JackAscii

Straight Outta Compton and I took a trip to Brimstone Recreation Park this past Sunday to do a little trail riding. Per the official Brimstone trail map, the trails are rated either easy, moderate, or difficult. For the most part, we tend to ride the moderate trails as they provide some challenges but not anything thats going to get us KO’d. The first moderate trail we attempted was 95 (also known as the “Mike Branch” trail). Anyway, roughly five minutes in it became a apparent to me that the recent rain had washed it out and made it nearly impossible to pass. So…we turned around. This was pretty much par for the course for the rest of the day.

The good aspects of Brimstone were that there were lots and lots of trails to ride and that each trail seemed to have some type of interesting  (sarcasm) site associated with it. The bad aspects were that the trails were not always clearly marked which resulted in team clueless (me and S.O.C.) getting lost from time to time.

Anyway, not much more to add. I only took a couple of pictures and completely forgot to video record anything. Anyway, here is a picture of S.O.C. sitting on his ride in front of a mammoth 4 ft. waterfall. This particular waterfall was clearly marked as a point of interest and even had its own fancy sign posted out front (a sign for a 4 ft. waterfall seems appropriate). Here is a picture of my ATV in front of the monster pond. This location was exactly as interesting as the waterfall.  Without a good back story on why its called the monster pond, this pond pretty much sucks.

Quick anecdote… Near the end of the trip S.O.C. and I visited the Rob Sexton Cemetery. Prior to arriving at the site, we had seen maybe 3 people over the course of the 3 hours we had already been on the trails. However, once we got to the cemetery, we ran into two dudes and a kid. One dude had a sidearm, one guy didn’t have a shirt (not sure if he had pants either – he never turned to face us – thankfully), and the kid did not appear to like city folk too much. Anyway, once I took the whole scene in I began to wonder how long it would take the authorities to find my body. Honestly, who looks for a body in a cemetery.

Trip Summary

Total Trip Miles: 40

Total Trip Time: ~ 4 hours

Total Hours on ATV since Purchase: 14.7

Total Miles on ATV since Purchase: 123

Several weeks ago, me and a couple of buddies (“doodle” and “straight outta compton”) decided to hit trail 13 up on the Coal Creek OHV park (here is some information on my ATV if you’re at all interested or simply wanting to humor me.). Per the official Coal Creek OHV area map, the trail is rated as moderate and roughly 2.4 miles in length. However, as trail 13 is not accessible directly from the  parks parking lot, you have to take a combination of other trails to get there. We ended up taking trail 1 (moderate, 1.4 miles) trail 2 (moderate, 3 miles) and part of trail G1 (easy, 8.6 miles) to arrive at trail 13’s head. As we started down trail 13 we immediately came to two deer crossing the path. The pictures aren’t great, but if you have soft spot in your heart for Bambi, check them out here and here. The rest of the trail was filled with mud holes, lots of mud holes. Some shallow, and some deep enough to make me regret not wearing a pair waterproof boots (I don’t have any anyway…). This trail isn’t technically difficult and there weren’t any dicey parts as I remember, but you will want to make sure you either have a functioning winch or a buddy with some tow cables (I remember at least one occasion where doodle had to pull straight outta compton outta the mud with a tow cable.). I’m not sure what else to add here, but I’ll leave you with some of the more interesting photo’s.

Here is straight outta compton posing inside one of the cooler caves on the trail.

Here is the only picture I feel comfortable posting of doodle (he’s the dude in the white, I’m the dude in the green) – I’ll have to get his permission to post the better photo which was taken about 5 seconds later

Lastly, here is a neat looking water hole up in them mountains off of trail 13 – probably my favorite picture of the day.

Trip Summary

Total Trip Miles: 23.2

Total Trip Time: ~ 4 hours

Total Hours on ATV since Purchase: 10.8

Total Miles on ATV since Purchase: 83