Billings Canyon Jeep Trail - Colorado Invasion

This spring we got a chance to run Billings Canyon Jeep Trail. It is located near Grand Junction, Colorado, and has been adopted by the Grand Mesa Jeep Club.

Billings Canyon was the first new trail to be opened in Colorado following the Bureau of Land Management guidelines for new trail construction. It was more than a 4-year process-from finding an appropriate area for the trail, presenting it to the BLM, meeting all their requirements, building the trail, installing signs, and intervening on the lawsuit to stop construction-to the final opening of the trail.

In 1999 the concept of an extreme Jeep trail was presented to the BLM office in Grand Junction. Members of the Grand Mesa Jeep Club flew over the Bangs Canyon area south of Grand Junction looking for a canyon that would make an extreme Jeep trail. After club members walked Billings Canyon with a GPS and plotted it on a map, it was presented to BLM for approval to develop into an actual trail.

It took 688 volunteer hours to build the trail and countless hours in meetings with BLM to solve any problems that arose. The construction of this trail was a kind of a pilot program and because of the successful development and use of Billings Canyon Jeep Trail, the process is being used by many other BLM offices for new trail development. Billings Canyon is now known all over the country as a superlative extreme Jeep trail.

This trail could represent the first step toward a future of working with the BLM and other government agencies to keep public areas available for Jeeping and possibly even open up new wheeling areas across the country. If nothing else, it makes for a great day of wheeling.

Carrie Sheata had a blast running her '92 YJ down this trail for the first time. With front and rear Detroit Lockers, a 4.0:1 Atlas II, a Treks front coil conversion, chromoly axleshafts, and 37-inch Goodyears, her Jeep was more than up to the task.	Take the left line or take the right line, it doesn't matter-either way you go, you'll find out just how flexy your Jeep is on this trail. There are plenty of optional lines similar to this, but thanks to the tree just beyond, even stock-width Jeeps were better off going over than trying to squeeze through.	Chris Lang's '98 is running 35-inch tires, a Super 30 front axle, and a Super 35 rear. With the larger diameter aftermarket axleshafts, he should be fine, right? Nope, by the end of the trail he had broken both front axleshafts and had to drive out like that.
With Poison Spyder Customs sliders and a trail cage as well as Treks fenders, corners, and a high-clearance long arm kit, Amanda Sharman doesn't have to worry about body damage to this '98 TJ on this 9 out of 10 rated trail.	Here Chris is again after both front shafts broke, beating on his Super 35 rear, 4.56 gears, and ARB rear locker for all they're worth.	All-terrain tires, mud-terrain tires: It's all good. Heck, even if your tie rod has been bent and straightened more times than Courtney Love has been in and out of rehab, no one will fault you for it. Air it down and run it.
When you break the sector shaft in your Rubicon TJ's steering box and your Jeep is at a one-Jeep-wide part of the trail, you enlist some friends to help with steering duties to get the Jeep out of the way. In addition to this new power steering modification, we also learned that a '98 Dakota box will not directly swap into an '03-and-up TJ, and Conrad Brannon ended up leaving his Jeep and returning later for it.	Then, at the other end of the spectrum, is the throttle-down, point-and-shoot method of wheeling. You would think broken parts would be an issue with this type of wheeling, and so do we, but there wasn't a single thing broken on this Jeep by the end of the day.	We said no body damage. We didn't say anything about dragging the underside of the Jeep over stuff. Tires of at least 33 inches are required to run the trail, but you better have some good armor to come out the other side unscathed.
It wasn't too long ago that a YJ with coilovers was out of the ordinary. Nowadays it seems we see just as many coil-sprung YJs as leaf-sprung ones out on the trail. This one also had a Spidertrax front 9-inch and the Jeep was completely home-fabbed using good, old-fashioned trial and error.	What do you do when your Jeep is going under the knife, and you get invited to run a trail with the magazine guy? If you are like Billy Paddock, you grab your wife's TJ and a blond wig and go wheeling.	This was one of the last climbs of the day, and even the 37-inch-tired Jeeps had issues with the undercut. All the way to the right was the easiest way to go, but thanks to the soft dirt and loose rocks at the bottom, many a bellypan got smashed on this one.
Cody Crawford decided to take the high road on this one. We thought for sure he'd end up laying it over, but as soon as the front tires came over and the rear started climbing, he cut it hard left and crawled right on through.	Whale Rock doesn't look like much, but it is just off-camber enough, and just narrow enough, that once you get your front tires up on it, your Jeep starts sliding downhill, so you give it gas to get over the hump, and then end up high-centered on the end of the obstacle (to the right in this picture). Here Patrick Fleege in his '05 Willys Edition TJ shows us how it's done.	Wally Sheata's CJ-7 was under construction, so he borrowed Shawn Carney's TJ and then proceeded to lay it down a few times on Camel Toe. We told him we wouldn't run this picture, but really ... a borrowed Jeep whose owner isn't on the trail flopped over on an obstacle called Camel Toe? Who could resist that?