Blue Grade & Stoneman

After being gone 19 days, one of the first things Susun wanted to do was a road trip in SuziQ. We arrived home late Wednesday and were packed and ready to run by 11:30 Thursday morning. We headed back up the Blue Grade on the same route as our first run in Suzi Q on January 27th. This time, though, we pulled out at the cinder pit alongside Rarick Canyon. We spotted the elusive distant waterfall alongside Table Mtn. in Mullican Canyon and decided to attempt to get over there to see it.

When the Blue Grade ended at the paved Stoneman Road, we were somewhat surprised to see a "Road Closed" sign. The Blue Grade had been bone dry for us, even dusty in places. We figured the Forest Service put up the closure sign when the road was still a pig sty of mud.

When we reached the "T" in the Stoneman Road, there was another "Road Closed" sign for the route to Watershed Camp and Apache Maid Mtn. Since the previous Road Closed sign hadn't been necessary, we figured maybe the same thing was true for this closure sign. Wrong. Barely a couple of miles out on the Watershed Camp Road, it turned to total sticky, greasy, deep slop. We could easily see that the shoulders where black holes waiting to swallow a Zuk alive. We carefully and gingerly turned around and slip and slid out way back out to a firmer surface. At one point, our tires were basically as smooth as bowling balls with all the volcanic mud stuck to them. We enjoyed a nice snack break at one of the tributaries of Rarick Canyon.

We next figured that the main Stoneman Road would be passable since it gets a lot of traffic and serves a place where people actually live year-round: Stoneman Lake.
Sure enough, the Stoneman Road had been expertly plowed and was in great shape, even dusty in a few places. A normal sedan could have traveled the road except for one really sloppy part. We stopped briefly to peer into Stoneman Lake. It's not a lake anymore. It should be called Stoneman Marsh.

As we topped 7,000 feet and kept climbing the snow became much deeper. We topped out at 7500 feet and then drove out to the end of the Stoneman Road at Forest Highway 3 and turned around. We picked out a medium-dry pull out and slapped on our snowshoes. We enjoyed a fine snowshoe out into a sunny meadow. Well, it's not a meadow now, of course, but it would be when the snow's gone. There's an impressive amount of snow up there in there in the high country.

We then retraced our route back home. The run was 58 miles from door-to-door. The "new" General Grabber tires really performed well, except in the mud. They made the ride a lot smoother and we both made numerous comments about how the tires tamed the rocks and washboards.

After returning home, we stripped out the inside of the Zuk and ripped out the OEM carpet. Carpet is impossible to keep clean when you're messing around in snow and mud. We also made a more secure mount for the 2nd spare tire. Our personal rig is beginning to come together and we are pleased.

We don't think the Watershed Camp Road will dry out anytime soon--it's that wet. Hopefully, we can get up there while the Mullican waterfall is still cranking. We've hiked to it once before and we guess it was about 60-80 feet tall.

You can click here for all 72 photos we took. We'll eventually put captions on them.  The screen shot of the track map is below.  Click here for the interactive Google Map.

The trip took 3.5 hours.  The GPS shows we were moving for 2.5 hours and stopped for an hour.  Our average speed including stops as 17 mph.  Our actual moving speed average was 24 mph. Our mpg was 28.6 and the trip cost (@ $3.40 gal.) was $7.12 for 2.1 gallons.