2008 Saturday Recon Ride - June 21, 2008 -- Nugget Creek/Victoria Creek/Gilmore Dome

By Tom Clark

A Recon Ride is a reconnaissance mission. We are acting on some bit of guesswork that there ought to be a ridable route there, and we test out that theory. Sometimes it fails miserably, which is just as much fun as success. For this ride, we figured that there ought to be a way to go from Gilmore Trail at the big "Y" intersection down into the valley, ride north up Victoria Creek and return via the "trapper trail" that connects Gilmore Dome to Gilmore Trail.

To clear things up, view this map It shows all 15 miles of the course, an elevation profile and a 3-D perspective.

We met at the dirt turnaround at the end of the pavement on Gilmore Trail, all five of us: Ben Barton, Byron Broda, Tom Clark, Geoff Orth and Sheryl Reilly (alphabetical order, no sexist thing going on there). The first two miles were on familiar territory: Gilmore Trail. At the big "Y" intersection, we veered left and took our next left. From then on, we stayed on the main road. There are all sorts of four-wheeler trails off of it, and while we glanced at a few, our object was to make sure that the basic loop worked.

The road quickly turned into a deeply rutted and eroded high-speed descent, and right about the time that my nerves wore out, the descent tapered off and the erosion was past. We were then treated to a lovely ride along the side of the valley bottom. The weather was perfect: warm, partly cloudy, nice breeze. We stopped to look at a lot of really interesting mining equipment, and spoke knowledgably about the function of various items, though we were probably way off on all of it.

At about mile six, we turned from our easterly direction to riding north, up Victoria Creek. There's some recent mining activity there, and thanks to the miners, some wide open areas that let you take in the scenery. We kept getting distracted from our goal, seeing where one thing or another went, or playing in the creek, etc. Even found a moose (calf?) carcass, of which only the spine, pelvis, a few ribs and some strewn about hair were left. This was really picked clean. Ben snapped a photo of the thing on his cell phone:

Really, really dead.

All good times come to an end however. Somewhere shy of mile eight, the ascent became brutal, with sustained 30% inclines. About a mile later, we'd climbed 1800 feet, and connected with the road that goes by Gilmore Dome. It keeps going east and I'd like to see what sort of things can be done out that way, but that's for another time. We collected ourselves, and pressed on, following the road west. (Left turn.)

It was unremarkable riding back to the intersection with the "Trapper Trail". At about 10, 10.5 miles, you come upon the "Trapper Trail". It ain't a trail now, man. It has been graded and widened. Sigh. The good news is that the big wide superhighway thing only lasts about a half mile or so. It turns left and heads south, and the trail, looking more like its old self, continues west, uphill. When we got to the little "Y", we decided to go straight up to the summit of the hill, instead of taking the trail around it. Good thing to do, because the view up there is worth the effort. We spent a good five to ten minutes looking at the vista, figuring out what we were looking at.

The other good part of making the effort up to the summit is that you get to go down the other side. My inner "chicken" cropped up, and I didn't dare go as fast as I would have liked. Ben agreed that it was a little hairy, which made me feel better. We enjoyed the rest of the ride over to Gilmore Trail, with the twisty, windy, puddley section being particularly fun. At Gilmore trail we made a right turn and headed back to the cars.

So, no crashes, no mechanicals, no problems. Questions remain though: a large portion of the ride crosses private property. We didn't see any "no trespassing" signs anywhere, but there was evidence of some vandalism on some of the mining equipment out there. How long before the property owners get fed up and block the road off?

It should be pointed out that it is always good to have Ben Barton along. He doesn't think twice about following some side trail to see where it goes, and more than once he disappeared off to the side, only to reappear up ahead, having successfully reconnected with the main road. That's the way that you find the really interesting stuff.