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I heard my name mentioned, so, in my FJC I went with OME lift (about 2.5") so I was able to run 33" tires without any cutting. As mentioned rock sliders and good skid plates are a must. Just make sure that you use good bolts or things will fall off. With IFS, we can't do the difficult trails because of lack of articulation,

See you there 😊

spent the weekend out scouting for a future ORP overnight run... there's a trail somewhere in there... encountered a boulder in the middle of the trail on a shelf road area that i couldn't squeeze by. probably could have crawled over it, but i was alone and that would have pitched me really hard towards the edge so seemed prudent to winch. next issue was a tree and a major washout. fortunately i was able to use a creek-bed as a bypass for about a quarter mile to get around those. there had been some MAJOR water flow in the area recently. i walked the creek route first make sure i wasn't going to sink Gadget in some bottomless mud hole. i was in rolling hills for a while after that, so i took the only tiny flat spot i could find (the start of a short spur trail) as my camp spot for the night. had a bright-ass full moon for the evening. climbed up from around 3k feet to over 7k where i had endless views and even a small pine and oak forest. now this part really was just a forest road! found next to a random fire ring, someone had a bath here! tiny but bright flowers. i only scouted about a third of the route i had planned. so watch for a future difficult rated "exploratory" overnight trip in the Superior area - maybe early December!

While I do technically have a 4runner, it is a few generations older than yours so I'm not sure how much would be applicable to you haha. Mine is a manual 3rd gen. I have a 2 inch suspension lift and a one inch body lift so that I can clear my 35 inch tires. One of the most common challenges I've had is tearing my cv boots! If that happens to you, and you'd like to fix it yourself, I'd recommend a cv boot stretcher so you don't have to disassemble the entire cv axle. It's very messy! Decent skid plates are especially important if your not as high of the ground. Sliders would be worth your time as well if you wheel in some high clearance places. RCI and SRQ are pretty good places to start your search. If you want some good resources, the Facebook forums are excellent. Join us on the AZ 4Runner Outsiders Facebook page as well, tons of owners of all generations on there and we're all friendly!

i spent the night before the trip at a hotel in Clovis, a nice suburb of Fresno - which put me 2 to 3 hours from the trailhead still. Clovis is the last city/town of any size heading in. it took me just over 9 hours to get to Clovis from Phoenix. it was lunch time, so i tried out a local eatery (turned out to be OK, but not great). most of my photos are scenic - when the trail got rough i was usually clenching the steering wheel rather than the camera! a lot of the Dusy is dense forest, which i love since that's what i grew up with. i guess it could give some of you desert rats a sense of claustrophobia though! you're constantly steering on this trail, and to say the trail is "tight" would be a massive understatement. shorter and narrower rigs have the advantage here for certain. here's Kevin @TrailTractor coming up to one of a million of the easy obstacles. his LJ was on 35's and definitely hit bottom more often than me on 37's. his narrower track width was evident though many times when his rig sailed through a set of trees that i could barely squeeze my rig between. every so often the trail weaves through a meadow, many of which had a small creek crossing. it has been raining for a couple days before we got there and the first day continued to sprinkle on and off. there were puddles but not really much mud... the Dusy is usually a very dusty trail so the wetness helped keep that down and was appreciated by all of us - especially since Kevin and @Roger both had open-air Jeeps. Thompson Hill is the main event on this trail - a very steep, super loose, bouldery hill climb. compared to the last time i ran the trail 4 years ago, the hill was considerably rougher. it was way more dug-out in places. those extra holes of loose dirt between some rather large rocks ended up providing quite a challenge. this is technically the bottom of the hill, but before it gets really interesting. this was a sketchy spot where i kept sliding sideways and eventually had to winch. you can't tell at all from the photo, but you're looking down a steep incline here and my passenger rear is up against a hard ledge rock. the driver front kept sliding off the rock you can see here, and the other 2 tires had absolutely no grip in the loose sandy dirt. i ended up winching another 2 places before the top. Kevin winched once - which he said he'd never had to do before even after having run the rubicon multiple times and Fordyce as well! Roger's 40" tires, 1-tons, and Atlas transfer case kept him moving forward the entire trail without needing a winch. Gadget slid sideways into one tree on Thompson, which ripped the passenger mirror clean off. Roger also had a sideways slip and got a very minor dent just behind the hood and dislodged his a-pillar light bracket a bit too. Kevin was the only one to escape the hill without a souvenir! continued...