This trip was an adventure that I’d thought about since I moved to California four decades ago. It’s legendary. Mythic even. And I never thought you could still do it until we visited the Ridge Route Museum in Frazier Park pre-pandemic. There the curator mentioned that there’s a movement to preserve the road that still exists and “some” still drive it she said. The implication in her voice was that we couldn’t.
Presentation to the Kern-Kaweah Chapter of the Sierra Club by Zoom on 6 March 2021. A visual summary of our nearly 50 weekly escapes from Covid-19 lockdown.
Since the advent of the first Covid-19 lockdown in California in mid-March 2020, Nancy and I have taken weekly day-trips to explore our region. Fully cognizant of the need to socially distance ourselves from others during the pandemic, we’ve walked, hiked, climbed and driven through remote areas within 100 miles of Bakersfield, California. In most cases we never met another person.
The web site compiling road trip reports from EV drivers, including data on the trips, experiences, and routes mapped on ABRP trip planner.
The long-awaited DCFC station at the Inyokern airport is finally live after years of waiting.
That sounds simple enough but 15 of those miles were on an “improved” dirt road. This is a bone rattling trip over a rutted and washed out road that gave both the Bolt and its passengers a good beating.
Unfortunately, fires and smoke scuppered our most recent plans. So instead we headed east to Breckenridge Mountain where Forest Service web cams indicated the smoke wasn’t quite so thick.
The drive to Horseshoe Meadows is a trip we long for every summer. The drive up Hwy 395 on the East Side of the Sierra Nevada is one of the best road trips you can make in North America. The scenery is nothing short of spectacular. And when you’ve been cooped up in quasi-quarantine for weeks due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the drive is more exhilarating than usual.
It’s an EV driver’s nightmare. We were stuck in the middle of nowhere with an Electrify America charging station that wouldn’t charge our car.
As part of our weekly Covid-19 get-a-ways, we headed into the Sierra Nevada above Porterville toward scenic Dome Rock.
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