Something like preface: the whole thing is a little silly. Rubicon is a nice and perfectly drivable trail, with two lockers and at least 33" tires. The taller the tires, the merrier. But... it's been about 12 years since I had a locker in any of my trucks, and I've had it with large tires. It's all good until you do something stupid, and then... Hoisting a wheel with a 35" unseated tire full of mud to the roof of my old Jeep was probably the heaviest lifting I've ever done, and I don't want to ever do it again. Another funny factor is the tire availability: I was blown away when a club member cut two 33x12.5R15 tires on Poughkeepsie in Colorado, and not a single store around had what I thought was the most-popular tire size in the world.
31" tires are far more forgiving, so... Enter a full-bodied Land Rover on dinky tires and without lockers.
It was embarrassing to watch the videos of the affair afterwards - methinks I can count on myself to pick the right line... after I've exhausted the alternatives. But - it is more fun that way.
I took very few photos on this trip. Most of them were taken by our shotgunners - Thao Bauer and Andrey Portnoy.
Turkish: Have you ever crossed the road, and looked the wrong way? A car's nearly on you? So what do you do? Something very silly. You freeze. Your life doesn't flash before you, 'cause you're too fuckin' scared to think - you just freeze and pull a stupid face. But the pikey didn't. Why? Because he had plans of running the car over.
Lutzi is softly insistent on only having vehicles with at least 33-inch tires in the group on the trip to Dusy Ershim.
That puts me into a petulant mood. Fine, be that way. We'll do the Rubicon instead.
Email my friend Matt, a potential (if a little reluctant) candidate for the Dusy. He warmed up to the idea of doing Rubicon - I guess I scared him enough with Dusy horror stories from the Internet. He proceeds to finger the worldwide web for info on Rubicon, and emails back somewhat disappointed. The webz sayz one can do the whole 'Con in eight hours!
What's the point of having a nine-hour highway ride to the trailhead?
I am incredulous. A quick Google search brings up this gem from California Jeeper:
Description: The Rubicon Trail is the "granddaddy of trails." Most of 18 miles of trail consists of large boulders and rocky terrain. The other parts of the trail go across huge granite slabs which have steep inclines and sharp drop offs. This trail is not for the faint at heart! It does offer some spectacular scenery if you wait long enough for the dust to settle. You can camp along the way at Spider Lake, Buck Island Lake or about 12 miles in there is the Rubicon Springs Campground. This will take a beginner about 6 to 7 hours, or a seasoned wheeler about 4-5 hours if you drive straight through to the campgrounds at Rubicon Springs. The last leg of the journey is about 6 miles (1-2 hours) to paved road.
Recommended equipment: Almost any type of 4x4 vehicle has made it through, but some are easier than others. Stock Jeeps will do the job, but expect body damage. Vehicles with a long wheel base will have a little trouble with some sharp turns. Skid plates, rocker guards, and tow hooks and straps are a must. It is highly recommended that someone in your group have a winch. The less the vehicle is equipped the more work and damage you can expect.
What's the point, indeed? The photos of the obstacles really didn't look scary (do they ever?), besides the crack shot of an overturned Jeep by the trailside.
I did however have some corrections in mind.
The cocky four-to-six-hour Rubicon stories uniformly featured some exoskeleton beast with three feet of suspension travel and forty-inch tires, ram steering assist, lockers and power up the wazoo. Neither of our trucks is anywhere close to this category.
I assure Matt that, should we fly through all 18 miles in a record time, I'd make it up to him by taking the most-circuitous route through the Eastern Sierra Nevada on our way back home. He's convinced.
A few weeks later I retire the 32-inch BFG Mud-Terrains, and enjoy the quiet and balanced ride on dinky 7.50-16 Michelin XLS mounted on 5.5-inch-wide rims. The Discovery looks awesome with color-coordinated old-school Land Rover rims, but positively funny from the front or the back. I can't remember when was the last time I drove anything with 7.5-inch-wide tires.
