National Old Trails Road

The rains last fall and this spring made for several abrupt wash crossings, not nothing the frequent off-road groups won't take care of for us in the coming dry months. However, the flowers and greenery on this trip were fantastic. We went on the one cold and windy day this week, and most of the poppies were closed. A couple of days, either way, would have shown a lot more color.

We ran parts of this trail a number of times over the last two days while running the full length of all the trails that Cory has published. We developed a love/hate relationship with it. Some spots are conducive to high speed to get to the next trail, and then, a really rough spot would sneak up and everything in the Jeep would be bounced around. Today with finished the final piece by running the trail west from Franconia Road out to the interchange with I-40. That was the best section of the road. Thanks Cory for a fun and interesting two days running the trails in your area of the state.

This stretch of dirt road was pretty busy for New Years, with more people camping along Franconia Road than I recall seeing before. This area has grown considerably, and the condition of some of these roads shows the wear.

It was a beautiful day, with great temps. There are a couple of short stretches with rough washboard, but still a nice drive.

Nice first ride with trails off-road. Continued on past radar building with arrow road and pipeline road back to 95. Couple nice steep areas and careful your placement.

Beautiful clear day to enjoy the views and a relaxing drive. This area certainly gets more popular every year for dispersed camping.

It's hard to give this trail a fair review since I only ran a small portion of it from Waypoint 13 to Waypoint 7. The trail served its purpose though allowing us great desert scenery and access to other trails. I would highly recommend this area in general as a place to go explore for a day. Tons of great history that Cory, the trail guide writer, has researched for us all to enjoy.

The fact that this road is still here having not been washed out in over100 years of rains and monsoons is really impressive. It's hard to imagine what it would have been like to be some of those cars in the early years when only 400 cars a year on average passed through here. When driving this stretch its fun to stop and think there was no highway as we know them... Where were the gas stations? How often were they out of fuel? Broke down? Hungry? Are we there yet?? Water, food, fuel, breakdowns, not knowing how far between or possibly where you are, no GPS, no odometers in the cars, bet those were some memorable trips! I remember seeing the gravity feed fuel pumps with the big clear tanks on top when exploring Baja and some of those really remote towns when I was younger which was amazing to me, I sure can't picture this trip for people back then. But, thousands of cars made this trip every year even during the depression before being rerouted through Oatman and renamed Rt.66. I was told this happened on this stretch because there was (at least one) gas station there, makes sense. This is a fun stretch of road to drive, I've taken several people on this road and the conversations when stopping somewhere to enjoy the views or the old tin cans scattered about are a lot of fun.