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Moab Utah - Land Rover National Rally - Day 3 - Klondike Bluffs

Day 3 in Moab was the first official day of Land Rover National Rally. On this day, our SCLR group broke up, and I chose an easier trail, reputed to offer some incredible views of natural arches and such. This trail was to go through the Klondike Bluffs (an old mining area) , past some dinosaur prints, and then drop down into Arches National Park. Sounded good to me. The trail itself was easy, and fairly long. Photos are here:

Photos of Klondike Bluffs & Arches (45 images on SmugMug)

The day started quite early in the morning. The procedure was that you picked a trail based on the placard in the lead trucks window, then drove up to form a line behind it. There were about 10 or 12 different trails run every day, and officially there were 152 different Land Rovers (well, mostly Land Rovers), participating. There were a total of 5 LR3’s there, one Range Rover Sport (Adam’s), and MANY Defenders. More Defenders than I have ever seen before! There were no Freelanders, and about an equal mix of Range Rover Classics and Discovery’s. A couple P38’s, but no current (3rd Generation) Range Rovers to be found.

Our group started out on a long road trek to the trail head. We soon got to a large slab of slickrock (petrified sand, ie: sand stone), and saw quite a few very distinctive dinosaur prints in the sand stone. Very cool! Shortly after that, we came to a nice fissure in the sand stone, that provided a range of difficulty in passing through, from easy to as hard as you’d like. I opted for a medium difficulty spot, and promptly got stuck. My wheels had no purchase in the sand at the bottom of the crack, and I needed to take several approaches at it. On my fourth attempt, I found the right line and began to climb up the other side, but was given a bit of a bad Spot by a fellow LR3 driver (sorry Ray), and pushed my bumper just enough to make contact with the rock. Doh! Not a big deal, it was the same spot I dinged ages ago in Last Chance Canyon. Turned the wheels the opposite direction, and drove right out. Dave Lane in his LR3 followed in a more difficult portion, and made it look easy.

We stopped soon after at a place where you can hike a bit further on and see a magnificent overlook. A few of us made the hike, and then continued up scrambling farther into the rocks along the top of the bluffs. Very nice spot.

Continuing on, We go up and down a nice hill with some well placed rocks to navigate, and drop down into a large flat valley where we stopped to regroup. The rest of the trip was pretty uneventful. We did get to seen an arch (Tower Arch), and cruised past the bottom of the Klondike Bluffs that we had climbed up from the other side. We marched along slowly, until we got to an awesome dry river bed. We let the first group go way ahead (like 15 minutes or so), and then Dave Lane and I put our foot down hard into the soft river bed sand and had a total BLAST racing through the banks of the old wash. It was the most fun I’d had on the trip yet. It lasted only a mile or two, but was great fun. We quickly caught up to everyone, and the second half of the group was not far behind us. We ended up in Arches National Park at Balanced Rock, and then the group headed for home. I went the other direction, and went deeper into the park and found some more off road trails, but didn’t see much else of interest, and headed on back.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 9th, 2006 at 3:00 am and is filed under Land Rover, Moab, Photography, trail runs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Moab Utah - Land Rover National Rally - Day 3 - Klondike Bluffs

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