TL;DR
Distance: 9 miles
Type: Straight Through
Time: 2.3 Hours
Difficulty: Easy to Moderate
Rating: 4 stars
Yankee Hill road was explained to me to be easy. As you might know I am pretty new to taking my 4Runner off-road and I have been trying to take it up some easy trails to see how it does. I planned to go up to Yankee Colorado to check out this trail during the time my kids were at school. I drove up highway I-70 until I got to Fall River Road, exit 238. The drive up was really nice. There were scattering aspen trees throughout and the leaves had just started changing to the fall colors.
I continued up until I found the turn off right by a ATV Tour center. The dirt road up to the start of the trail was pretty easy and was maintained good.
Once I got to the entrance of the trail, I freaked out. So much that I didn’t even take a picture. On the video I will include I do have me exiting the same place I came up so you can check it out there. It was a skinny path with a pretty good incline with large rocks all around. I want to be honest. I almost turned around right there. This was not a easy path I was promised. But I am new. Maybe this is easy. So I decided to try it. The 4Runner took the opening pretty well. I don’t even think I had 4 wheel drive on yet. What came after was a pretty steady supply of rock covered road that was super bumpy and had some large rocks spread around. At one point I had to get out and move a large rock out of the way. I almost couldn’t move it. Here is a gallery of the path conditions on the way up to the first pass.
The top of the first pass was awesome. This is probably the highest I have been in my 4Runner and it was great. I had my Golden Retriever with me and let her out to run around for a bit. We even sat in the back with the hatch open and looked at the view for a while. She loved being up there. She didn’t seam to like the bumpy ride up though. Here are some amazing views of the top.
After I got to the first pass I checked my GPS maps I pre-downloaded before I left my house. You never know what kind of service you are going to have when you get on the mountains so I make sure I have a way to get out if I get lost or something happens to my 4Runner. I realized after checking that I was running out of time. I had to be back in Denver to pick my kids from school and was wondering if I could still make the drive. Was talking a lot longer than I had planned but I decided to continue a little more to see if the road for a little easier and then would be faster to travel. Boy I was wrong.
I traveled a while down this very rocky road. I actually hit a few times under my 4Runner but not to hard. My 4Runner is stock so a higher lifted vehicle with bigger wheels might have a better time on this trail. I decided to turn around once I got down this path a bit further. I am glad I did because I only had about 2 hours to spare when I got home and I had two hours left to drive plus the hour drive home left in the trip from the info I had about it. I plan on coming up here again with another person because I don’t think at this point I feel safe traveling this road by myself right now. I feel like most of my anxiety was because I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to get home in time. This is a weekend trip for next time with no time limits and should be way more enjoyable for me.
In all it was a good trip. I had fun and so did my dog. I would say if you don’t have a pretty good stock clearance or a good lift I would stay away from this road or just be really careful when selecting your lines. When it got really rocky and bumpy there was no where to turn around until you went far down the path. Thanks for reading.
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