Monthly So Cal Off-Road Run

yeah I like the idea of keeping it open to everything, I used to be moderate/hard trail only guy but after a year or so of doing that and seeing the $$$$$ toll it takes on my truck, sometimes it's just as fun (or more fun) to take it easy. Really just depends on the mood of the group and if we have enough people that want to do one or the other, the great thing about Big Bear especially is that you can split the group into 2 and do different trails in relatively the same area.

 

I'm going to stop you there.

He can do whatever he wants and you have the freedom to decide whether to participate or not.

I agree that not every trail run should be planned to exclude anyone and that it's great to learn from the more experienced, but don't get on a high horse saying he can't plan a more technical trail.

 

Plus, Big Bear has a few awesome breweries that will make for a good end of the day trail debrief spot

 

Exactly. You shouldn’t be running more than a handful of trucks on a trail anyway so if enough people show, you can spit the group and run trails that will fit everyone’s skill level. Big Bear is great because it offers such a variety.

 

Yea with the fact that the trails are going to vary, naturally, the difficulty will vary along with that. Everyone is free to do what they want, if we're planning on an easy/moderate trail, and one or two, or more, people want to split off and do a hard trail, awesome for them! No one's going to get mad about that! I think that's going to be the beautiful thing about this, its a great way for people of all ability levels to meet up and go out on whatever they want to do!

 

The issue is for sure the amount of rigs on the trail, that can be unsafe and cause a traffic jam.

@Norsemanvike has a good opinion here, so let me revise a few thoughts

I think maybe instead of 1 run, 2 runs a month could work if that allows people to have that kind of time wheeling. Not sure if it's too frequent.

1 run would be advised as an open group, 2nd run would be advised as a more intermediate run with examples of challenges and truck requirements etc. This way no one shows up and breaks anything

Intermediate runs are probably smaller groups, 5-10, where as open groups would be larger 10-20+ naturally. Especially if consistently doing it, the crowd only gets bigger

 

yea, I think that if the participation becomes too high, we may have to split it up into two days, maybe saturday and sunday, or 1st and 3rd weekends, or something like that. But our plan last time was that if we had more than 10 trucks that we would basically just split up into smaller groups, and have one leave about 30 min ahead, or meet up before the other group, that way there's space between each group. A lot of this going to be played by ear as the day gets close, and we have better ideas about how many trucks are going, and we have a few meetups/runs, and learn what works and what doesn't.

 

I feel like if people want to wheel they should be able to use this thread to find people to wheel with.

I think we should have at least one organized meet a month. BUT it shouldn't be restricted to 1 or 2 or even 100 meets a month. If someone doesn't want to hit the trail of the month (coining it lol) and wants to do a different trail on a different day or something than (IMO) they should feel free to post in here asking if anyone else would be interested in joining them.

idk, just my opinion lol

 

Agreed. Basically this is a local group BS thread centralized around offroading with one regular Big Bear meet up a month, those who want to go to the regular meet up can and we'll decide then what trail(s) we're doing. There's so much up there that a few can do one thing while a few do another, if everyone wants to do the same trail then we can split the group up in different start times if the group is too large.

Any other trails we wanna do outside of the Big Bear one can be discussed here as well and planned out in advance

No need to make it too complicated, let's just talk about wheeling and local trails and see where that takes us lol.

 

so what's the next trail run?

 

You can't get that complicated with it. This is just a thread to allow people to coordinate a day or two a month of wheeling. Allowing people to get together and be active in the community. If you want to do more trips, do harder trails, etc then you do you. Just post up and see who wants to join.

5-10 rigs should be the MAX on any trail run regardless. Any more than that you are no better than OC Overland or equivalent and are not making a good impression to anyone.

 

Yeah when we did White Mountain a few weeks back, we got lucky we were in a good spot to pull over when that massive Jeep group of 20+ trucks drove past. If it had happened further back or a little further ahead it would've been a nightmare. At least they were moving though, the worst is when you're on a trail and a group of that size is stopped to take a break and you can't get around them. Or they're moving incredibly slowly.

 

Yeah, last year when doing Lower Largo we ran into two large Jeep groups coming towards us. The first group was larger but we were able to get our group, 4-5 trucks, off the trail for them to pass.

The second group was at the last/first obstacle on the North side entrance, opposite of the Gatekeeper, and we had nowhere to go. It’s was at least an hour if not more to figure out a way for us to proceed being they kept having issues on the river obstacle. Such a headache. Plus, there is always that ego issue with Jeeps and Toyota’s so when we tried to offer solutions they didn’t want to cooperate

 

Was afraid of that Jeep/Toyota ego when we saw that big group but luckily they were cool, it was one of the Jamboree's beginner groups so I don't think they've all been taught to hate on Toyota's yet lol. The leader had a rig that was way overbuilt for White Mountain but he was cool and chatted for a bit about the trail conditions.

I had that experience on Pilot Rock 2N17x once, got stuck behind some Land Rovers on street tires that couldn't cross the ruts in the trail because they had maybe 10 centimeters of suspension travel and next to no traction. That was fun.

 

Don't get me wrong. Some Jeep guys/gals are totally cool and realize we are all there to wheel. We shit talk and it's a good time but the Jeep mentality is definitely a thing and it's a little discouraging to people, especially beginners. Typically if you find an overbuilt rig leading beginners they are going to have a lot of patience anyway so you're off to a good start.

 

No high horse here Shane and that wasn't my intent. We actually agree, you just said it better than I did.

 

This is how I view your hose...

See what I did there.

 

LoL - ok, ok...

 

Who's down for Pilot Rock/2N17X? My leaf springs are super squeaky right now so I need to clean them up, plan on doing that this weekend along with some other adjustments. But I would like to him 2N17X next Saturday (it will be the first haha) if I can get all my crap done in time.