Time flies; I spend some time assembling a Detroit locker in a spare third member for the rear axle, but Matt (who briefly owned this particular Detroit) dissuades me with a passion. By the time I decide to buy heavy-duty axle shafts, it is already too late. My vehicle preparation is limited to tightening a few bolts and nuts, and removal of the front sway bar. Good riddance...
Out of the blue, Lutzi and Conal tell me that ... Dusy is not going to be open at all this year, and they are going to Rubicon as well. Remembering the 33-inch thing, I promise to hang on close - but not tag along as part of the group. Why do I have to continue being petulant?
Marsellus: The night of the fight, you may feel a slight sting. That's pride fucking with you. Fuck pride. Pride only hurts, it never helps.
Fast forward - the day comes. The truck is - for the first time EVER - fully fuelled, loaded, and ready to go the night before, so I sleep on until 4:30 in the morning, kiss my sleepy wife goodbye, and leave home on time.
Pick up my long-time friend, geologist, tennis coach, and photographer Andrey, meet up with Matt and his lovely wife Thao at a gas station, and we hit the oh-so-hated I-5.
Los Angeles greets us with a forty-minute jam near downtown, but nothing really to bitch about. Soon, we're on the Northern downslope of Grapevine, descending into San Joaquin valley.
We split to Highway 99, and the valley towns blast by. We have plenty of time, so we elect the scenic route, leave 99 in Merced, and proceed to a meandering route involving highways 59 and 49. Pull over to a shaded corner near Lake McSwain on Merced River, and have our lunch.
After lunch Andrey takes the helm - his approach to steering a top-heavy truck without sway bars and propensity to alternate between heavy understeer and equal understeer is something like pulse-width modulation. Every turn in the road involves protracted oscillations around the desired trajectory; Matt and Thao behind us get nearly nauseous looking at our Disco swaying side to side. Some particularly nasty, progressively-tighter, turns make me white-knuckle the grab handle. Andrey is unfazed.
We arrive in Placerville late afternoon - perfect time to take a stroll along the main street, and hit all bizarre stores along the way. I have half a mind to buy a saxophone in one of thousand antique junk stores - but bail out for the lack of reeds. Most eateries are closed - some until evening, some - until Winter, - so we get a couple of beers and some grub wherever we can. Nobody's impressed.
We leave for our hotel in Camino - aptly named "Camino Hotel" - a few miles away. Kelly, the hotel's owner, took the pains of driving for three hours from Bay Area to the hotel - we are the only customers, and have the place all to ourselves. The hotel is awesome, and we enjoy the beaty of the dining room after a short trip to a restaurant across the road, with a bottle of Four Roses between us. By the time the Bourbon is exhausted, Matt's working hard trying to elicit all biographical details of Andrey's life meanders (which are plentiful). Finally he gives up, and we turn in for the night.
It is our vacation, after all - no reason to get up all too early. Kelly makes us a wonderful breakfast, European in contents but very American in quantity, and we reluctantly leave the place half past eight. We make our way up Highway 50 to Ice House Road, then spend long forty minutes negotiating tight bends in the road towards the Loon Lake. I have the radio tuned to VHF frequency Lutzi and the gang planned to use, and soon hear some chunky banter. It gets fairly clear when the lake is in sight, and I establish contact - that's the SCLR/NCLR guys all right.
By the way, this is my first trip when I can enjoy it all - I talk to Matt via CB, listen and occasionally chime in to Rover crew banter on VHF, and listen to my tunes - by plugging the phone to Yaesu FTM-10R line input, and its line output - to the car stereo.
Soon, we're at the large staging area by the Rubicon trailhead - time to use the (remarkably clean) restroom, air down, and generally get ourselves oriented on the map. By the time we're ready to go, the lot is full of baby Jeeps sporting a lot of expensive hardware. The whole ordeal all of a sudden looks a little intimidating.
Photo by Thao Bauer
Photo by Thao Bauer
We decide not to wait for the big little Jeeps to move ahead, and drive up to the Gatekeeper.
There's some commotion at the Gatekeeper; it turns out that a couple of local guys, serving as trail maintenance volunteers, are busy winching one giant rock OFF the trail. Earlier, they winched it ON, but were met with too many complaints.
