El Diablo Prerun

One thing is certain about Mexico, it's always an adventure. This weekend we went down to pay deposits on campgrounds, make sure everything is dialed in with the hotel, check the road conditions and basically just follow up with everyone down there who works with us on this event. Even though there is good communication via email now, it pays to go down in person and make sure everything is ready to go, well in advance.

For this trip we piled in my 4x4 Toyota Tacoma since we wanted to show Kyle from Lowbrow some of the Baja 500/1000 course and some of the epic backcountry of Baja. There is a good 35 miles or so of dirt road that cuts from Valle de Trinidad (gas stop on day three) over to the Pacific side just north of Colonet. My friend Matt "Baja" Frick went along for the free drinks and to check the route for an off-road tour business he's working on called Camp4lo. Kyle is a big fan of off-road racing but being from Ohio, he's pretty far from the action out here. This was a good excuse to spend a bromantic weekend bouncing around on the actual race course and get our EDR duties handled at the same time.

Well, the recent rains washed out our short cut about half way into the route. First we missed a turn and went about 30 miles deep into the course until the last few miles got gnarly enough that even in the venerable (but stock) Baja Taco we decided to turn around. It is seriously remote and being a solo vehicle it didn't make any sense to snap an axle or get heavily stuck so far from any sort of civilization so we turned around. We chased back to where we missed the turn and got back on the known dirt road only to have it disappear into a sand wash. We pushed on a little further and to our surprise found two dudes in a stock Honda Civic at the end. Their English was worse than our Spanish but we eventually found out that there was no route through the wash since the rain destroyed the road. We couldn't figure out what the hell they were doing out there in the middle of nowhere in that beater but we finally decided it had something to do with burying a body. One thing is for sure, that dude could drive! He hammered that Civic back through the wash and over stuff that I hesitated to take my truck through at first. ¡Huevos con mas Fuerte!

Dejected, the only choice was back out the way we came. We hit the highway in Trinidad where we had started some six hours and 100 miles earlier. We made it into Ensenada just as the sun went down. Beers, tacos and beds. It's a good thing Kyle is a Jeep guy, anyone else would have been bummed that we beat his kidneys out all day like that, but he dug it and had a good time. My truck has some new Manzanita Pinstriping and Matt knows a route to avoid with the tours until they clear that road again some day.

I'll post up some road notes and updates on the El Diablo Run blog later in the week, so check there for details. In a nutshell, everything is good-to-go and they are all stoked to have our dirty asses back.