Duck_Hunter's camping/hunting/fishing chronicles (and a very limited number of mods)

I am relatively new to the forum and enjoy all of the helpful information, awesome pictures and videos, and (most of) the BS. I won't be doing any off-roading, except very light stuff, to camp or hunt, but it won't be hardcore unless things get western by accident.

What I'm trying to say is, there won't be a lot of modding to this thing, so I will probably use this space mostly to chronicle road trips, hunting trips and fishing trips.

My wife and I traded in her beloved 1998 MT SR5 AC with 210,000 miles and two salvage titles on it. It also had an ARE cap on the back. We got a 2014 DCSB MT TRD OR with 29,000 miles on it.

First mod: ATC hard cap



The first thing the installer noticed once he got it out in the sunlight was the dark spot under the cap's window. I had just seen the thread about how MGM is hard to color match (someone's third gen in MGM is basically two different colors). The installer, salesman and owner of the place I bought it all came out to take a look and take pictures. They wanted to send it back to the manufacturer, which I'm fine with, except for one problem. We bought this thing for a road trip to Arizona and Utah next week to visit national parks.

They all three said, almost in unison, "no problem! Just bring it back when you get back in town and we will send it in then." I'm very happy with the place I bought it from.

Anyway, that's it for now. I'll update with pictures from our road trip when we get back and maybe I'll be adding some mods over time (I want new wheels and tires, but we will see).

Thanks for looking.

 

My wife, our dog and I got home a few hours ago from a helluva trip. We left Friday, August 26, and saw so much and took so many pictures, I'm not sure I will be able to cover it all in a follow up post, but I'll hit the highlights.

Our goal on day one was to get to a campground in the Jimez Mountains of New Mexico. We left Fort Worth shortly after 6 a.m. and made it to the San Antonio campgrounds weary and ready for a beer around 5:30 or so. It was a long day but worth it. I didn't expect New Mexico to have such nice forests, but it does. On the way back, we had more time to explore this area and found that there are tons of places to drive dirt roads and find your own camp spot. I really can't say enough about this area and I hope I get to go back and explore the rest of it. Here are the ribeyes I cooked over our camp fire:



We woke up and drove to the Grand Canyon, which is a must-see place, in my opinion. It's stunning. It's also a very well-laid out park and amazing how smoothly everything runs there, despite its size. There is so much wildlife, too. We saw several elk and mule deer that have no worries about being around people because no hunting is allowed.

We saw a rainbow, a sunset and a sunrise at the Grand Cabyon before we left for Lee's Ferry, Arizona to get ready for our Paria Canyon three day/two night backpacking trip.







Paria Canyon is a cool place, but can be dangerous to backpack because there is no trail, you're hiking through a river that looks like chocolate milk, has rocks and - no shit - quicksand. It's also very susceptible to flash floods, so you've got to be careful. Unfortunately, due to rain in Bryce, it was unsafe for us to go when we had planned, especially with a dog. We tried to get permits for later in the week (they only allow 20 permits per day) and we thought that would work out. We would adjust our schedule and head to Zion first, then come back and hike part of the way down, set up camp and spend two days down in the canyon exploring the main route and also Buckskin Gulch, another part of the Paria Canyon you can choose to hike if you feel like adding another two days to your backpacking excursion.

We got to Zion and all of the camping spots were full. We were able to get into the group campgrounds and, guess what we saw when we pulled up. It was this sweet Tacoma, owned by a guy named Russell, who has been on the road for six weeks already, just flying solo. He is a good dude and a member of the forum.



The next morning, my wife and I dropped our dog off at the Doggy Dude Ranch in Springdale for the day where he had plenty of space to run around with other dogs for the day while we hiked.

We did about 95% of Angel's Landing, which is an awesome hike, but we didn't have the energy or - ahem - courage, to do the last section at the very top. You have to climb along some very steep and narrow cliffs using chains bolted into the rock. This is after nearly three miles of hiking almost straight up, at altitude, and in the heat.

The part we did wasn't so bad. The part we didn't do looked much worse and, based on the way people had acted along the chains so far, we decided not to finish it. I'm ok with our decision, but I think my wife has a little regret.

Next, we hiked The Narrows, which is awesome. If we had more time, we would have done Angel's Landing one day and The Narrows another. We went pretty deep into the canyon, but not deep enough to get away from the crowds. We picked up our faithful hound, Bocephus, who was pooped, and headed back to camp.

The next day, we went back to Paria to start our two night base camp deal in lieu of the backpacking trip we had planned. When we tried to change our permits earlier in the week, I screwed it up somehow and it didn't go through. We only had permits for the day we were there, so we had to hike in and hike out. We were able to camp at the trailhead, though, and it was a pretty awesome experience nonetheless.

It was a hard hike. The plan was to cover 38 miles in three days. We covered 16 in one day and it was difficult. I'm glad we didn't backpack, because it rained the night before in Bryce again and would have been dangerous.

More to come, including more pictures and an unplanned, but fun, off road experience.

 

Here are photos from Paria Canyon.







Here are the two good shots of Antelope Canyon I took on my phone. It is a slot canyon located outside of Page, Arizona. The truck is what the guides drive you to the canyon in. They sit 12 or so in the back and three, including the driver, in front and are pretty rowdy.

 

Boulder Mountain in Utah is part of the Dixie National Forest and where we camped one night. Highly recommend it and wish we had more time to explore there. It's beautiful in the middle of your typical southern Utah desert.





My wife suggested we drive to the Grand Staircase National Minument and, since we weren't on too strict of a timeline, we did it without looking into it too much. Turns out, "monument" is a bit of a misnomer. It's an off-road trail with some nice views and an arch to see. The map lists it as a dirt road. It quickly turns into a little more than we bargained for, because I'm not at all experienced in driving over some of the stuff we drove over, but the truck handled it fine and I tried to take it slow, which worked out well.



That's a bad picture of the most serious obstacle that we drove over (coming back, we found a less-intense route). The dark spot in the middle of the hill we tried to take slow but the ditch a few feet above it requires some momentum. 4L helped, we didn't get stuck or scrape too bad (the bottom of the hill is steeper than it looks in the picture) and I breathed a sigh of relief. I know it's nothing to a lot of y'all, but my off road experience is limited to deep mud county roads trying to get to the duck lease, not rock crawling.

The road was like that creek bed, for the most part, but was up and down a mountain. It was fun, even though I was out of my element driving it. These pictures don't do it justice and I was too busy paying attention to take pictures anywhere other than the dirt parts. Some of y'all would enjoy this road if you're out in that part of the country. It goes on quite a while and there is a sign that says it is "impassible" after 24 miles. If we had known, we would have planned to drive farther into it and primitive style.