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San Diego Four Wheelers Superstition Mountain Run VII
January 15th - 16th, 2005
I arrived at about noon. From my house (Glendora) it was a 3 hr 10 min drive (with 1 stop for gas). Fred said it took about 4 hours in his motorhome (from La Habra Heights). The directions were excellent. Each turn was clearly marked.
There were not too many people there yet, so I found a spot about 200 yds from the SD4W headquarters. I set up my tent near a fire ring (there were not too many rings on the lakebed) and relaxed as I waited for the others. Rick and Carolyn arrived at about 3:30 pm.
Since I didn't have to defend our campsite any longer I got my safety inspection and registered, then headed off to the hills and dunes north of the lakebed. This is where all the trails are located.
The dunes were awesome! With all the rain last week the sand was so dense that I could drive up all but the steep parts in 2WD! I got some pictures of the Blue Angels practicing formation flying... very cool.
It was sunset and by the time I got back to camp everyone else had arrived (Fred and Venetta; Jorge, Patti and Eric; and Les and Paulette).
We had the usual great happy hour and then headed over to sign up for a Saturday run.
The run I wanted to do, Knock-on-Wood (4+ on the SD4W scale) was full. Rick didn't want anything too hard core and I didn't want to risk body damage with half my rear bumper gone, so we signed up for Black Cat (4).
Some of us didn't sleep too well Friday night as quads and motorcycles raced around until about 2:30 am! If I knew where those yahoos were camped I would have parked my truck there and let it warm up for 20 minutes at 7am! Oh well... that is the way it goes now that all off roaders are forced into smaller and smaller areas!
Our run left at 9am and was about 25 rigs. The Black Cat trail is on the far (northern) side of the hills so we cut across an area called the Sand Dam and then down a twisting canyon on the other side.
This area is very interesting. It is sort of like Truckhaven, but with more rocks and some impressive sand dunes. The sand had dried out more but the route was not up any sand hills so we did fine.
The Black Cat trail is a steep rocky climb up to a hilltop overlooking the Sand Dam, and then it drops back down to the north side again. It had a few interesting rocky obstacles, but nothing too difficult, about like John Bull as far as difficulty goes.
Next we wound our way up and down, in and out of various washes and mounds to a plateau that overlooked a tight canyon with some nice boulders... We stopped here for lunch.
Fred and I took a look and thought it would be fun to try, not too tough, but more difficult than the other stuff we had done. Our leader then came up and told us that he was about to lead anyone interested down the very same canyon... cool! We all gladly joined him.
It was fun, and we had no problems. I didn't get any pictures of us, but did get a few of some Jeeps going through. We would like to return here and go up it next time!
Next we climbed to the top of the hills up a very steep rocky cleft and then a very steep sandy but stable hill. Our decent down the south side of the hills and back to camp involved an off camber sand hill that gave us all quite a thrill (fright) since we are mostly sand newbies!
We were back in camp by about 3pm for another happy hour!
The raffle was a good one. The only problem was that they sold a huge number of tickets... in other words, we were skunked!
They raffled off 3 Warn winches, 4 Pro Comp tires, a Power Tank, and 2 gift certificates good for 2 BFG tires each... There were also about 70 goodie bags that were raffled off... each bag had several items/certificates in them and I don't think that any of them were worth less than $50 - $75 and many were worth more!
Two interesting things about the raffle:
1) They drew the tickets for the 7 big prizes first, but put them in envelopes and said we would have to wait until the end to see who won them. I can forgive them that... it gave the largest possible pool of tickets to draw from.
2) They took 3 breaks of about 5 minutes each during the raffle. I don't understand this one. The MC just hung around talking to his buddies while we sat and got cold. They said they needed to catch up, so maybe someone else was doing something important...
Saturday night was no quieter than Friday night...
On Sunday we didn't sign up for any runs, we just went back to the north side of the hills to try to locate some of the more difficult runs, Wishbone, Broken Arrow, and Knock-on-Wood, all rated 4+.
We think we found Broken Arrow (we thought it was Wishbone until I talked to someone when we got back) and we almost found Knock-on-Wood... at least my GPS said we were right on top of it, but somehow we missed where it dropped into a canyon.
We returned to camp by traveling around the hills on the west side and back to the lake bed.
There were awesome fields of purple and white flowering plants all over the south side of the hills.
I left at 1 pm, with Jorge and Les not far behind. Fred, Venetta, Rick, and Caroline stayed Sunday night, planning to come home on Monday.
Superstition Mountain OHV area is a beautiful and diverse area. There is plenty to do there for 4x4's, motorcycles, quads, and dune buggies. I would like to see it become a regular stop for the club and am looking forward to the next trip!
I took several high resolution pictures of a very nice map of the trails that they had at the sign up board. I will try to print out something that we can use next time.
San Diego 4 Wheelers did an awesome job on the event! They are a great club, full of great people, 100's of Jeeps, and a couple of Toyota's!
Mark Matthews (TurtleTruck)
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