[elhigh]

If you can live without the 4x4 (Colorado, maybe not), a 4x2 with a limited-slip diff will get you out of a lot of tight situations while providing much better fuel economy the rest of the time. You're going to sacrifice a lot of fuel economy and money the rest of the year for the limited amount of time you need all four wheels pulling.

For a fair amount of space, full-time AWD and better fuel economy in general, have you looked at something like a Subaru Outback? One word of warning: avoid the EJ25 engine. Aside from that they're pretty good.

There's a guy here with a Forester (he calls it Forester Whitaker) that beats 25mpg every time, and cracks 30mpg pretty often. The 2011+ model Foresters got the new FB series engine, which is supposed to be quite a bit more reliable than the EJ. It also made the switch to timing chains instead of belts, which is important to me in particular.