These would be the ones I mounted on my '97 TJ this fall. 31x10.50's.
Up at elk camp this year, the conditions were tough for the second year in a row. We hunt a roadless wilderness area at 6000-7500 ft. in Oregon and it gets coooold, and snows. There's this one road that goes up and over the mountain, that you use to access the trailheads. It gets pretty hairy since there was also a big fire in this area 5 or 6 years ago and in some spots there's nothing to stop you if you go off the road since the trees all died and have fallen over now and it's steeper'n crap. You would just plunge. This is not really a problem if you are even a half-assed driver because USUALLY, if the road should happen to be that bad, it's where there IS timber to at least catch you if it all goes south on you. Or, in the spots where the timber burned, the road is icy or snowy but perfectly reasonable to drive on. Any old idgit could do it. Or, furthermore, most hunters would not have any need to go all the way up since 3 out of the 4 trailheads are accessible without risking a permanent pucker in one's nether regions. Or worse.
However, for those sturdy, intrepid, brave and stupid hunters wishing to go in on the 4th trailhead, for the simple reason that judging from the bootprints nobody else is even hunting it, for those rare beings there exists a section of road. A section of road that seems designed to kill someone. A section of road that is a lawsuit waiting to happen. A section of road that, at it's worse, tests the limits of driver and machine. And tires. A section we shall call... Valhalla.
Imagine you come over this mountain. You are 45 minutes of crawling up the snow and ice and muddy road from camp. it's had it's spots but nothing too bad. It's a dirt road at best, minimally maintained by the Forest Service. You come to the top. There's this like Official Regional Observation Tower up there. Even though you are hours from anywhere, your cell phone has 3 bars. You can see for 60-80 miles in 3 directions (4 from the top of the tower) and it's all wild. There's elk all over down there, you just know it. So. You come over that mountain and hit the other side, and it's like they let the junior civil enginaeer take over. Suddenly the road seems designed to kill you. Sharp corners tilt wrong. It is steep; if you go off the road in some places, they MIGHT find your bleached bones in the spring. Maybe not. Depends on if the coyotes or crows got into you, I suppose. There's places where you can see other folks had trouble. They went off the road on this corner here and had to get yarded out, they spun their wheels there trying to turn around, in a rare wide spot, after chickening out. So all that happens THEN you hit the real killer, a long straight stretch about 100 yards long with about a
2-foot shoulder, max, between the road and oblivion. It's steep beyond belief, there's nothing to catch you, and here's the catch... the road slopes, subtly in some spots and glaringly in others, TOWARDS the edge. How friggin' hard is it to make a road right? Or fix a broken one? Sweet Jesus H. Christ, you get about 40 yeards out there, and your rig starts to let go... just a little, just enough to let you know who's (not) in charge here. Worst is still to come. You can see it coming since you are crawling in 4-lo with 4.10's and 31's as slow as you can go. You get to the worst part and it's not subtle now, the abyss is sucking the ass end of your Jeep into hell. That slope wants your ass. You can try and pull the rig along with the front end but that also makes you get sideways. The more sideways you get the more your apotions narrow. Nose slanted uphill, ass end slanted down and the slowdown of time and tunnel vision start. Fight or flight or sqeel like a pig and just give up, punch it and see WTF happens anythign is better than this slow torture...I did it both unchained (packed snow) and then chained up front (ice) and it sucked each of the 4 times i did it. Going downhill was the worse. I kept going up there because there were elk up there....
....so, and I hope you enjoyed my story, this is a long-winded way of knocking my MT/R's preformance on ice. They had almost no lateral control; if there was low spot, my TJ went to it pretty much always, the back end especially. Considerably worse than the BFG AT's I had on there last year. I knew knobby tires were gonna be bad on ice but this was sort of stunning. In snow, they were funny... slippery in general but they would reall "hook up" if I goosed it and spun 'em a little. So I found myself using the front end of the Jeep to sort of haul the back end around a lot. It was extreme, and that's coming from someone who normally drives a pickup.
Next year I'll have chains for all 4 tires or different tires. I do like my MT/R's for the things I bought them for: commuting to work, and general wheelin' in western Oregon, which means sticky mud in the fall and winter and spring. But do NOT buy them as snow/ice tires!!
That's my story and I'm stickin' to it.
-jeff