Moab Off-Road Challenge: Putting the Toyota Land Cruiser, 4Runner, and Tacoma Through Hell
The article reviews Toyota's 4Runner, Land Cruiser, and Tacoma on Moab's Hell's Revenge trail, highlighting their off-road capabilities. Despite challenging terrain, these factory models excel with features like front-facing cameras and Crawl Control, proving accessible off-roading is within reach.
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The climb out of the Sand Flats Recreation Area parking lot puts you in a Martian landscape where ancient aliens once roamed. Millions of years before we set out for an afternoon picnic in a convoy of $60,000 and $70,000 trucks, dinosaurs trekked through this area, leaving behind three-toed footprints you can still see today.
Hell's Revenge is the quintessential Moab trail—challenging, fun, and stunningly beautiful. It's the perfect place to show off Toyota's quintessential off-roaders, the 4Runner, the Land Cruiser, and the Tacoma. Drive these trucks on this trail, and you come away with genuine respect for what a bone-stock factory off-roader can do and where it can take you. You can't fly to Mars, but you can drive through Moab, Utah, and that's kind of the same thing.
Shortly after takeoff, the trail drops into Lake Michigan, a narrow canyon that earned its name because it tends to fill with deep water. The day we drive through, it's nearly dry, a sea of sharp stones capable of slicing a tire sidewall, gnawing a wheel, or punching a hole in an oil pan. All three of the trucks I drove—a 4Runner TRD Off-Road, a Tacoma Trailhunter, and a Land Cruiser—have front-facing cameras that, in theory, should help you place the tires exactly where you want them. In practice, only the Land Cruiser's camera display has the resolution and contrast needed to read the shadows and highlights that reveal the surface's contours. The 4Runner and the Taco use larger 14.0-inch screens (vs. 12.3 inches in the LC) with a more practical squarish aspect ratio, but the picture quality looks like it's straight off an early 2000s Blackberry phone.
It's a moot point in this case because we have seasoned spotters pointing us through the tricky bits. Between their expert direction and the Toyotas' hardware, the truth is we have more capability than we need. Airing down the tires and shifting the transfer cases into 4 Low is all it takes to conquer this trail, which Moab guidebooks rate as 'difficult.' I had all the traction and articulation I needed without ever locking the rear differentials or disconnecting the front anti-roll bars.
Moab's misleadingly named slick rock is only slick if you're a horse wearing metal shoes. In an off-roader on modern tires, most sections of the trail are so smooth and grippy they might as well have been paved by UDOT. Some stretches even look like a road thanks to the dark streaks of rubber and white hashes laid down on the path.
That's not to say Hell's Revenge is easy. Any sand that finds its way between the tire tread and the hard rock acts like tiny marbles, and the Toyotas have just enough clearance to skate through the gnarliest scrambles. It takes a well-planned line to avoid scrapping an armored belly on the stairlike ledges, and occasionally a small boulder is dragged into position to act as a step stool. Where the steepest climbs and descents bend to level ground, front fascias and trailer hitches kiss the sandstone.
It's impossible to fully convey these grades' severity in words or pictures. Toyota's digital inclinometer maxes out at 30 degrees, but the 5,000-pound 4Runner, Land Cruiser, and Tacoma effortlessly ascend even steeper grades that I'd struggle to walk up. In Low range and first gear, the Toyota off-roaders multiply the engine's grunt by a factor of 40. That makes for buttery smooth throttle tip-in and masks the difference between the 4Runner TRD Off-Road's standard turbo four-cylinder, which makes 317 lb-ft of torque, and the hybridized version in the Tacoma Trailhunter and Land Cruiser, which churns out 465 lb-ft.
For the Land Cruiser, going downhill proves more challenging than going up. The brake pedal can be touchy when you're trying to finesse the truck over a rock or down a step. I briefly activate Toyota's Crawl Control, the low-speed cruise control that modulates the brakes and throttle to maintain a steady, single-digit speed. It works exactly as advertised, driving smoother than my size 11 feet can. It also steals all the fun, so I quickly resume control.
Roughly 3 miles into the drive, you reach the payoff, an overlook with stunning vistas of the Colorado River, the snow-dusted La Sal Mountains, and a ribbon of road far enough below you to make the cars on it look like ants. From this vantage point, you can easily see why Hell's Revenge is one of the most popular trails not just in Moab but in the entire state of Utah.
We follow the trail back the way we came. Turning the climbs into descents and vice versa gives Hell's Revenge the look and feel like an entirely different route. Naturally, the drive ends with the inverse of how we started. The nose-down descent fills the windshield with vermillion sandstone and leaves you hanging on your seat belt. It's a roller-coaster thrill at a 2-mph crawl.
Back in the parking lot, returning these Toyotas to civilization-spec is simply a matter of shifting the transfer case. It's so easy to switch between the trail and paved roads, which just makes it that much more of a tragedy that so many modern off-road vehicles are relegated to a life of suburban servitude. Take this as all the proof and encouragement you need: It doesn't require an expensive custom-built rig or even deep experience to drive off-road to incredible places that you'd otherwise never see.
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