The Big Bear Trifecta

Story and Pictures by Steve Unwin

Attendees:
Charlie Seeger - yellow TJ
Matt Unwin/Thad & Rachel Gilmore - white TJ Rubicon
Steve Unwin/Nora - white TJ

Yesterday Charlie, my dad and I went up to Big Bear to do 3 of the harder trails up there. The trails are done back to back starting with Dishpan Springs, Holcomb Creek and the John Bull Trail.

We started on Dishpan Springs, the newly opened trail with a black diamond rating. The scenery is amazing as you make your way from Lake Arrowhead towards Big Bear Lake. At the earliest part of the trail after Deep Creek there is a minor rock garden that requires some careful tire placement to do without getting hung up. None of us had any difficulty there. At the hard part of the trail there is a very rocky uphill climb with a "waterfall" type obstacle at the top. There is a bypass, which still looks pretty bad. All of us opted for the harder line up the waterfall. I made it with no trouble. My dad and charlie both did wheelies, then tried again and made it. We finished the trail in less than two hours and moved on to Holcomb Creek.

Holcomb Creek starts out with a nice rock garden. All of us commented on how it use to be much harder. This time there was no need for spotting, especially for those of us with larger tires. We had no real difficulties on this trail until we got to the second rock garden. My dad's Rubicon struggled due to lack of ground clearance. Fortunately he had ample armor and we could hear the screeching metal as he clawed his way along. At one point he got high centered and it required rock stacking and the use of his winch to get him unstuck. A misjudgement in spotting on my part got him his first body damage: a dent in the rear passenger corner. Later, wrote on the dent with a Sharpe pen "Jesus forgives, Rocks don't: Holcomb Creek 7/27/06". I'm glad he had a sense of humor about it. We all negotiated our way to the end of the trail with little difficulty and noticed how few vehicles we were seeing on that day. It was unexpected. At the end of Holcomb Creek we splashed around in the water crossing and got some pretty good pictures of it.

The group made its way to the East side of the John Bull trail with plenty of time left in the day and a confident attitude. Charlie and I did fine with our larger tires and ground clearance but here again ground clearance was the issue for the Rubicon. The winch was required to unstuck my dad from a ledge climb. Later as we descended down the west hill my dad's Rubi slipped off a rock into a position which threated to take out his driveshaft. After a lot of trial and error (including my dad smashing his finger stacking rocks) we were able to winch him backwards and no damage was done. Beyond this we were careful to spot him the rest of the way down so as not to have a repeat performance. Dad was getting tired after his 3rd black diamond trail of the day, and so were we!

So it was a fun day in the forest for us with lots of fun and lots of work. We topped it off with a dinner at the local Mex restaurant and headed home.