UPDATE: 2wd up Cerro Gordo road

I posted around a week ago asking advice if anyone had made it up to the town with a 2wd car. From the responses it didn’t sound promising, but I thought I’d give it a shot and if I had to turn around so be it.

The first few miles were pretty easy going, mostly hard pack with a loose gravel/shingle surface. No traction problems.

The road started to narrow and got slightly bumpier but not awful by any means.

It was around mile 5-6 where we started to have problems. The surface changed into loose sharp shale and traction was becoming a problem. It was around this time I can smell the transition and shortly after I got a warning on the dash of a transmission overheat. I stopped for a while to let it cool.

By this point I was contemplating turning around but with less than 1.5 miles to go, I couldn’t help but push on.

I was glad I did as after this difficult section the road smoothed out again and it was more like at the beginning.

At the top we were greeted by the town manager who was a cool guy and told us where we could visit around the town. He then told me that he’d known of cars the same as ours blowing up on the way up!

From my experience it took around 40 minutes to get up the road and about 50 to get down. I probably wouldn’t risk it again, but we were passing through and it happened to be on our route. I’ve done off road driving before, so had some experience behind me, but had the road been in any worse condition we certainly would not have made it.