Middle St Vrain - Coney Flats loop

So not too many pictures or vids of the wheeling. My wife was scared sh**less to get out of the truck. And the pics are kind of crappy because they were taken on my iPhone.

9 mile loop with about 5 "oh boy" spots for a stock Tacoma. To Ol' Red's credit, two guys in a rock crawling Jeeps said, "Good luck, no way you make it."

Passenger side rocker panel took a big hit (see pic) because there was a 20 foot section of narrow trail where I had to keep strategically placing tires on rocks ranging from 2 foot in diameter to 3 feet. Somewhere in the middle of that stretch is where I dropped too hard off one of the rocks and smashed the rocker panel.

Ironically about 30 minutes before that I was telling my wife about the wonderful functionality of sliders

The only video comes from the Coney Creek crossing. Piece of cake, but at that point my wife had sh@t herself enough and said, "no way I'm going through that." So she took the adjacent boardwalk and filmed it. I watched a total moron in a Jeep Cherokee take it first to see the depth, any underlying rocks etc... So the dude barrels into it going about 5-10 mph, throws a huge wave over his windshield (no snorkel, mind you) and then tries to go full throttle through the whole thing only to violently hit a rock about 3/4 the way through the crossing. Dumba** yahoo

So this is the first picture. It's 4 miles up the Middle St Vrain where you begin the loop back on the Coney Flats trail (507). It's hard to see but at the top there are three rocks. One on the left side of the trail, one in the middle-ish and one on the right. I would have loved to been able to go around on one side or the other, but the configuration of the rocks prohibited that. So I had to get both tires up on the two rocks on the trail (see next pic)



Here are the two rocks. The one on the left in this picture is about 3 feet and the one on the right is about two feet. This was really tough in the stock Tacoma. Thank god for skid plates.



A mile after that 507 junction you get to Coney Flats and Coney Creek



Nothing special about this picture... in fact I don't like it. However it is the last known visual on my front license plate. Sawtooth Mountain in the background



And a glamour shot of Ol' Red




Rocker panel damage



Well deserved trip out to our favorite pizza joint

 

Video of the creek crossing

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJP0flVfcD4

 

Nice to see you pushing that little taco hard!

 

Holy innuendos!





Thanks. I wish my wife was such a white-knuckler and would have gotten out of the truck to take more pics/vids

The trail was pretty gnarly for a stock Tacoma.

In fact I locked up the rear more on Saturday than I had in the 12 previous years.