Hi Amir: Good luck on your cross country trip. I’m sure you will find your LR3 more than capable, as I did mine. I hope you get to do some 4-wheeling here in Utah if you are in the Moab area. While my trip was not right by Moab (across the river about 70 miles west of there), I’ll share my experience to whet your appetite!
I just completed my LR3’s maiden 4-wheeling trip to the east side of the Horseshoe Canyon unit of Canyonlands N.P. in south-central Utah. Horseshoe Canyon is home to some of the finest rock art in Utah, if not all of the USA. The west side of the Canyon is accessible to two wheel drive vehicles. Access to the less popular east side requires 4 wheel drive or overnight hiking. The first 70 miles of dirt road from Utah 24 to the turnoff at the southeast corner of the canyon was smooth and uneventful. I did get a brief (five second) yellow suspension fault warning when I took a turn a little fast and hard with my fully loaded vehicle (3 mountain bikes and 3 nights firewood on the Yakima roof rack, plus coolers, water and gear for 3 people and a dog for 4 days-3 nights).
After unloading and setting up camp just off of the Spur road (on BLM land outside of both the park and Glen Canyon National Recreation Area to accommodate my dog), we did a little wheeling from our camp to the trailhead of the ominous sounding Dead Man’s Trail leading into the Grand Gallery section of the canyon. The hike into the park and to the Grand Gallery is only 1.5 miles from this trailhead, but first the road and then the trail drop precipitously into the canyon. It was quite a strenuous hike at mid-day back out of the canyon and up to the ride. The next day we went wheeling a little bit and then to another trailhead, this time into the northeast corner of the canyon. Where the road ended (it was washed out circa 1997), we hiked for about 4 miles to catch 3 more sites of pictographs. The pictographs in Horseshoe Canyon are Archaic- meaning they predate the Fremont and Anasazi cultures more commonly known in the Southwest (builders of cliff dwellings and graneries in Mesa Verde, think Kokopelli, etc.). The dating of the Archaic art is apparently 2000-3000 years old, versus 900 for Anasazi culture.
Both of the 4-wheel drive roads leading to this part of Park from the east have some easy to moderate difficulty wheeling. It was a good first outing for me and my LR3. We got to know each other better. It took a while to get used to the hill descent, but once I learned to ease off of the throttle on approach to a descent, it worked great. This really is an amazingly capable vehicle off-road. I actually think it is geared lower than my old Jeep CJ-7. The rock crawl and sand modes work very well. I climbed a very steep sand hill on the first attempt so effortlessly it (almost) took the fun out of it-except for grinning afterward at my passengers, who were kind of shocked we were even going to try it! I am going to have some big fun with this truck, especially now that I have red Utah desert sand in every nook and cranny and I’m finally “over” that new car protectionism.
One thing I will say- the trip computer on my LR3 freaked me out. After we camped and drove around (maybe 20 miles) in low range using terrain response “sand” and “rock crawl” modes, the computer started telling me that my range had decreased to about 100 miles. As I knew I had to go at least 85 miles from camp to the nearest gas at Hanksville, UT, I started to become concerned. When we returned to camp the last day before we were to drive out, my computer showed we had a range of only 80 miles-five miles short of Hanksville. My gas gauge showed just better than a third of a tank-but how much fuel was all that low range driving consuming? Well, as we drove out in high range over that good dirt road, the computer adjusted, and before I knew it I had a range of 102 miles. In fact it kept recalibrating, and it turned out I had 90 miles range when I had to choose between ducking into Hanksville or motoring back to Green River, which was my preference in terms of a direct route home. It’s obvious that the low range driving uses more gas than I would have thought for as slow as I was driving. But the trip computer will not rule me next time, as it played with my mind a bit before it returned to reality.
http://i3.tinypic.com/vrq5pf.jpg Camp
http://i3.tinypic.com/vrq1vq.jpg Dead Man's Trail
http://i3.tinypic.com/vrq6bb.jpg Part of Grand Gallery
, the first change was at around 1200 miles. i know, i am truely earning the couple of titles that i have earned here on this forum) at 2812 miles so i guess i should be good for the next three or four thousand miles or so.