The Gatekeeper looks fine and poses no problems whatsoever. Looking back, I wish the guys kept that big rock smack in the middle of the road - that way, it would be more representative of what's in the store. Matt lands the Disco on the diff, and it is the time for the strap to come out to the surface (where it would remain until the end of the trip - where it still remains, actually). The Placerville guys are friendly and encouraging, and hand us very good and informative maps of the trail. Andrey tries out his homebrewed gimbal for the video camera and quickly discovers the ways to improve it (which would be tried later at the campsite).
Photo by Thao Bauer
We proceed on to the Granite Bowl.
Not even 500 feet into the trail, there's already a big little Jeep with a broken driveshaft. The place is crawling with Jeeps, and the drivers are itching to do something meaningful - exploring the routes around the woudned Jeep, to little avail.
We are relieved that the large group (that the wounded Jeep is part of) is staying behind until the driveline is sorted out, and head on.
Photo by Thao Bauer
Photo by Thao Bauer
Photo by Thao Bauer
Photo by Thao Bauer
Photo by Thao Bauer
Photo by Thao Bauer
A short detour to dwell on our rides: both - Land Rover Discovery Series 1, mine - a 1996 with 281 thousand miles on the clock, Matt's - a 1998 with about half the mileage. Both are built in very similar way - with 31" tires, Eaton/Detroit TrueTrac limited slip differentials, about 15% lower gearing than factory, with front bumpers off Great Divide Edition Range Rovers, decent if slow winches, diff covers, rock sliders, and heavy-duty steering linkages and rear trailing arms. That's about wraps up all the might. Looking back, in three days on the trail we have not seen another vehicle with less than 33" tires, and only three other full-bodies vehicles - Lutzi's Disco 2, Conal's P38A Range Rover, and someone else's FZJ80 Land Cruiser.
Let me take another detour.
Most trails I've driven in my life were reasonably good roads (with rocks less than football size), with an occasional obstacle. The closest in difficulty (that I know of) is Pritchett Canyon in Moab - but it is short. You break your truck quickly and go back to Moab. Rubicon is very different.
The average ride distance not requiring me getting out of the vehicle - about 200 feet, give or take. Keep in mind that I did not need to scout the line on the Gatekeeper. My WAG is that, for every mile of the trail, we walk at least a mile (or more if I have to go back and spot Matt through the obstacle). Some of this distance is walked with rocks in our hands. I vaguely remember the trail etiquette, requiring one stacking rocks to disassemble the man-made ramps - I don't think this is relevant in our case. First, the rocks are already stacked, and in the worst-possible way for us, since our differentials are on the passenger side. Second, every day the trail is travelled by the big or giant little Jeeps with a lot of gearing and horsepower, and the rocks (football to basketball size) go flying every which way.
The friendly trail up-keeper guys catch up with us some time into the trail. Full of sense of accomplishment, I ask them whether we're about to hit the Little Sluice.
They laugh, and show us the map and where we are. We haven't even made it to Ellis Creek!
Soap: A minute ago this was the safest job in the world. Now it's turning into a bad day in Bosnia.
Photo by Thao Bauer
Photo by Thao Bauer
Photo by Thao Bauer
Photo by Thao Bauer
Photo by Thao Bauer
Photo by Thao Bauer
Now, I can pretend I remember the names of the obstacles, but I really don't. By the time we see Ellis Creek Bridge, we feel like we've driven half the trail already. Somehow, we make it up the Walker Hill and Soup Bowl without incidents (although not with ease or grace, by any means). TrailsOffroad has a beautiful comment on the Soup Bowl: "The trick is to be on tires larger than 44 inches, but this doesn't mean people on smaller tires can't make it."
We did make it, on 31 inch tires.
By the time we see the granite block with the words "Little Sluice" carved into it, it is already mid-afternoon. The skies are leaden-gray, and rain squalls and thunderstorms are approaching from all sides. We follow the tracks of the Jeep people, and end up unknowingly on the Little Sluice Bypass. My only hunch was that the Sluice should be somewhere low, and we were headed uphill on the granite slab.
