A friend at work just bought a mint condition 97 tacoma 4x4, with 67k miles on it and has never ever been truly off road. So a bunch of us sought to remedy this situation by taking him and his truck out for a mild run at bull dog canyon.
Bull dog canyon is an interesting place because it's only about 30 minutes from home but yet feels like it's in the middle of no where. That is, until you crest a hill and see the city of mesa before you.
So the group consisted of 5 vehicles. One stock jeep rubicon, 1 mildly lifted 4 door wranger, a fully built xterra, the stock tacoma, and my stock 07 4runner. Why did I take my stock 4runner you ask? Two reasons. One, I've never really taken it off road so I wanted to see what it could do. The other reason was so that my friend could follow my line with his tacoma and know that if I could do it, he could do it. I did take off the running boards, however (and it's a good thing I did).
Here's the shiny, practically new, tacoma
Here's the xterra on the first, sort of, but not really, obstacle.
The 4runner's large butt scrapes on everything, but makes it up just fine.
And the tacoma makes it down the hill without scraping anything.
Here's the xterra on a real obstacle.
And the jeep on the same obstacle
One of the dangers of desert wheeling, but despite this cactus is stuck to the tire, it didn't do anything. These cholla balls are excruciating when they get stuck to people.
Coming down.
But it's not all rocks and cactus; this is also the prime time for desert flowers.
Except even the flowers have spikes
A shot of the 4runner before I went down the rock face.
I've got a few more scrapes and dents underneath now, but nothing serious.
Look at all those dash lights that need to be on, just to go off road.
Overall, my friend had a really good time for his first trip out off road. He called me up later the same day, all excited to build up his tacoma. But, I suggested that instead of doing that, he should finish up the FJ40 that we started rebuilding a couple years ago. It would be a way better off roader in the end, and he agreed. Hopefully, this trip will jump start that project again.
Oh, so how did the 4runner do? Well, I think if only it were a couple inches taller, it would be more capable than a stock pre 4th gen 4runner/tacoma. I had to be really careful about which lines I took because I didn't want to hit anything underneath. Meanwhile, the tacoma just sailed over everything.
But the 4th gen had 2 things going for it. The traction control really worked well. Whenever I lifted a tire, the braking system kicked in and I just kept moving forward. Only one time was it not aggressive enough and I had to back up and hit it with some momentum.
The other thing is the large amount of low end torque of the V6. For most of the obstacles, even going up hills, I just idled over everything. It was truly amazing. Only once in a while would I have to give it the slightest blip of the throttle to get over a rock. In contrast to the 3.0 of my 93 4runner, I would have to give it a good amount of gas to get over stuff and use my left foot on the brakes at the same time to keep from bouncing over stuff.
Anyway, it sounds like a good time was had by all. Too bad it's starting to get hot out. In another month or two, it'll be too hot to go outside.
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