We left on friday the 9th around mid day. My buddy Cam was a few hours behind so we took our time heading to Fruita. We spent the night there at Cam's mom's place. She treats my family like her family so we stop and pester her any time we pass through. Cam rolled in around 9-10 and we planned the next day. I wanted to drive across 50 west of 15, but I was persuaded to take 80 instead so we could stop at the salt flats.
I love the stretch. both kids and the dog, plus a weeks worth of clothes, spare parts, and tools in the back of a beat old YJ.
Salt flats stop, what a weird place. I got up to 70 and called that good.
We rolled in to Elko in the dark on saturday night and slept fast.
I'm based in LA with my job. I have a travel trailer there that is my studio apartment and a van to tow it around when necessary. I am taking a leave from the airline due to the beer flu, so I drove them up to Reno at the beginning of the month so we'd have a place to sleep while we were out there.
We left Elko by 8. I figured we had 6 hours of driving left to get to Jones Fork campground. Sunset was around 630. That left us 4 hours of screw around time if we wanted to get there before dark. We stopped in Reno to pick up my duplex on wheels. I drove the van and my wife drove the jeep.
Here is our caravan ready to pull out of Dodge...
My copilot
My caravan enroute.
We stopped in Carson City to stock the coolers and then headed over the hill to Tahoe. The passes here on 70 are longer pulls than anywhere else I've driven, but the hills further west are definitely steeper. That pull westbound out of Carson City had me down to 15-20 MPH and the altitude didn't break 8000 IIRC. No BS steep!
We drove straight through S Lake Tahoe and stopped for gas in Kyburz, CA. That is the closest gas to the west trailhead of the rubicon. Gas in CA is expensive.
Damn, that's a long YJ
It was 30 minutes from there to Jones Fork campground, which was the closest site to the trailhead that was open. From Jones fork, it was about 25 minutes to the trailhead. We met my buddy from work who drove his JKU on 37s out from San Jose at the campsite, set up and had a beer.
The next morning we stuffed our faces and headed to the trail.
There are a ton of write-ups on the Rubicon and I read a lot of them. It's tough to gauge a persons perspective through their description. We'd heard everything from you can run the trail in 5 hours if you're hustling to you'll need 3 days. They weren't allowing camping on the trail due to fire concerns, so we planned on running half out and back on day 1.
Little Sluice
Rubicon Springs.
We made it to the lake and figured it was the same time to keep going or go back, so we pressed on. We made it to Rubicon Springs and then it got dark. Cadillac hill in the dark was interesting. We didn't factor in the drive from Tahoma where the trail dumps out back to Jones Fork was around 1:45. We got back to camp around 1130. My family was beat, but it was a pretty good day. We had run the whole trail and we still had 4 days to play.
More report coming, need to upload more pics and get a few more from Cam and Dave.
