Long Road Ahead

We came up to Big Bear this weekend, and while the trip wasn’t about doing a big bike ride, I decided to sneak one in anyway. I based this route off a gravel race that takes place up here, but chopped it down to keep it at around three hours.

I’ve always been curious what riding up here is like, but never actually bothered to come find out. Big Bear’s only about two hours away from us, but it is a tourist town, and land on the wrong weekend and you’re stuck waiting around for hours to do just about anything. That might just be about every weekend up here, though, as yesterday, a mostly random Saturday in October, had: an ultramarathon, a wine walk, some OHV race thing, and Oktoberfest.

The bike route itself was on an OHV road. I’m not really used to riding on these with other people. I’ve never seen a truck, side-by-side, or dirt bike on a single one of the (rare) OHV roads outside Los Angeles.

Mostly people were nice, but the buzz cut truck bros are gonna bro it up no matter what, I suppose. In any case, the cool ones moved to the side when I was climbing to let me by so I didn’t have to stop. Basic courtesy, sure, but not something you always find.

The most striking moment came about two hours in, when I came around a corner to see guy pointing a rifle off into the distance. Ah right, hunters. I had a moment where I wasn’t really sure what protocol was. Was I supposed to be quiet? Stop? Should I hunch down and army crawl over, whispering about whether it was wabbit season or not?

Of course, these dweebs were just on the side of the road. They’d literally just stopped their big truck dead center and gotten out, gun in hand, to shoot at whatever was in the distance. I often hear hunter-types talk about the elegance and respect of the hunt. But the other side of that is three bros with beer cans falling out of their truck just shooting at something off the side of the road. Real sign of manhood’s dominance, that.

In any case, I ended up creeping past slowly on my bike. I figured there was no real etiquette here to be shown, since they didn’t appear to be showing it themselves.

I can’t say I loved riding these popular OHV trails. This much traffic on a dirt road sort of defeats the purpose of pursuing the backcountry. And the road was fucked up and mostly unpleasant to ride on. I’d done similar rides on similar types of roads in Tahoe, and while I’d see a few campers along the way, it was never this busy. There’s a lot of other gravel roads up here, though, so I’ll probably give it another try someday.