By Tom Neal
Bigfoot Trails Basecamp | Independent Adventure Media

It had been a wet month leading up to our little day trip to Tahuya to play, so I was expecting to see A LOT of mud. I prepped and checked over the Jeep on Friday before our venture out, when I just about caught my shop on fire.

I have 15 LED 4-foot shop lights mounted up on the ceiling. One burned out in a section, and another light literally melted and was hanging six inches down, all blackened. Thankfully, all was good, the crisis was averted, and I was able to continue packing up some food for the next day’s ride.

Look close at the far trailer. See the dark spot at the back? That was underwater when he unloaded. The trailer was back about 10 feet, and the water was over the hubs. Good-size puddles that day!

Saturday morning came, and my wife decided she wanted to go craft-bizarre shopping with a friend, so I met up with my son Tommy and his buddies in Belfair, WA, at 10 a.m. We made the short drive up to the Tahuya ORV staging area, where I aired down my tires a bit for the trails ahead.

Looking around at the other rigs, all of which were coming off trailers, I was the smallest rig out there on 33-inch tires. Felt a bit out of place, but whatever. I’m here for the trails, not the rock gardens.

As we walked back to the rigs, Tommy pointed and laughed at my Jeep.

“We haven’t even hit the trails yet, and we gotta fix your pile!”

I looked. Shit. My electric fan was hanging down. The mounts had broken, and the fan had dropped down, being held only by the wiring.

So we zip-tied it up to the radiator.

Let’s hit the trails.

And yes, it was fixed right after it made it home.

Tommy unloaded his Toyota on 37-inch Yokohama XMTs, pointed over to the gatekeeper obstacle, and said, “We better go look at the entrance and pick your line.”

As I looked over, I saw a rock garden as the gatekeeper.

“Oh shit, what am I doing here?”

He just laughed and said I should be fine. There were bypasses to all the rock gardens, and the entrance should be easy.

“I did it in my Ranger with 33s. You can do it in the Jeep. Oh, and I just dumped the clutch, put the hammer down, and bounced through it all.”

The gatekeeper was an easy run, even wet and muddy. We never really saw any “mud,” just a bunch of water holes to go through.

Not too far into the trail, we came upon the first optional obstacle: a long, steep climb up through a rock garden called Yellow Jacket Hill.

Now, my son took his Toyota up this hill over the summer when it was dry and said it was pretty easy, but he is locked front and rear on 37s.

While I was NOT gonna attempt this hill, dry or wet, it was a lot of fun watching other people attempt it. Everyone I saw made it up, though no one had an easy time.

We watched for a while, then moved on up a nice steep incline, made our way past a couple of broken rigs, and dropped into a crevice to get to the start of Buggy Hill.

Again, I parked to watch the action.

My son made it up, as did his two buddies with a YJ on 40-inch tires and a purpose-built buggy on 37s. If I had the 8.8 in the back of my Jeep, and it was dry, I would have attempted this hill.

This was another rock garden, man-made like Yellow Jacket Hill, but a shorter run and a little steeper, at least it appeared that way to me.

As we made our way out of Buggy Hill, we had to travel through some “whoops.”

These are not some dirt-bike-style whoops you just cruise on through. These had holes that could swallow rigs, and they were narrow.

As you near the end, there is another rock garden, or you can take the narrow bypass that puts you up onto a rock on one side and a drop-off on the other.

If you have a full-size truck, good luck!

It was a blast in the Jeep.

Continuing on, we played on some trails for a bit. More water crossings—which reminds me, I need to check the differentials to see if I got water intrusion before I drive too much further.

Some tight tracks were found that we had to navigate through. Then we came upon another rock garden climb.

Tommy told me this was the only obstacle he hadn’t done at Tahuya yet, and today…

Still not the day he would do it.

When we arrived, there was a Jeep JK stuck midway up. A Toyota went up for the rescue and hooked on with a 15-foot tow strap, then just pulled him backward. It looked super sketchy to us. We heard a lot of crunching and metal scraping, but he was recovered without injury.

Then another rig attempted it and snapped an axle near the top. He was getting winched up when we finished eating some sandwiches and decided to roll on out into some more tight trails.

We stayed for another 45 minutes or so, navigating some cool stretches of trails before heading back to the staging area to load up Tommy’s truck.

His buddies stayed longer, but Tommy had injured his knee at some point and was having a little difficulty with his clutch.

All in all, I had a good time in Tahuya. I was a little disappointed, though. I was hoping for more mud, not puddles up to the doors.

There is a lot of gravel at Tahuya, but apparently the water does not drain into the ground well and just puddles up. Unlike Capitol Forest, where once you get off the main tracks, you WILL find mud—gooey, sticky clay mud.

Will I go back?

Oh yeah. I’m sure I will. Gotta watch my kid climb those hills again and conquer the last obstacle.

But honestly, I’m not sure how many more times.

It is also a very crowded area. Dirt bikes have hundreds of miles to play there, but still get into the 4WD area. A few quads and dirt-bike riders were very disrespectful, which I found disappointing as well.

Back in the day, anyone out in the dirt was respectful to each other.

Not as much now.

At least not here.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tom Neal is the founder of Bigfoot Trails Basecamp, an independent adventure media project built around real experiences. He’s spent most of his life around vehicles, motorcycles, racing, travel, and projects that tend to take longer and cost more than originally planned.

After decades of doing all that stuff, he’s learned that the best stories usually aren’t the ones you planned. They’re the people you meet, the places you stumble across, the things that go wrong, and the moments you never expected.

That’s what he wants to capture with BTB.

He doesn’t want to write about adventure from the outside. He wants to go experience it, then tell you what happened.

Bigfoot Trails Basecamp | Independent Adventure Media