By Lisa Shrock

Travis and I were the trail leaders for the Lockwood Creek & Miller Jeep Trail this year, with an awful lot of help from Jesse May. Travis and Jesse spotted the various vehicles throughout the trail, and in my opinion they both did an excellent job of it.

We actually started off with Trail number 118 this year, and ran a total of three trails. We left Flying J’s at approximately 9:15 AM. We had a total of 11 vehicles with us. We had Larry & Margie Williams, Rob & Marcie Scholer (newly weds), Adam, Jesse & Eric May, Bill Smith & his wife & granddaughter, Dan & Allison Delp and their daughter Sarah, Jorge Lopez and his daughter, Peter and Gray (guests of Larry Lesher), Larry Lesher, and Richard Heine and his guest.

This year we started the run with Trail 118. This is the first time that our club has run the 118. We found out that it has been adopted by a club named RiffRaff, and we saw a few of their members along the trail doing cleanup and repair. The 118 is a very pretty trail, which helped to get us on the dirt sooner. A few vehicles had a tiny bit of trouble at the beginning because a drainage trench was dug down the side of the highway and it ran straight across the beginning of the trail. 

When we pre-ran the trail a week earlier, we couldn’t make it across this trench and broke our plastic bumper mount. It was getting late and the trail is approximately six miles long, so Travis and I spent about two hours filling in a rock ramp through to the road in order to keep from turning around and going back. This also made it possible for us to take the club through the trail the following weekend. Other than the trench, the 118 is an easy scenic trail, and the rangers have been made aware of it and will be working on fixing it. The trail starts off of Lockwood Valley Road right after the turnoff for the Ranger Station. We ended up right out on the dirt road near the staging are near the beginning of the Lockwood Creek Trail. The first hill climb of Lockwood proved to be a challenge for a few of the vehicles. It has definitely become more difficult since the last time that the club ran the trail. Travis had to work at it a little to get our Grand Cherokee up it. Of course, our vehicle was fully loaded. We had all our equipment and had brought my parents along for the ride too. This was their first off-road adventure other than the Don-A-Vee runs. So, they got a lot of excitement out of it. My mom was nervous at times throughout the day, especially here. My dad was okay with it, but I think he rather prefers pavement. All in all, I do believe they had fun though. And the trail was just as pretty as usual, so they enjoyed themselves, as did everyone else. We didn’t get to have lunch at our usual spot, because with adding the 118 addition we ended up running late, so we stopped at the first valley where Yellow Jacket hits the Lockwood Creek Trail. We all managed to find a shade tree to setup our chairs under. After lunch, everyone had a bit more fun when we came to Kabob Hill. We found out that the name of this hill came from when they rerouted Lockwood Creek Trail and everyone involved in the work stopped at that point of the trail and roasted kabobs for lunch. The teeter totters definitely proved to be challenging. I tried to go up it myself, with no success so, Travis spotted me through it and everything was fine. Jesse helped everyone else that tried and got everyone through without incident.

We eventually started up Miller Jeep Trail. By this time, it was starting to get too hot outside. If we run Miller next year, we definitely need to leave earlier than 9:00 AM if we are going to add the 118 Trail to it. Lots of us started having overheating problems and people started getting tired, because it was just too hot. ME JEEP ended up overheating to at least 260, I think it may have been higher, because the idiot needle was pegged (it only goes to 260). I didn’t know what to do, because I never had that happen before. The main thing that registered in my brain was "this can crack the head". So, I turned off the engine. I’m still not sure if that was the correct thing to do.

In the late afternoon, we had an unpleasant person come up behind our group who did not seem very happy with life, which made things a little harder for us all. We tried to speed up our pace, not only because of the unhappy person in the back, but also because we all needed more air running through our engine compartments. We eventually made it through Miller and ended up in SHADE!!!!! We were all happy then. We all stayed and talked for about 1/2 hour while our Jeeps cooled down, enjoying the SHADE.

Adam, one of our guests, was really happy because he made it through every obstacle without being strapped. We were all very happy for him on his achievement. Our other guest, Peter and his passenger Gray (invited by Larry) had fun and didn’t hurt their blue Amigo either!

All in all, I think and I hope that everyone had a good time. Hopefully, we’ll be able to do this run again next year; only I think we should plan it for a cooler time of year and maybe start it a little earlier.

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