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California-Nevada Border • WCXC
Photo: Nik Schulz

What’s your favorite overlanding moment? I’d love to hear about them. If you send in a brief description and some photos (1400 pixels wide), I’ll publish the best ones here on the blog.

OK, I’ll start. My favorite overlanding moment was on our Twain trip. Natalie, Greg, and I were in the Sierras, close to the California-Nevada border, about 15 miles north of Bridgeport. Maybe half an hour earlier we had been lost in open country. The map for the obscure road we were on (Forest Road 067) had an error, and we weren’t able to find our way through the mountains. Every trail we tried faded into nothing. Then someone on an ATV pointed us in the direction of a steep, rock-strewn hill, saying something like, “That’s where you need to go, if you can make it up that hill.”

It was 067, the road leading to Bridgeport, our next supply stop. It was pretty loose and fairly steep but not only did we make it to the top and now know where we were, we were rewarded with stunning views to boot. Here are some more photos.

What’s your favorite moment? Send ’em in to westcountyxclub. I’m on gmail.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Link:
Overlanding in the Land of Twain, Part 3 Read the rest of this entry »


Photo: Gregory McDonald

Shortly after getting on the road for our second day on the California Backcountry Discovery Trail, a tiny CRV carrying a long, thin, rip-stop-nylon-clad load on its roof, came clamoring up the rocky trail behind us. In front of us a Toyota Tacoma made its way up the mountain, similarly equipped. We were way out in the forest in traffic.

Soon we figured out what all of the congestion was about. Besides the opening of deer season, people were heading up to Hull Mountain for a hang glider “fly in.” Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s some video of our drive through Joshua Tree. At one point I took a bad line and impacted the bottom of the truck, which was less than ideal. The drive was beautiful though.


Photo: Nik Schulz

After leaving the deserts of Arizona we crossed over into the deserts of California. We’d initially planned to camp at Joshua Tree’s south entrance off of the 10 freeway, but we completely missed the exit and ended up in Indio (in the Palm Springs/Coachella area). By the time we got there it was well past sundown and the wind was blowing an absolute gale. We shelved our camping plan and headed to a hotel.

After a hot shower and a good night of sleep we ready to head into Joshua Tree and found what was probably a more interesting way in.

Read the rest of this entry »


I realized I hadn’t written anything about our Southwest trip for awhile and, since we’re heading out on another trip soon, I thought I’d better get cracking. So here it is: Part 3.

After Canyon de Chelly we headed to Sedona, AZ. I’ll tell you right off the bat, it’s not much to see. It is beautifully situated, I’ll give it that. Towering walls of red rock surround it in dramatic fashion, but the town itself looked upscale suburban. We couldn’t even find a historic downtown, just a retail strip.

The road getting there was pretty good though. We came in on Schnebly Hill Road off of Highway 17. (See map below). Read the rest of this entry »

I cut together this quick video from our trip to Canyon de Chelly in northeastern Arizona. Apologies for the wind noise.

Here’s the blog post about the trip. It includes a map, resources on guides and camping, and a bunch of photos.


Photo: Gregory MacDonald

A couple of weeks ago I headed up to the Mormon Emigrant Trail in the Sierra Nevada with my friends Greg, Mas, and Ismael to get into the snow and practice our recovery techniques. We started with a plan that Greg had drawn up of the different types of recoveries we wanted to do: Pull Pall with winch, winching with Hi-Lift, Kinetic strap pull, etc. When we got to the snow though, we found that it was a lot of fun just to drive around. We were doing recoveries soon enough, however. Read the rest of this entry »


Photo: Nik Schulz

When Clemens arrived in Virginia City in 1862, it was a mere three years old. Its mines, however, had already produced over $400 million dollars in silver, enough to bankroll the building of San Francisco and eventually help the Union win the Civil War. The booming town was lined with businesses, restaurants, saloons, and populated with well-paid miners and dancing girls. After his own hard-scrabble mining stint, Sam Clemens, newly shaved and puffing on his ever-present cigar, must have surveyed the bustling, cosmopolitan scene and thought, “Now this is more like it.”

Here he began to thrive writing stories for the Territorial Enterprise. When the news wasn’t interesting enough for him, which it rarely was, he stretched the facts like taffy, folding and molding them until he had produced a confection that bore little resemblance to the reality from which it was derived. To these colorfully fabricated accounts, he added his colorful new pen name: Mark Twain.

I found one wagon that was going to California, and made some judicious inquiries of the proprietor. When I learned, through his short and surly answers to my cross-questioning, that he was certainly going on and would not be in the city the next day to make trouble… I took down his list of names and added his party to the killed and wounded. Having more scope here, I put this wagon through an Indian fight that to this day has no parallel in history.

My two columns were filled. When I read them over in the morning I felt that I had found my legitimate occupation at last… I felt I could take my pen and murder all the emigrants on the plains if need be, and the interests of the paper demanded it.

Mark Twain, Roughing It, Chapter 42

Our legitimate occupation involved getting to the former town of Masonic in the Bodie Hills. First though we had to follow the trail south from our Desert Creek campsite to Jackass Creek and over the Sweetwater Mountains. Read the rest of this entry »

Rice Fork, flooded last March, was crossable in November.

If you look closely (or click on this photo) you’ll see my spare gas can lying on this rutted section of Forest Road M3. These were typical road conditions for the first 10 to 15 miles.

Click here for a downloadable .gpx file of this trip for your GPS device.

In mid-November I went to the Mendocino National Forest, north of Clear Lake, solo, to see if I could circumnavigate the Snow Mountain Wilderness. I tried to do it back in March in the Montero but the snow melt-swollen rivers were too deep to cross. This time I brought a dirt bike. I didn’t think I’d be able to cover the estimated 60 or 70 miles in the truck, at least not in a day—10 mph is about average on rough roads. I figured I could easily double that on the bike.

I got up early, was in the woods, and on the bike by noon. Within a few minutes I had crossed Parramore Creek Rice Fork (the one that had held me back in spring) without a problem. OK—I stalled the bike mid-stream and had to dunk a boot in the water to keep from falling over, but basically no problem. From there my wet right foot and I headed north on forest road M3—see map below—and things got a little more serious. At one point, after slamming through a deep puddle in an especially rutted section of road, I stopped and thought, “Should I take a picture of that for the blog?” I decided yes and headed back. There in puddle lay my spare gas can. Sheesh.

After an hour of bouncing two wheels over mangled dirt, I had covered only 11 miles, about as much as I could have covered on four. I doubted whether I’d make it round the whole loop. That morning though, much like a 17th-century captain hoisting the flag of his patron saint, or an Indian taxi driver with dashboard shrine to Ganesh, I had attached a photo of Archangel Michael to my handlebars, well, a photo of a statue anyway. It helped. Despite my fear of heading alone into the wilderness, I felt a certain solidity in the journey and pressed on.

Read the rest of this entry »

My artist’s rendering of our night siting.

It was around 4am, mid-September at the South Yuba Campground northeast of Nevada City. Natalie and I were sleeping happily. Then nature called (both of us—I guess it was a conference call). As we headed out into the chilly night air to take care of business, I said, “Hey, look, there’s Jupiter.” Fairly low on the horizon, east-southeast of us floated a bright white light. “Wow, it’s really twinkling.”

“It looks green,” observed Natalie. “Yeah, I does look like it’s twinkling green,” I said, struck by the brightness of it. I can’t remember exactly how it went from here. I think Natalie said, “It looks like it’s moving.” I looked again. “Oh my God, it does. It’s totally moving.” And we watched through the trees as this blinking, twinkling thing hovered and moved, paused and moved again. Read the rest of this entry »