars.

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Sunday morning rolled around & we got up for another awesome day in the desert. We fixed breakfast & coffee and discussed our plan for the day. Due to the challenge of Poison Spider and having some additional folks joining us for their first or second time offroading, we decided to replace Top of the World with Fins & Things. It was a great decision. I know I ran it recently, but that trail simply rocks (pun intended). To me, it's quintessential Moab. It has slick rock fins, rocky climbs / descents, sandy high speed areas, amazing views, and is just the right mix of challenge, beauty, and fun. I wont spend a ton of words recapping this trail run, but here are some pictures from the trail. We had an awesome day.

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Unfortunately, weekends like this always have to come to an end. We had breakfast at camp Monday morning & stopped in town on our way out to grab some coffee and air up the tires to highway pressures. Made good time on the way back to Denver and even had some time to reset before the short work week. I know this is a long read, so for those who made it to this point - thank you for reading!!

Also, HUGE shoutout to my buddy who joined for this trip & Ryan's wife for being the photographers. They took some incredible shots. I just love looking back at the photos after the trips and reliving the moments.

 

Fantastic. Great trip report and fabulous photos; looks like you all had a great time!

 

Thank you, Dan! Really appreciate the kind words . Your trip reports serve as inspo for my report format, so thanks for all your amazing work as well! Always enjoy reading / seeing your content!

 

Nice write-up. Too bad you didn't have time to run Hells Revenge (right next to Fins and Things) for some very challenging obstacles.
Sounds like the front locker was more useful then the rear? What front locker do you have?
I got my G1 Tundra stuck on the Golden Crack with no lockers. A rear locker would not have helped near as much as a front locker here. With the auto-LSD, adding a front locker 1st makes more sense to me than the rear. I can think of more situations where the front locker is preferable over a rear but both diffs locked would make the Tacoma an unstoppable crawling beast.

 

Thank you! And apologies for the slow reply.

I’ve actually ran hells revenge (well, part of it, haha) a couple years ago on my first trip to Moab. Hell of a trail and definitely one I’ll be running sometime again soon!

Nice shot of your rig. I have ARB air lockers front and rear. I see your point about how having a front locker could make sense for your since you already have an LSD in the rear, but I personally would go with a rear first. Being able to push the truck up / over obstacles tends to be my main use of my locker. I frequently use my rear locker, but seldomly use my front. Main reason for this approach is because the rear axle is so much stronger than the front CVs. But if you can swing the cost or are regearing and getting in there anyways, I say just get both installed. It doesn’t add that much more cost, relatively speaking, and the capability is INSANE when you’re double locked. Like you said - it becomes a beast even with 33s haha.