Big Bear CA Dual Sport Ride June 27-28

[SteveTOaks]

Is anyone going to the Big Bear Trail Riders Motorcycle Club dual sport event at the end of June? I'll be there, camping at the convention center. Would be nice to meet up with other Sportsmobilers!

http://www.bigbeartrailriders.com/

(Big Bear is a ski area in Southern California, about an hour north-east of Los Angeles.)

- Steve

[Gooseberry]

I might be up at green spot camp that weekend with a group and was going to bring the ds. I looks like it's going to happen now.

[SteveTOaks]

Here's my report on the Big Bear Dual Sport Run that was held this past weekend.

First, it's amazing that the ran it at all. They have different routes every year, and this year the routes (there is an 'easy' and 'hard' route) went through the "Lake Fire" burn area east and south-east of Big Bear. It took 2-3 months to get permission from the Bureau of Land Management for the expected route, then only 2 days to get permission for the new routes from the US Forest Service! The approval was given only 2 days before the event! They ended up using routes they had run about 5 years ago.

Here I am boondocking in the Big Bear Convention Center parking lot. Lots of neighbors


It took me a couple of hours to reproduce this map of the route from the GPS tracks. Red-dotted lines are the hard route, and blue and black-dotted lines are the easy route. The difference is that blue is on dirt and black dots are paved roads that connect the Green Valley Lake area with the far side of Lake Arrowhead.


The easy route was about 135 miles, of which 50 was on pavement The hard route was 145 miles, with only a few miles on pavement. Even so, a lot of the dirt roads required licenced vehicles. I rode the easy route.

There were rides on both Saturday and Sunday. This year, the second ride was the same as the first, only in the opposite direction. At least that's true for the easy ride. Unfortunately it started to rain on Sunday when I was near Lake Arrowhead, so I skipped the last dirt sections and rode back to the start, raining the whole way. It takes about an hour for the ride.

Here are some photos from along the way from both days.


On the highway on the way to Lake Arrowhead, there are lots of views down into the San Bernardino basin. The haze way down at the bottom is due to the Lake Fire.


Along the way I passed a fire station that had a current map of the Lake Fire on display.


Overlooking a lake on the far side of Lake Arrowhead. Looks like there's rain happening out there.




Even with the rain on Sunday, it was a lot of fun. I'll definitely be going back next year! And I'll be going back this summer. Being at elevation, it's much cooler than the other OHV areas within a couple of hours of LA. And there's much less sand than in the desert

[JetnJim]

Looks like it was a blast!!! I have spent over 120,000 miles touring all over N.America on my D/S since July '08 Love popping into Rally's as I'm ripping about.