By John, Lonestar, Strege

I meet with 3 Dirt Devils (Tom, Andy, Walt) and a guest in Running Springs at 8 A.M. as planned.

Bill Baker had e-mailed me earlier that week to meet Larry, 2 guests and himself at the city dump by 9:30 that morning.

My group got there at about 9 A.M. and aired down tires as we waited for them. A club from Nevada (all Toyotas) passed us. We waited for the second group and tried the C.B. as it was now 9:45 . So as the leader, I started the group up the trails leading to John Bull wondering what happened to the Bakers. On the way to John Bull, we came across the Nevada club and we were told that their local friends never showed up and asked if we could take them to John Bull. I told them to follow us, but by the time we got to the trailhead, they were not following us. So I asked Walt if he would go back and find out what happened to them. Turns out, that when we passed them, some were starting to air down their tires and their trail leader stopped following us to go back for them. As it turned out, this was a good thing for the DIRT DEVILS. When Walt found the Toyotas, he heard Bill and his group on his C.B. Turns out, that Bill had fixed his fuel pump problem and Ken just showed up just in time to follow Walt leading everyone back to John Bull.

We made room to let the 12 TOYS pass thru and let our second group air down their tires.

We quickly caught them because one of the Landcruisers encountered a mechanical problem. After a quick trail-fix, they were on their way. The first part of the trail is mellow, so we did not see the TOYS until the second part of John Bull. This section gets tuff right away and after waiting for the Nevada club to get thru, it was the DIRT DEVILS turn to run the rock garden. Larry was the only one who needed serious CALTRANS work, but moved along and did not get stuck.(Sorry Bill Hammond, you still keep the COWBELL !) The rest of the trail went as planned, played in the rock gardens as we went thru the trail and only stopped for lunch.

We crossed paths with Orange County 4 Play and saw a DIRT DEVIL running with them. It was Billy Sims, but he is also a member of that club.

We got to the end of trail by 3:30 , I still had planned to run Holcomb Creek and only 3 people left to go home. The rest of us went to the next trail and found to my demise, that all of the rock garden have hordes of small rocks filling in the holes around the big rocks (A.K.A. CALTRANS WORK). So our group finished that trail by 7 P.M.

All that was left to do, go back to the asphalt and air-up the tires. As we got on the highway, we said our good-byes because I was the only one staying in Big Bear City for Sunday's ADOPT-TRAIL run.

The only injury on the run was when a guest tripped while walking on the trail. It was thought that it was a sprained wrist, but later that night, he went to the hospital for an X-RAY. Found out that he fractured his hand (OUCH). Hope everyone who came out for the day had a great time ?

Til then, see ya