My family and I went to Coyote Flats over the long weekend. We camped at Funnel Lake which is really nice but a little unsuited as a base camp spot because the road there is 40 minutes of pretty rough driving, which we had to do twice a day if we wanted to explore the area. There were some tight spots and some large rock that required careful tire placement. I would have been more comfortable with sliders, but they weren’t ready yet before we left. I’ll go pick them up on Saturday and install them.
On Friday afternoon we were the only people camped at Funnel Lake. It became much more crowded on Saturday.
Campsite looking in the other direction.
On the flats.
On the way to Baker creek, we had spectacular views if the North Palisade Range.
Trail on Sanger Meadow.
Ponderosa Pines.
Campsite again.
Smoke from the Creek Fire on the west side of the Sierras moved in on Sunday. This is at Green Lake overlook. The road there had a steep sandy hill were I had to use both lockers and some momentum to get up (and not use the bypass
).
View from the summit of Vagabond peak, which I climbed with my daughter.
Our tent broke in wind gusts while we were gone, I fixed it with a piece of pipe from my bottle jack and a bunch of duct tape.
What went well:
- 37s did not rub on the trails, even fully articulated. The additional ground clearance came in handy I’m sure. I’m running 45 psi all around on the road and 20 on the trails. I could have gone much lower probably, but there were some passages where I could go 30mph and I wouldn’t want to do that with 15psi or so.
- Spare tire in bed worked ok for a long weekend trip, enough space for all our gear and 5 bundles of firewood
- Carli Front diff guard got a couple of scrapes that might have saved me from leaking diff oil
- In general JUXI performed really well
- OnX Offroad App worked well for navigating
- Coyote Flats is an amazing area to explore, we’ll definitely be back.
What didn’t go so well:
- Sliders would have been nice just for the peace of mind, I was worried about rocker panel damage in a couple of spots. I’ll go pick them up in Apple Valley next weekend though.
- I can see why people run Thuren suspension packages. The bouncing while crawling over rocks was pretty annoying. With the camper shell, the Decked system, the larger spare tire and a lot of other gear we might be over the weight limit as well. I’ll need to drive over scales at some point to see what front and back axle weight is. The 250lbs of rock sliders coming next weekend won’t make that better either.
- The tent is pretty much trashed at this point. I bought it last black Friday for $80, so it’s not the end of the world as we probably slept 6 weeks in there in the last year. Roof top tent plans are forming (yet more weight).
- Camping at Funnel lake was nice, but there are more central camp sites we could have used for exploring the area. The trail to Funnel Lake is a little too long and rough to drive twice every day.
- We should have taken more pics from the harder parts of the trails.
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