We left Prescott around 10:30 AM (my hopes were to leave by 10:00, but ended up backtracking to Walmart to put some oil in and stopping at the fuel station to leave with a full tank of gas.
The trip to Crown King is nothing exceptional, it's a Prius-rated road (FR259), although this time the road seemed a little bit worse than last year, but nothing bad. Because the FR259 is built on an old railroad bed (Murphy's Impossible Railroad) it's quite wide (there's a few 1 lane sections, but for the most part it is pretty decent) and there's only 5 really sharp turns (the 5 original railroad switchbacks).
We reached Crown King around noon, stopped to stretch the legs, take some pictures and continued on our way to the mine.
To go to the mine we took the Gladiator Rd out of Crown King and started going into some steep mountain roads. Unlike the frontway to Crown King, it's a pretty narrow road and the grade goes from decent to bad, there's rocks of different sizes across the road and it's definitely a low speed road.
After traveling for a little over 1/2 hour the road became worse and worse, and after a turn and steep downhill I decided that going forward was too risky, more when I looked at what I could see of the next turn, my copilot agreed, and since we were right by a driveway, we had some room to turn around. After turning around it took me 4 or 5 attempts to climb that hill, because the bad grades were making one of my tires spin freely. After assessing the conditions I decided on how to proceed and Brent (my friend) guided me into that path, I made it to the top and then we continued downhill and back into CK.
We stopped at CK again to have snacks, water and the restroom. We left CK around 1:50 and made it back to Prescott shortly after 3 PM.
I'll post the maps once I master the TOPO! software, all I have right now are the PDFs of the maps.
From what I read on the internet, this wasn't supposed to be a bad road, doable with 2WD. Whoever said this either came from the other road (we attempted from the SE of the mine, and the road continues to the NW, and you can get to the mine from the NW; or had a 5" lift on a 2WD truck. The other possibility is that the road has since deteriorated badly (again, most of the road is perfectly drivable with a fully stock 4WD TB, provided that you have some skill. I don't know of the conditions of the road as it approaches the mine, maybe it's doable in a setup like James', maybe you need Roadie's. In the end, after taking the coordinates of the point where we turned around (I had considered the idea of us being on the wrong road after a bad turn) and verifying them on Google Earth, it turns out that we were about 1/2 mile from the mine on the correct road.
Not a lot of pictures because my batteries were low and I had to take it out of the camera and warm it in my hand after every 1 or 2 shots.
One of the old switchbacks, on the way back from CK
One of the railroad cuts, also on the way back from CK
Right outside CK, on the way back from the mine. That's my copilot in the picture
A different type of Blazer
On the way back from the mine
The complete collection in a bigger size
http://www.flickr.com/photos/43033468@N00/
looks like a nice ride and scenery
