We did make the trip. We rented through Turo a Toyota 4Runner TRD with an Old Man Emu lift/ suspension kit. Great vehicle. Something I was not prepared for was how rough the county roads (trails?) were. Completely exposed rocks. Did I say rough? I was carefully picking lines so as to not wind up buying a tire or a wheel. Had I known, we would have found some way to air down but as it turned out we had no way to air tires back up, so I chose to make the drive at 36 psi. Not the best. Much slow going. Women complaining about the rough. Surprisingly, only a few comments about “stay away from the edge.”
We saw lots of Polaris RZRs and I'm now convinced this would be the way to go. This was my original plan but we were rendezvousing with a friend who was driving a GMC...something...SUV... so I chose, rather than rent a car to drive from Denver and then an RZR, just rent an off-road capable vehicle for the whole trip. Would have preferred to do the RZR in retrospect. But, those people in the RZRs were eating a lot of dust. Goggles and a mask would be mandatory I think.
We didn't drive the entire loop. I said we need to do a guys-only trip and do the whole thing.
I didn't take a whole lot of pictures as I was preoccupied with not driving over the cliff! But I did take a few, I can select and share a small batch here, but I know we like to stay focused on shooting and not get off-topic too much.