Hole in the Rock Trail

Lifelong Jeeper said:
What is it about this trail that makes you love it so much? I want to run it so bad but am not getting much support from those in my group. Maybe I'll have to come run it on EJS with you.
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Hi Old Geezer and Lifelong Jeeper,
Thanks for the link to the other thread.
The beauty of the area and being able to research the areas history, makes it very special place for me.
When I first ran the trail 23 years ago, it had hardly had any use, In many places it was very hard to find the trail.
This trail offers the solitude with challenge and is wonderful. As the word spread about the trail it has become very popular and used more. A lot of the solitude has been replaced with more quads and motorcycle use. I have no problem with this as the trail is all of ours to share.
The trail can be run with a stock vehicle and a excellent driver. I have done it myself! I have even done it with Jean Akens as my passenger in 2 wheel drive on a pre-run before EJS. This was not to show-off or anything we were just in a hurry to do the trail in one day. The best way to do this is the knack of picking the line to keep both tires in the ground of the drive axle.
A note about the north side of the trail to the actual "Hole in the Rock" from the Escalate side. Last year in a snow and rain storm, 3 road grades were coming out from the HITR as I was heading in (on the way to EJS). They have it bladed for 2 wheel drives, across the slick rock about 5 miles from the end. The blades made some nice banks along the sides. This left some long deep mud puddles in the road. When I got to town I was 75 pounds heaver with the mud.
 
Hey Alex, when are you planning to run HITR? Me and a buddy are planning a trip to HITR the weekend of April 18th - we'll be driving over from Las Vegas - if that's the same weekend it'd be nice to have some company, especially since neither one of us has done this trail.
 
We'll be there the weekend after you!

Don't worry about a thing, I have only done that trail once and it was the first time for everyone involved. That made it feel more like an adventure, giving us a little better appreciation of the work it took for the poineers to find their way through the unknown.
 
I hear ya, always fun! There's a chance we may push our trip to the following weekend so another buddy can make it. We'll see how it pans out but either way I'm sure we'll come across some fellow overlanders.
 
What a great trail! We had a good, safe time but made the mistake of setting up base camp in Lake Canyon late Friday afternoon after getting a late start out of Flagstaff that morning. We planned to leave camp there and drive in and back out to camp all in one day. We won't make that mistake again!! As it was, we didn't have enough time to make it to the end. Being our first time we stopped a lot to take photos and assess obstacles, etc. It was 4:30 by the time we made it down through the chute and up the next ridge. That's when we huddled up and decided to turn around and head back to camp, knowing we would be driving in the dark. Fortunately, having covered all those obstacles going in we knew the lines to take on the way back out so we were able to backtrack out in almost half the time it took us going in. There were a lot of quads and dirt bikes camped in Lake Canyon but we drove back a ways and had a nice quiet spot protected from all the winds. The washout at Lake Canyon was quite impressive. Going UP the bypass in the daytime was pretty easy; going DOWN it in the dark caused a slight pucker(!) but turned out to be quite easy - all owed to our 2 excellent spotters. I learned a lot about my FJ and my driving ability on this run.

We also ran across a group of 11 Land Rover vehicles coming out on Saturday. I saw them on Sunday morning at the marina and talked to them a bit. They ran the new Nokai bypass route on Saturday and said it was very beautiful that way, and not quite as challenging as the normal route. They also said it's still a fairly "new" route, and the signage isn't all that great.

A great time was had - we'll be back!
 
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