On our way to Loveland, Colorado we decided to put our Porsche Cayenne soft-roader to the test at MERUS adventure park. MERUS adventure park is located within Palo Duro Canyon. With 25 miles of different trails, you won’t find anything quite like it to do some off-roading in Texas.
We took the liberty of transcribing the video below.
Justin: Here outside Amarillo at the Merus Adventure Park. We’re about to see what the Phoenix soft-roader can do, we’re going to take it out here into the largest off-road park in the United States. Let’s see what we can do.
Aaron: And we are here with Dirk, Dirk, what’s going on here?
Dirk: Well, the pretty cool thing is, Palo Duro Canyon, which not a lot of people know this, but it’s actually the second largest canyon in North America, it’s 1.3 million acres. So it’s just behind the Grand Canyon. It’s second to the Grand Canyon in size. And we’ve got obviously a really small chunk of that. But we’ve got all kinds of different material here. So we’ve got about 900 feet of elevation drop, from the highest point in the park to the lowest point, and lots of different kinds of rock, sand, red dirt. I mean, if you love nature, if you love exploring, if you love wheeling, there’s just about every kind of, you know, material here that you can you can have fun on.
Aaron: And how many different trails do you have right now?
Dirk: So right now we are probably sitting around 25 trails for about 43 miles of off-road trails.
Aaron: Okay, and we’ve got mountain bike, we got hiking, we’ve got, you know, full-on off-road vehicle. So for those beginners out there, what are some do’s and don’ts for wheeling for getting out here with your truck? Get off the factory floor you know, do some mods to it. Tell us a little bit about that?
Dirk: Yeah, I mean, the first thing we always recommend, if possible, is use the buddy system, so always will with at least another vehicle. If you’re not able to do that, then you really have to start looking at your recovery gear and we tell people that a winch is the number one accessory that you need. If you’re going to be offloading a lot of people want to start buying everything else. The other thing is just to take a gradual right make sure that you try the easier trails first and really kind of get a feel for your vehicle. You know how it does on descents and climbs and Off Camber and all that kind of stuff so that it’s just a progression
Aaron: What are the five levels of trails?
Dirk: Yeah, so we kind of follow the the ski code, right so we’ve got green circles, which is our beginner trails, and the most stock four wheel drives are going to be able to run those just fine. We’ve got the blue squares which are intermediate trails, and now you’re getting to trails that may have a little bit of rock on it, you may want some lift on the on the trails. However, most of it’s still fairly manageable. Then we go into black diamond and now you’re definitely going to want at least probably two to three inches of lift, maybe running at least 35 inch tires, you’re going to start encountering a lot more walk off camber things like that, then we have double black and that really goes into the expert level where you know that’s where you really it’s not just about your build now it’s also about your skill level and really understanding how to use the vehicle in extreme off road conditions and then we’ve got the purple hexagon trails which are for the guys that just love the super extreme stuff so I don’t actually ever go on those you know, I barely go on the double blacks with with my builder my skill. But we do have that for really the people that that have those big rigs and really love to kind of get into the rocks and premises and stuff like that.