Day 1: Rubicon
The first official day of Ultimate Adventure II, and what a doozie. We planned to get from Placerville, through the Rubicon, to the hotel in Truckee all in one day. No small feat, considering most wheelers take at least two days for the same trek. Could we get 19 vehicles through the trail that fast? Would we get stuck behind long lines of civilians? Would we be held up by unforeseen breakage?
As it turned out, all our worries were for nothing. With the 6 a.m. drivers' meeting and one-hour drive from Placerville to the entry point at Loon Lake behind us, the group aired down and hit the granite. Our trail leader for the Rubicon was Tim Hardy in his battered Suzuki Samurai. Tim did an excellent job of keeping the group moving, while still allowing time to play on some of the gnarlier obstacles such as Soup Can Rock and Little Sluice.
Thankfully, the crowds were small and those we ran into waved us by. It was shortly after we left the slabs when we realized what a capable and competent group we had. Rob Harris, a veteran from the last Ultimate Adventure, came close to toppling through one of the tubs, and Tom "Foolery" Boyd crunched a fiberglass panel in Little Sluice, while the newbies took it all in stride. There were no major catastrophes, no complaints, and most important, no whiners. Shortly after lunch we were at the dam at Buck Island Lake, and by 5 p.m. we were at the campsite at Rubicon Springs, where we waited while Gage Hartman of Warn replaced a broken track bar bolt in the company's TJ.
By the time we aired up and hit blacktop it was just getting dark, but reports of a wild fire raging north of Lake Tahoe got us worried that we may not make it to the hotel in Truckee. There was a little smoke and an ominous orange glow in the sky, but the roads turned out to be open and the last of the group straggled into the hotel by 10 p.m.