Easter Jeep Safari, and the week it takes

The Easter Jeep Safari runs for nine days ending on Easter weekend, so the dates move every year because Easter does. Registration opens in January on the Red Rock 4-Wheelers event pages and stays open until the trails fill. That floating date is the single most important planning fact about the event, whether you are coming for it or trying to plan around it.

You pay per vehicle per trail day, and the club posts the current fee with the trail grid on its event pages when registration opens in January. You register for specific trail days rather than for the event as a whole, which is why it is quoted by the day. The popular trails go first, and packet pickup at the Spanish Trail Arena closes for Big Saturday and Easter Sunday, so plan the paperwork earlier in the week.

The club accepts full-size street-legal four-wheel drive vehicles of all kinds, plus street-legal rock buggies. A stock four-wheel drive can handle many of the trails rated at the lower difficulty levels, which is the honest answer most first-time entrants want. The harder trails on the grid call for high-clearance, seriously modified vehicles. The trail ratings on the published grid are written by people who run these routes constantly, and the mistake is not misreading them but deciding your vehicle is an exception.

The final Saturday of the event and its largest single day, sitting immediately before Easter Sunday. Registration and packet pickup are closed on both Big Saturday and Easter Sunday, which is worth reading twice: it means the administrative side of the week has to be finished before the two days most people are in town for. Packet pickup happens at the Spanish Trail Arena, on US-191 south of Moab, in the mornings earlier in the week.

Only if that is why you are coming. During the event lodging is booked out months ahead at prices set accordingly, US-191 through town moves at walking pace, restaurants run at capacity at every hour rather than only at peak, and the popular trails are spoken for. US-191 is also the only route north to both national park entrances. A Moab park trip landing inside Safari week is a materially worse trip for reasons that have nothing to do with the parks themselves.

Across the whole system around Moab, with a heavy concentration in the Sand Flats Recreation Area east of town, which carries close to thirty miles of jeep trail including Hell's Revenge and Fins and Things, both within walking distance of the Slickrock Bike Trail parking lot. West of town, Poison Spider climbs onto the mesa above the river off SR-279. Beyond both, the network runs out on Bureau of Land Management roads in every direction, which is what lets dozens of separate runs go out on the same day.

Yes. Outside the event they are open ground, with a gate fee where the Sand Flats Recreation Area applies and most federal passes not honored there. What changes in Safari week is the volume of traffic and the presence of a volunteer leader on every run. The vehicle requirements do not change at all: a trail that needs a modified high-clearance vehicle in March needs one in September.

The Red Rock 4-Wheelers, a Moab club and the oldest four-wheel drive club in the town. The event is built as a grid of trails against days, with a set number of vehicles permitted on each trail on each day and a volunteer leader assigned to every run. It is not a race and it is not a vehicle show, although manufacturers have long used the week to display concept vehicles. Registration, the trail grid and the current year's dates all live on the club's own website.

Stricter than the regulations require, and the club sets them that way deliberately. The event runs on public land at the discretion of the agencies managing it, and the argument for keeping it there is made by the condition of the ground afterward. Stay on the designated route rather than widening it, do not cut around obstacles onto undisturbed ground, and treat the cryptobiotic soil crust between the rock as the living surface it is, because a single tire track through it takes decades to recover.