Photo by Thao Bauer
Photo by Thao Bauer
Photo by Thao Bauer
Photo by Thao Bauer
Photo by Thao Bauer
Photo by Thao Bauer
Photo by Thao Bauer
Photo by Thao Bauer
Photo by Thao Bauer
The clouds close in, and it starts to drizzle. We pull over wherever possible to let one or another group of Jeeps pass - they move way faster than us... Until they don't.
31" tires are far more forgiving, so... Enter a full-bodied Land Rover on dinky tires and without lockers.
It was embarrassing to watch the videos of the affair afterwards - methinks I can count on myself to pick the right line... after I've exhausted the alternatives. But - it is more fun that way.
I took very few photos on this trip. Most of them were taken by our shotgunners - Thao Bauer and Andrey Portnoy.
Turkish: Have you ever crossed the road, and looked the wrong way? A car's nearly on you? So what do you do? Something very silly. You freeze. Your life doesn't flash before you, 'cause you're too fuckin' scared to think - you just freeze and pull a stupid face. But the pikey didn't. Why? Because he had plans of running the car over.
Lutzi is softly insistent on only having vehicles with at least 33-inch tires in the group on the trip to Dusy Ershim.
That puts me into a petulant mood. Fine, be that way. We'll do the Rubicon instead.
Email my friend Matt, a potential (if a little reluctant) candidate for the Dusy. He warmed up to the idea of doing Rubicon - I guess I scared him enough with Dusy horror stories from the Internet. He proceeds to finger the worldwide web for info on Rubicon, and emails back somewhat disappointed. The webz sayz one can do the whole 'Con in eight hours!
What's the point of having a nine-hour highway ride to the trailhead?
I am incredulous. A quick Google search brings up this gem from California Jeeper:
Description: The Rubicon Trail is the "granddaddy of trails." Most of 18 miles of trail consists of large boulders and rocky terrain. The other parts of the trail go across huge granite slabs which have steep inclines and sharp drop offs. This trail is not for the faint at heart! It does offer some spectacular scenery if you wait long enough for the dust to settle. You can camp along the way at Spider Lake, Buck Island Lake or about 12 miles in there is the Rubicon Springs Campground. This will take a beginner about 6 to 7 hours, or a seasoned wheeler about 4-5 hours if you drive straight through to the campgrounds at Rubicon Springs. The last leg of the journey is about 6 miles (1-2 hours) to paved road.
Recommended equipment: Almost any type of 4x4 vehicle has made it through, but some are easier than others. Stock Jeeps will do the job, but expect body damage. Vehicles with a long wheel base will have a little trouble with some sharp turns. Skid plates, rocker guards, and tow hooks and straps are a must. It is highly recommended that someone in your group have a winch. The less the vehicle is equipped the more work and damage you can expect.
What's the point, indeed? The photos of the obstacles really didn't look scary (do they ever?), besides the crack shot of an overturned Jeep by the trailside.
I did however have some corrections in mind.
The cocky four-to-six-hour Rubicon stories uniformly featured some exoskeleton beast with three feet of suspension travel and forty-inch tires, ram steering assist, lockers and power up the wazoo. Neither of our trucks is anywhere close to this category.
I assure Matt that, should we fly through all 18 miles in a record time, I'd make it up to him by taking the most-circuitous route through the Eastern Sierra Nevada on our way back home. He's convinced.
A few weeks later I retire the 32-inch BFG Mud-Terrains, and enjoy the quiet and balanced ride on dinky 7.50-16 Michelin XLS mounted on 5.5-inch-wide rims. The Discovery looks awesome with color-coordinated old-school Land Rover rims, but positively funny from the front or the back. I can't remember when was the last time I drove anything with 7.5-inch-wide tires.
Time flies; I spend some time assembling a Detroit locker in a spare third member for the rear axle, but Matt (who briefly owned this particular Detroit) dissuades me with a passion. By the time I decide to buy heavy-duty axle shafts, it is already too late. My vehicle preparation is limited to tightening a few bolts and nuts, and removal of the front sway bar. Good riddance...
Out of the blue, Lutzi and Conal tell me that ... Dusy is not going to be open at all this year, and they are going to Rubicon as well. Remembering the 33-inch thing, I promise to hang on close - but not tag along as part of the group. Why do I have to continue being petulant?
