Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area

Bought a new to me H3T, so decided to get in some light offroading to break it in. Had it about 2 weeks before we decided to trek down to land between the lakes. We went for 5 days, and wished it was longer. Absolutely beautiful area, however, if you've read other reviews there was a lot of trash laying around. We picked up a lot, so at least you feel like your making a difference.

Here's a GPS track of where we explored. We did the majority of this in about 5 hours. We covered not even a quarter of the island. Terrain varied from blacktop to gravel, to washed out muddy ruts. Roads on the mvum map are number from 100, 200, to 300. Took 1 300 road, and it was rougher than I really wanted to get into without a wheeling buddy, or a winch. Put it in low, and locked both diffs and crawled through the mud for a few miles. The wife didnt' think we were going to make it back out.


All Loaded up, ready to head out.


Views of the campsite. We were the only site on the whole bay. No one for miles







Some of the local wildlife. Also saw some eagles, lots of birds, and even had a armadillo(!) visit us one night.



Some Wheeling Pictures. Didn't get too many of the harder trails. Didn't want to get stuck posing.








Got the truck a little dirty:


It's not camping without a good steak on the fire (and some whiskey, or wine)



We had an absolutely great time, I think it's probably some of the most isolated camping you can do in this part of the country. Well worth the 4+ hour trip for indy, we're looking forward to going back.
 
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4runnerteq

Explorer
Hey Man. Plannin on campin & wheelin Oct 18th at Energy Lake.Interested? That site looks familiar but I cant quite place it. Been on all those roads before
 
It's a great park. My biggest caution would be the road markings. If you've been through Kentucky you know how poorly marked their interstates are. Now, imagine interstate guy's slow cousin jeb got the contract to bark the roads in LBL, then you can understand how bad it can be.

Some roads aren't marked at all, some are marked on only one end, a lot of road markers are buried behind trees, ect.

The GPS was great when trying to figure out the forks in the road, I'd also recommend printing out the mvum malls in large format, it's confusing trying to trace a road across multiple pages.
 

Silver dude

Xplorer
Terrific trip! in a few weeks I'm planning to explore the region as a result of this thread great pictures and write up. What made you chose those specific roads? I'm assuming there is some chart or something that rates the road numbers by difficulty. Couldn't locate something like that online though. Seems like a rather confusing system. Running it solo I'd rather not slide down a mud hill and into a pit of doom.
 

4runnerteq

Explorer
Silver dude you are welcome to come with us. We dont do any hard core technical stuff. Ck my threads. Also go to lbl.org and go to the map section. You can print the mvum map from there.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
silverdue as cruiserbent said you can get the mvum (motor vehicle use maps) from the lbl webpage. The roads are numbered on the maps, and that is supposed to indicate what types of roads they are. However, I was on some really easy 300 roads, and 1 particularly bad 300 road. Rule of thumb would be that the less traveled a road looks - the more grown in the trees, then the more likely it will be a tougher trail. I wouldn't attempt many of the 300 level roads in the spring w/o mud tires. The Hummer is still riding on half bald factory duratrack's, so things got a bit dicey. Would feel much more comfortable w/ better tires (coming soon!).
 

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