I thought that was a nice trip. Really great group. We mostly ran green trails during the day, with a couple of short blue rock crawls mixed in. Mostly we were kind of exploring around the west reserve of AOAA, which is what I’d intended to start with.
Attendees:
- Kirk – FJ Cruiser
- Ben – 4Runner
- Brian – JKU
- Darren – JKU
- Chase – Rivian
- Jeff – Defender
I will say that navigating in AOAA is still not super easy, though it’s gotten better. I was a bit annoyed to discover that they dropped their maps from Maprika and have a partnership with OnX. Though between the paper map and looking at the GPS trace, it wasn’t too bad. There were a few places where we turned onto something that wasn’t on the onx map or where the trails didn’t quite match the various maps, but nothing too bad, and I made one or two turns the wrong way that was purely just turning the wrong way at an intersection.
Given how little rain there had been, I wasn’t expecting a lot of deep mud, but we sure found plenty of mudholes, some of which were pretty deep. Ben managed to totally repaint his truck to a natural brown, and had to clean off the side windows and mirrors to be able to navigate the trails. A lot of the mud was sticky, so if you got it up on the windows, it stayed there rather than washing off.
We met up in the parking lot and were rolling out around 9:40 after a bit of a delay. My GPS track for the day showed we covered just over 21 miles. There were a total of 6 of us. We didn’t see much other full-size traffic on the trails, but did see a fair number of side-by-side and ATV groups and a few motorcycles. I actually think the full size groups tend to use the Eastern side of the park more, and the maps seems to show more interesting terrain there, though there’s still a few parts of the Western park that I’d like to go back to do at a later date, mostly north of the Whaleback, more of Fern Ridge, and some of the blue chunks along 102.
We did run the Bootlegger trail, which was actually a pretty scenic and easy drive. We stopped at the Glacier Rocks, where we got out and several of us climbed to the top of the rocks on foot. There’s a really nice view from the top. From there we continued west to the Sands section of the park, which is mostly dust and mud and a big play area to go bombing through stuff. There were a lot of side by sides and such in this area. We then headed up to Heart Lake for lunch, it’s a nice small lake at the edge of the park. From there we went up around Dead Lake, then checked out the Projects area, which would also make a nice lunch spot, with a dead end road and clearing. From there we went through the middle of the park, down to Fern Ridge where we ran the first section, Fern Ridge A, then we headed down the green version of 102 and out of the park. I think we got back to the parking lot around 3:30.
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Trail Report written by Kirk Adams. Pictures contributed by Chase G, Ben Dunkerton, Darren Modzelewski, Brian Middleton, and Jeff Kohler. GPS track provided by Ben Dunkerton.