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Mount Taylor is a famous Navajo sacred peak that I’d had my eye on. We had originally wanted to see if we could snowshoe up Wheeler Peak that morning, but being nervous about high winds and potential -10 degree weather, I opted to instead go checkout Taylor.

This would be the first real test for the XJ I had bought this fall. I read that you could drive pretty far up if you had the right vehicle. So we drove about 2 hours to the dirt road leading to the saddle of Mount Taylor and Mosca Lookout. The road was covered in about a foot or two of snow which the Jeep did pretty well in. There was only one spot that really tested us, otherwise we were pretty stoked to finally have a capable car for this kind of access.

At the saddle while trying to turn around however the jeep got very stuck and required an hour or so of digging out. Lesson learned to bring traction boards on future adventures like this. The only other tracks up there were from a snow cat and we would have had a long, cold walk back down if we couldn’t get out.

We still wanted to bag the peak so we got our snowshoes out and took the trail up a quick mile or so to the summit to enjoy the summit rootbeer.

The jeep made it down the mountain just fine, but during the 3 hour drive home we weren’t so lucky. In between ABQ and SF the jeep started losing power, I pulled over, turned off the car, but it never turned on again. It sounded like a dead battery, but the lights were still on. We ended up waiting on the side of the road for like 3 hours for a tow truck to bring us to Santa Fe and then had to call up Quinn to give us a ride home. It was a good thing we were prepared for cold weather because sitting in a dead jeep in 15 degrees was a tough way to end the day. Ended up being a bad starter… doesn’t explain the power loss, but after paying the mechanic $300 we got the Jeep home the next day.

Lots of lessons learned. Almost a perfect adventure.

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