Trip Report: Barrett Lake

Sept 11-15, 2019
Trip report by Rick Frier

Members attending: Rick Frier, James Anthony, Doug and Jayson, Bobby, James's brother in law

It's Wednesday morning the 11th of September

James Anthony sent me a Text saying he is on his way. I replied - leaving at 11:30.

Wednesday 2:33pm

James replied - Entering Placerville, I will continue up Ice House Road to Wright's Lake Road.

James arrived at Wrights lake at ~5pm and I arrived at ~6pm.

We had a wonderful evening talking and reminiscing about our lives and how lucky we are to be sitting in such a beautiful place and looking forward to the next days of 4-wheeling.

Thursday Morning

James and I had a nice morning and left camp around 11am. The plan was to go past the bridge and check out where the creek crossing was before the bridge was built.
Picture of a Jeep on the bridge crossing the Jones Fork Silver Creek.

We found the old creek crossing - now covered in trees and other stuff making sure no Jeeps bypass the bridge.

We hung out in the area checking out the river and stuff. Proceed back to camp waiting for others to arrive. Doug and Jayson arrived at ~3pm on Thursday. Bobby, James's brother in-law showed up at ~5pm followed by Robin showing up at ~10:30pm.

The plan was to leave camp at 8am and we left at 8:20am. Six Jeeps heading towards Barrett Lake. The Gate Keeper is always entertaining to go through and up-we-went. It took a bit more than 4 hours to get to Barrett Lake. We had no issues except crawling over big rocks and steep rocky trails. A great Adrenalin rush!!! (Key actions of adrenaline include increasing the heart rate, increasing blood pressure, expanding the air passages of the lungs, enlarging the pupil in the eye, redistributing blood to the muscles and altering the body's metabolism), explains why we sleep so well after. 😀

The next picture is about one half of the way to Barrett Lake. Beautiful view of the mountains. Behind the mountains is where the Rubicon Trail is and then behind those mountains is Emerald Bay in Lake Tahoe.

Barrett Lake is "AmaZing" -



We walked around parts of the lake - from the Dam Jayson had a GPS for tracking Geocaching sites. Geocaching is an outdoor recreational activity, in which participants use a Global Positioning System receiver to hide and seek containers, called "geocaches". Jayson, Robin and Bobby continued to search for the site shown on Jayson's device. Welp - they found it. It was started in 2005, had a log book for those who found it to sign it. The container had other items to enjoy and laugh at. We had lunch and then headed back to Wrights Lake. The trip home was a different trail than coming in, still big and small rocks all over this skinny trail. We got back to camp just before 5pm. Several people had showers which felt really nice. We meet at camp site #66. This is the best site for all to gather.



Many used my barbecue on my trailer to cook their food and we all sat around the fire talking and chatting about the day's run and plans for Saturdays run. The plans for Saturday were to leave by 9am which seemed quite easy - we were all excited to get back out on this trail. We went in for about 3/4 of the trail and moved quite a bit faster than the first day. We were getting to know the difficult parts to climb and fall off of. On the way back we ran into someone with two upper rear link arms which the welds had broken. I pulled out my welder and grinder and in a rather quick time he was fixed and putting his rig back together.


Broken rig before welding.

We then headed back to camp and were home before 5pm. Wonderful day of 4-wheeling.

That evening the bar opened a bit earlier than the night before. The Food / Dinner was over the top. Jayson has this cook top stove which was perfect for everybody to cook everything we had left in our refrigerators. Again - laughing and cheering for the success we had on the 4-wheeling and the wonderful meal we were having. Saturday evening was a full moon but could not be seen due to the clouds. Robin has a picture of the full moon from his camp site when he went to bed. We did discuss next years trip to Berrett Lake and that we need to build a plan for spending the night. It's just toooooo beautiful of a place to only see for a short period of time. One or two nights will be the plan for next year. We will need to plan well so we only bring the stuff needed for the group size going in.

The next day we were all ready and left camp by 9:30am. We decided to take the road from Wrights Lake to Ice House road and then down to Hy 50. This is a much better way for going-to and coming-from Wrights Lake. The Wrights lake exit off of Hy 50 is really steep and hard on the tow rigs. When we got to Ice House road there was a turn out where we stopped to make sure everything was OK. Jayson and I looked at his trailer tires and noticed one of them was bulging at the outer part of the tire tread. It was nice finding it there and replacing it before his tire blew-out on the road. My input to all is every time we stop we should look at our trailer tires making sure they are not coming apart and feeling the wheel bearings making sure they are not overheating.

Kind of like preventative maintenance.


The trip home was nice. James headed North and the rest of us headed South.

No issues, wonderful time, looking forward to next years trip to Barrett Lake.

Another good showing of the SC4WDC club at http://www.sc4wdc.com/