So as from the last posts, we were prepared to drive out 97 Jetta from Denver to Montrose, CO then from Montrose on the 160 mile Rimrocker trail to Moab, Utah. A brief background, as I don’t remember if I mentioned it, on the Rimrocker. In general, it is considered a 3 out of 5 on the “offroading” scale and not recommended for any vehicle that isn’t build for offroading/lifted. Really a solid choice for our vehicle that sounds like a box of metal parts driving around.

The first 90 or so miles of the trail went fairly smoothly. It is primarily just a dirt road through a forest. Was still a lot of fun until Kody(you’ll find him in several photos), our guest passenger and veteran of several Rickshaw Runs, claims to have spotted a bear. A point of contention for the remainder of the trip. This day ended with us crashing in Naturita, Colorado at the Rimrock Hotel. It is a lovely hotel with a solid bar and a friendly owner looking to sell after owning it for some time. So…if anyone is interested in purchasing, you’re welcome.

After a not so labored nights sleep, the next day was meant to be packed with what was considered the hard part of the trail.

So the Rimrocker website gives a good breakdown of the trail piece by piece. The parts that were iffy to us were the river crossing and the “Rocky Descent”. Though, as Colorado is in a bit of a drought, the river was empty. While it was definitely bumpy it wasn’t a potential “day-ender” like we thought.

No doubt this did a number on our suspension and muffler but didn’t slow us down. It’s also worth noting that our muffler took a beating on this trip and became detached at some point between now and several hours from now and our vehicle started to sound loud and awesome.

At some point, we realized as well that our gas gauge was way off and had no idea if we were able to make it. Though based on the trail length that wasn’t the biggest worry. What ended up a large worry was the large hills around mile 90. It took us roughly 45 minutes and 4 or 5 tries to get up the first large one. When we finally got to the top a local came up on a 4×4 asking if we were lost. We confirmed that we were just stupid.

The hills got easier but more rocky it was mostly slow going. We perpetually ripped of our bumper and by the 4th time we just pulled it off the back and turned it into our new spoiler. Which I think looked awesome.

We started to get a little over confident that we would make it at this point and ended up getting unlucky and hitting a fuel line on a rock. We were leaking gas, but not at an alarming rate. We had to take some time to superglue that. I should note this wasn’t an advised fix we just happened to have superglue from all the dinosaur toys we were gluing to the inside of our car. This did seem to fix the leak though.

Unfortunately at this point and the pace we were making we wouldn’t be able to finish before dark and had to pull off the trail and drive in to Moab. we had done 3/4ths of the trail roughly. We were pretty proud and confident if we had another day on the trail we could make it. We even heard from the Rimrocker officials asking to use our story as an official warning on their site as to why you need better vehicles for the trail. Though that is a bit disingenuous because we felt we could have made it with more time but we are all for that mark of honor either way.

We made this quick video on the event too and will be doing more rallies with this car for sure. In fact, we just finished the Rocky Mountain Rambler in it and will be making a post about that soon!