Mendocino National Forest/"Lake" Pillsbury Maiden Voyage!

[Matt B]

Hi all - just wanted to post a little blurb about my first trip! Had a good time. I have only owned these TT250's for about a week. So this was their maiden voyage! A buddy came over and helped me load up the bikes in the back of the truck at 8:45am. Early enough to get a good start but late enough to enjoy a good cup of coffee and gather my thoughts for a few minutes.

Mendocino National Forest's Southern border is about 2.5 hours North of San Francisco in Lake County. It's got just ENDLESS dirt roads, estensive desiganted OHV trails, rivers, lakes, etc. It's great. It is the only National Forest in either California (or maybe the entire U.S.) that does not have one paved road that intersects the whole thing.

We have a friend that lives near the forest's Southern edge so we parked the truck at his property and unloaded the bikes. Our plan was to get to the top of a Mountain called Sanhedrin. It's got awesome 360 degree views. Unfortunately neither of us dressed very warmly and the snow was getting deeper than we expected as we headed up the mountain so we decided to turn around. That was fine though. I was happy to just be out breaking in the engines and riding around. We'll head back up in the later Spring and conquer Sanhedrin.

Once we turned around we decided to head back to a Lake called Lake Pillsbury. When we got there, we found that there was pretty much NO lake! It was a dry lake bed all the way across! Kind of fun to ride on but really slippery!The lake is man made and controlled by a dam so I'm not sure if they just let out all the water for some reason on purpose or if our water level was that low?

While we were at the lake we saw a giant herd of Elk! Really beautiful. Bucks, doe, and fawns all just hanging out eating grass. I think that herd hangs around Lake Pillsbury a lot.

After that we headed back to the truck and drove home with a stop at In N Out in Ukiah for dinner. Overall, great day! The bikes performed well and now have almost 100 miles on them. The only issue I had was when I was going up a boat launch coming back out of the lake bed I paused for a minute to look back at the lake and the carb started leaking on the uneven terrain and the bike died. It took me a bit to get it going again. It didn't seem like that crazy of an angle to me, but I guess it was more than my carb liked?

Hope you enjoy the pictures. This was my first experiment to resize them using an app I found so I guess we'll see how they turn out when I post...

[TxTaoRider]

Looks like fun! Great pics. Thank you for sharing.

[JerryHawk250]

Awesome! We've been itching to get out riding offroad trails again. Weather has not been cooperating at all around here. I can take a little rain while out riding but not the cold rain.

[culcune]

Originally Posted by JerryHawk250

Awesome! We've been itching to get out riding offroad trails again. Weather has not been cooperating at all around here. I can take a little rain while out riding but not the cold rain.

Throw on that ugly windshield for the day...

[2LZ]

Looks like a great time! I used to go up to Pillsbury a number of times in my younger days. A buddy's family had a cabin there and we'd go every year for fun and of course, the annual pine needle clean up and burn.

The lake was most likely purposely drained. It was PACKED with (aggressive and invasive) squaw fish when we used to go. DFG, at the time, was talking about killing the lake due to the squaw fish wiping out all the game fish. It was so bad that when I'd be standing knee deep off shore, the squaw fish were nipping at my legs looking for food. There was that many. That would be my guess on the dry lake bed. I once took my boat up there and was amazed at how shallow the lake was, according to my fish finder.
Did you find the airport there? That would have made a great drag strip....

[rubakon]

I think that herd hangs around Lake Pillsbury a lot.