Rubicon Portal Party - 74Weld Portal Run Trail Recap

Trail4R · Dec 10, 2025

Rubicon Portal Party - 74Weld Gen2 Portal Axles Tested... Proven

We've been planning this "Portal Party" for a while now, and everyone was in crunch mode to finish their builds. Everyone was still working the morning we started the trail. Some guys were wiring lights, some were still clearancing tires, and I was cutting off my spare tire brackets because my track bar was colliding on uptravel. I was also wiring my front Eaton e-locker the night before at camp. A handful of the guys (Jason, Jason, Kristian, and Bill) drove up from Southern California, and those guys were working on their truck until midnight the night before, and they still had to stop off at Stellar Built in Sacramento to finish installing a few mods. It was all last-minute, but somehow we managed to pull it off and started the trail around 9 am. This thread is really just to share a ton of photos with you guys.

The Builds:

Dissent Off-Road (Ben) 250 Land Cruiser
74Weld (Kristian) 4th Gen Tacoma
Stellar Built (Dima) 3rd Gen Tacoma
Taco Dust (Jason) 2nd Gen Tacoma
Flexus Frank (Frank) GX550
Trail4R (Brenan) 6th Gen 4Runner
Dusty Summit (Jason) Photo/Film
Bill (bill) Photo/Film

All the builds were on Gen2 74Weld portals, with the exception of Frank (GX550) and Dima (3rd Gen Tacoma).

Every build did amazing. The 74Weld portals took every build through the Rubicon without hesitation. The ground clearance you get from this part is unbelievable. I've done the Rubicon in the past on 35" tires and mid travel in a 5th Gen 4Runner, and it's doable, but you do tend to get hung up quite a bit. You're dragging on skids and sliders all day long, and it just makes for a longer day all the way around, which can be fun for sure, but after winching back to back all day, that can get tiring. Portals just make the trail much more enjoyable. You can focus on wheeling and not winching all day. It's just a different experience on portals. From start to finish, this was hands down one of the best weekends I've had in a long time. If you're on the fence about portals, just know that it takes average wheeling and makes it epic wheeling. The feeling you get from gapping massive boulders and effortlessly crawling in a late model Toyota locked front and rear is unreal. We all drove to the trail and drove home after... no trailers, no BS... just rolled up and started wheeling.

We only had one failure on the trail, and that was Taco Dust (Jason's) CV axle. Coming up Whales Tail, Jason managed to snap a CV, but thankfully, Kristian had a spare 4th Gen Tacoma CV, and it happened to fit into the 2nd Gen front diff. We got the CV swapped in an hour or so, and we were back at it.

Good times, great people, great food, good beer (well, mostly Coors lights - haha), but you get the point.

I'll try to post in chronological order of the trail. From the trailhead at Loon Lake to the Tahoma staging.