12-31-15 Ride Report - Shotgun Creek OR
 

After encountering all the snow in the Oregon coast range after Xmas, I called the BLM office that covers Shotgun Creek to get conditions. The ranger said the trails were open and shouldn't be too snowed-in, so we bombed down New Year's Eve day to get a good rip in before bringing in 2016.

My buddy offered to drive down; so we loaded his awesome camp-van/bike hauler and headed south. The ambient temp when we left was a balmy 33 degrees and the hope was that once the sun was up, that would rise. And going south is supposed to make things warmer too, right...lol. By the time we pulled into staging, the mercury had fallen to 24 degrees. On the bright side, the sun was finally up and we had staging to ourselves.

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The plan was to hit as many of the trails as possible before the clock chimed 3 so we had time to get back. I thought I had a pretty good loop mapped out and things were going well until I realized the map I had was old - a whole bunch of the trail numbers had changed. That made the majority of the ride pretty interesting. On the upside, we did find & hit new trails that weren't on the map. That meant a bit of back-tracking and lots of navi-guessing, but tons of fun anyway. We stopped at the Cascade View staging area and the view was amazing - so nice to have blue sky this time of year.

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Although the ranger said the upper trails had a light dusting, we found there to be a bit more snow than just a dusting. Guess I should have clarified what he meant by dusting...lol. We were able to push through everything we wanted to hit; with the deepest snow probably close to 6" or 8" in some spots. While trying to find one of the difficult trails (3 on our map, 4 in actuality...lol), we hit a 4x4 section and I chose poorly while trying to navigate around a large puddle. I'm just glad I didn't kill her while the motor was partially submerged, though it did make for a good photo op.

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When the ground wasn't frozen and we weren't in snow, traction wasn't too bad. There were some seriously slippery spots when we hit clay though - had a good off after coming down a steep hill a bit too fast and couldn't turn. It's too bad my bud wasn't filming as he made it down and was in the process of coming back to tell me to slow down when I biffed - at least I was running video. We also encountered a ton of wind fall, some of it easily passable and lots of it not so much. I do like lifting a 200 2T far more than a 250 4T though, damn valves and such.

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All in all, we covered ~32 miles and one of the highlights was finally finding trail 14 - which is actually trail 18 in the real world (lol). This is one of the trails I tried finding the last time we trekked down there, but couldn't. It was one steep mofo - one of the steeper downhills I've had the pleasure of slipping all the way down. Kind of reminded me of Bales Creek near Lyda Camp.

As usual, there's a bunch of video to waste some time with.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrjAEbT53_8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqI8iQ9-QAs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdixc3gB8Ic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcEMaAVL9lM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9_Z3jCzWPA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6X3m3Xwv-HQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUkcbhClk18

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Zjsm97mMLs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBtrrO-FRBQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akm3k_wboXs