Dramatic yes, it is not the most desolate area of the USA. But, we did the first part of this trail last week and it is one of the worse trails in the area (minus Pritchet and behind the rocks). We all agreed afterward, doing that first part with a foot of snow would have been unimaginable. It was off camber to the right while doing a a left turn on a narrow cliff, it had a narrow canyon filled with boulders to drive over or try to drive around. It has steep ledges, loose shale rocks, we had to pull in mirrors and going back down was worse than going up. And I should also add, try it one-handed going halfway up and all the way down.
NEO smashed his rear fenders on the H1, I believe everyone’s undercarriage protection was moved upward a few inches; my front license plate was bent outward when the H3 almost went ass end over front, and possibly, my winch mount bracket might have kept it from going all the way (also took a few minutes to remove the seat from my butt crack too). Next time, I’ll let someone else lead the way. All the rest of the vehicles took a different line.
Once you get past the first 1.3 miles it is a nice easy ride through to about 70 miles south to Hwy 211. Where there is an outpost that has fuel available and the people who own it live there year round, so these dudes could have found fuel if they wanted to drive about five miles out of there planned route. Due to a medical problem, we had to turn around after the gnarly canyon route and head back to Moab. If not, we might have gone a few more miles and turned back, we had no camping gear and were not planning on the entire trail anyway since it is usually a two-day trip. We just wanted to do the gnarly first 1.3 miles.
As for calling BLM rangers? There are three rangers that patrol out of the Moab and Monticello office and they cover almost 5 million acres. Do you really think they know what the trail conditions are of any given trail on any day? NO! They normally patrol those areas where there are a lot of humans such as Sand Flats, the campgrounds, etc. That is where the problems are usually found. Besides, Lockhart Basin Road is a San Juan County Road on BLM land. As for the weather channel, it is worthless in this area. It can dump two inches of rain or a foot of snow five miles from another area that is totally dry. The weather channel gets their weather from the airport fifteen miles north and a thousand feet higher than Moab and probably two thousand feet higher than Lockhart basin. So normally, weather reports are notoriously incorrect for most areas south of the airport.