Just came back from a 10 day road trip to Moab, Utah. Went with a group of friends in a GX470 and a 1st Gen Raptor. Spent time hiking and sight setting both Arches/Canyonlands National Park, and Dead Horse Point State Park. Also visited the Land Cruiser Museum in Salt Lake City - awesome place and I highly recommend it to any Toyota truck enthusiast.
Due to our time constraints and the unexpected failure of the Raptor's ball joint we were limited to Fins n' Things, Hell's Revenge, and the simple Shafer/Potash Trail. We initially planned to complete Top of the World as well. We did all the obstacles at Fins n’ Things and Hell's Revenge, less the Escalator and the deep hot tubs. We still had to drive over 1000 miles back home to the PNW. The Raptor is all stock, the GX and my SR5 has 33's. 4LO plus ATRAC handled everything on these trails, made easy work on rocky ascends. We didn't even touch our skid plates. Most were scrapes on the sliders or taps on the hitch or the corners of the rear bumper.
It was fun being the only Toyota's on the days we hit up the trails. All we encountered were swarms of side-by-sides and the typical Jeep groups with 40"+ tires. Surprisingly empty trails for the most part during the weekday.
We will back again soon but with a re-gear and bigger tires ready other trails. Will do Golden Spike, Poison Spider, ToW, and Elephant Hill next time since we got the National Parks out of way now. Moab is a must-visit for those into the outdoors, especially if you are into wheeling your 4Runner.
Fins n' Things 5/25
We don't have much rock crawling experience as we are used to messing around on dense forest and mountain roads in the wet PNW. We have some man-made rock gardens near Seattle but it's nothing like the slickrock in Moab. Fins n' Things was a great trail to get our feet wet in Moab. Fairly easy 9.5 mile trail consisting of some steep ascends/descends on slickrock fins. We didn't take any of the bypasses as the optional obstacles were pretty simple. The Raptor did scrape his running boards, front and rear hitch often due to the long wheel base and poor breakover angle.