Last Saturday, a group of four of us went out and hit up the Sleeping Princess Trail, near Bullhead City. I've posted a couple reports before about this trail, and it's a fun little trail. Since there was some pretty serious rains out here in August and September, I wasn't sure what condition the trail would be in, but we decided to check it out anyway. The group was:

Sonny - FJ Cruiser
Marc P - SAS Runner, known as GOLDMEMBER!!!!
Daniel - H3
Yours Truly - Tacoma

This was Daniel's third time wheeling, and the first time on any potentially body-damaging terrain. He did great, learned a lot, and I was fairly impressed with the H3's performance. At the very least, he definitely separated himself from the vast majority of H3 owners...

Now for the pics:

On the approach trail:



Sonny coming down into the start of the real fun stuff. It's pretty off-camber, with not a lot of margin for error.

Me:


There's a fun little step up right after that off-camber section. Not too hard, but a lot of fun.
Sonny:

Marc:

Daniel:

Me:


Me horsing around:


A cool FJ pic:


A little further down the trail:



Stay tuned, more to come.

 

We hit a point on the trail that we felt was a little much for Daniel, and since Marc's been dealing with a questionable front end issue for a while, we decided that "discernment is the better part of valor", and turned around to go check out some other trails.

These pics are on the way out:



We decided to go check out a large mine in the area. Sonny has forgotten more than I know about this area, and he took us on a tour of this particular mine. It's massive. The actual name of the mine slips me at the moment.






Say hi to YotaTech, Marc!






What you're looking at is the remains of the elevator. It's long gone.



It's hard to gauge how deep it is in the pics. Those walls are between 150' to 200' feet high. It's massive.


A few more on the way...

 

After checking out that mine, we drove back to the highway and went East on 68 before turning South towards the Secret Pass area. There is a fun little trail that either takes you over the pass into Golden Valley, or will take you deeper into the mountains. We went deeper.

These pics are from one section that I have done before. The recent rains made it a lot more interesting than last time. I don't know why, but when you're sitting in the driver's seat, it looks a lot burlier than it does in the pics...

I led this one:





Marc:




Sonny:




Daniel:
(Who knew those H3's could flex? )


Finally, Marc and I being posers.




Well, there you go. If anyone is interested in information on these areas, just let me know.

Thanks to Marc for bringing his 4Runner and making everything look easy, thanks to Sonny for being a walking guidebook on the area, and thanks to Daniel for being teachable and for putting up with the occasional H3 joke.

It was a great time.

Oh yeah, one last shameless pic of my own truck:

 

Thanks for putting this run together CJ. That was a fun trip. The mine exploration was a real treat. Sonny really knows his history.

On the way home my rear driveshaft came apart and left my family and me stranded...luckily it happened in Temecula.

We need to plan a big meet up out there...I really want to explore that area more, and I want to run the rest of Sleeping Princess.

 

I'd be down for that for sure. We could easily link a few of these trails for an all-day thing (maybe multi-day?). Spring would be the best time, before it gets TOO hot. There's also a trail up outside of Kingman that I've been wanting to do. It takes you to an old mansion up in the Hualapies. Anyway, I'd really love to do a joint So-Cal/AZ run out here.

I forgot to post these earlier: Here's a little more of the scenery out here:



Not a bad place to live and wheel...

 

Awesome!

Very cool pictures, thanks for sharing.
The mine is cool, and yes, the pics are deceiving, the walls only look a few feet tall in a few of them.

That would be a cool place to explore.

 

This is a calender shot

 

Great pics of an interesting area.

I'd like to get in on some of your AZ runs in the future. Seems like you guys find some great places to explore.

 

Aaaaahhhhhh, nice.