Marsellus: The night of the fight, you may feel a slight sting. That's pride fucking with you. Fuck pride. Pride only hurts, it never helps.
Fast forward - the day comes. The truck is - for the first time EVER - fully fuelled, loaded, and ready to go the night before, so I sleep on until 4:30 in the morning, kiss my sleepy wife goodbye, and leave home on time.
Pick up my long-time friend, geologist, tennis coach, and photographer Andrey, meet up with Matt and his lovely wife Thao at a gas station, and we hit the oh-so-hated I-5.
Los Angeles greets us with a forty-minute jam near downtown, but nothing really to bitch about. Soon, we're on the Northern downslope of Grapevine, descending into San Joaquin valley.
We split to Highway 99, and the valley towns blast by. We have plenty of time, so we elect the scenic route, leave 99 in Merced, and proceed to a meandering route involving highways 59 and 49. Pull over to a shaded corner near Lake McSwain on Merced River, and have our lunch.
After lunch Andrey takes the helm - his approach to steering a top-heavy truck without sway bars and propensity to alternate between heavy understeer and equal understeer is something like pulse-width modulation. Every turn in the road involves protracted oscillations around the desired trajectory; Matt and Thao behind us get nearly nauseous looking at our Disco swaying side to side. Some particularly nasty, progressively-tighter, turns make me white-knuckle the grab handle. Andrey is unfazed.
We arrive in Placerville late afternoon - perfect time to take a stroll along the main street, and hit all bizarre stores along the way. I have half a mind to buy a saxophone in one of thousand antique junk stores - but bail out for the lack of reeds. Most eateries are closed - some until evening, some - until Winter, - so we get a couple of beers and some grub wherever we can. Nobody's impressed.
We leave for our hotel in Camino - aptly named "Camino Hotel" - a few miles away. Kelly, the hotel's owner, took the pains of driving for three hours from Bay Area to the hotel - we are the only customers, and have the place all to ourselves. The hotel is awesome, and we enjoy the beaty of the dining room after a short trip to a restaurant across the road, with a bottle of Four Roses between us. By the time the Bourbon is exhausted, Matt's working hard trying to elicit all biographical details of Andrey's life meanders (which are plentiful). Finally he gives up, and we turn in for the night.
It is our vacation, after all - no reason to get up all too early. Kelly makes us a wonderful breakfast, European in contents but very American in quantity, and we reluctantly leave the place half past eight. We make our way up Highway 50 to Ice House Road, then spend long forty minutes negotiating tight bends in the road towards the Loon Lake. I have the radio tuned to VHF frequency Lutzi and the gang planned to use, and soon hear some chunky banter. It gets fairly clear when the lake is in sight, and I establish contact - that's the SCLR/NCLR guys all right.
By the way, this is my first trip when I can enjoy it all - I talk to Matt via CB, listen and occasionally chime in to Rover crew banter on VHF, and listen to my tunes - by plugging the phone to Yaesu FTM-10R line input, and its line output - to the car stereo.
Soon, we're at the large staging area by the Rubicon trailhead - time to use the (remarkably clean) restroom, air down, and generally get ourselves oriented on the map. By the time we're ready to go, the lot is full of baby Jeeps sporting a lot of expensive hardware. The whole ordeal all of a sudden looks a little intimidating.
Photo by Thao Bauer
Photo by Thao Bauer
We decide not to wait for the big little Jeeps to move ahead, and drive up to the Gatekeeper.
There's some commotion at the Gatekeeper; it turns out that a couple of local guys, serving as trail maintenance volunteers, are busy winching one giant rock OFF the trail. Earlier, they winched it ON, but were met with too many complaints.
The Gatekeeper looks fine and poses no problems whatsoever. Looking back, I wish the guys kept that big rock smack in the middle of the road - that way, it would be more representative of what's in the store. Matt lands the Disco on the diff, and it is the time for the strap to come out to the surface (where it would remain until the end of the trip - where it still remains, actually). The Placerville guys are friendly and encouraging, and hand us very good and informative maps of the trail. Andrey tries out his homebrewed gimbal for the video camera and quickly discovers the ways to improve it (which would be tried later at the campsite).
Photo by Thao Bauer
We proceed on to the Granite Bowl.
Not even 500 feet into the trail, there's already a big little Jeep with a broken driveshaft. The place is crawling with Jeeps, and the drivers are itching to do something meaningful - exploring the routes around the woudned Jeep, to little avail.
We are relieved that the large group (that the wounded Jeep is part of) is staying behind until the driveline is sorted out, and head on.
Photo by Thao Bauer
Photo by Thao Bauer
Photo by Thao Bauer
Photo by Thao Bauer
Photo by Thao Bauer
Photo by Thao Bauer
A short detour to dwell on our rides: both - Land Rover Discovery Series 1, mine - a 1996 with 281 thousand miles on the clock, Matt's - a 1998 with about half the mileage. Both are built in very similar way - with 31" tires, Eaton/Detroit TrueTrac limited slip differentials, about 15% lower gearing than factory, with front bumpers off Great Divide Edition Range Rovers, decent if slow winches, diff covers, rock sliders, and heavy-duty steering linkages and rear trailing arms. That's about wraps up all the might. Looking back, in three days on the trail we have not seen another vehicle with less than 33" tires, and only three other full-bodies vehicles - Lutzi's Disco 2, Conal's P38A Range Rover, and someone else's FZJ80 Land Cruiser.
Let me take another detour.
Most trails I've driven in my life were reasonably good roads (with rocks less than football size), with an occasional obstacle. The closest in difficulty (that I know of) is Pritchett Canyon in Moab - but it is short. You break your truck quickly and go back to Moab. Rubicon is very different.
The average ride distance not requiring me getting out of the vehicle - about 200 feet, give or take. Keep in mind that I did not need to scout the line on the Gatekeeper. My WAG is that, for every mile of the trail, we walk at least a mile (or more if I have to go back and spot Matt through the obstacle). Some of this distance is walked with rocks in our hands. I vaguely remember the trail etiquette, requiring one stacking rocks to disassemble the man-made ramps - I don't think this is relevant in our case. First, the rocks are already stacked, and in the worst-possible way for us, since our differentials are on the passenger side. Second, every day the trail is travelled by the big or giant little Jeeps with a lot of gearing and horsepower, and the rocks (football to basketball size) go flying every which way.
The friendly trail up-keeper guys catch up with us some time into the trail. Full of sense of accomplishment, I ask them whether we're about to hit the Little Sluice.
They laugh, and show us the map and where we are. We haven't even made it to Ellis Creek!
Soap: A minute ago this was the safest job in the world. Now it's turning into a bad day in Bosnia.
Photo by Thao Bauer
Photo by Thao Bauer
Photo by Thao Bauer
Photo by Thao Bauer
Photo by Thao Bauer
Photo by Thao Bauer
Now, I can pretend I remember the names of the obstacles, but I really don't. By the time we see Ellis Creek Bridge, we feel like we've driven half the trail already. Somehow, we make it up the Walker Hill and Soup Bowl without incidents (although not with ease or grace, by any means). TrailsOffroad has a beautiful comment on the Soup Bowl: "The trick is to be on tires larger than 44 inches, but this doesn't mean people on smaller tires can't make it."
We did make it, on 31 inch tires.
By the time we see the granite block with the words "Little Sluice" carved into it, it is already mid-afternoon. The skies are leaden-gray, and rain squalls and thunderstorms are approaching from all sides. We follow the tracks of the Jeep people, and end up unknowingly on the Little Sluice Bypass. My only hunch was that the Sluice should be somewhere low, and we were headed uphill on the granite slab.
Photo by Thao Bauer
Photo by Thao Bauer
Photo by Thao Bauer
Photo by Thao Bauer
Photo by Thao Bauer
Photo by Thao Bauer
Photo by Thao Bauer
Photo by Thao Bauer
Photo by Thao Bauer
The clouds close in, and it starts to drizzle. We pull over wherever possible to let one or another group of Jeeps pass - they move way faster than us... Until they don't.
