Where to Run · California
Johnson Valley OHV Area
Home of King of the Hammers, roughly 96,000 acres of open BLM land, free, no permit. The fast desert washes and graded roads out of Hammertown are Raptor territory; Backdoor, Sledgehammer, and Chocolate Thunder are built for buggies on 40s, not full-size trucks.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Air down
- 15-18 psi
- Season
- Year-round, best Oct-Apr
- Mapped trail
- 473 mi
- Elevation
- 3,422 ft
Trail map & conditions
473 miles of motorized routes within twelve kilometres of the anchor point, drawn from OpenStreetMap. Green lines are the network; zoom for detail.
Drive to
Anderson Dry Lake staging area / Camp Rock Road entrance
Camp Rock Rd off CA-247, Lucerne Valley, CA (~55 mi SE of Barstow)
- Search in your maps app
- “Johnson Valley OHV Area”
- GPS (entry)
- 34.51764, -116.75320
Reached via graded dirt road (Camp Rock Rd north off Hwy 247); no entrance fee; area is shared-use with the Marine Corps' Twentynine Palms training range, so check for scheduled closures before visiting.
Entry info: blm.gov
The rules of this place
Come for the KOTH event in early February and the whole valley is a parking lot; go any other week for the miles without the crowd.
Also worth the trailer miles
Glamis / Imperial Sand Dunes Recreation Area
The proving ground. Oldsmobile Hill, Razorback, Comp Hill, and China Wall separate the trucks from the trailer queens. Gecko Road and Wash Road are the mellow on-ramps if you are new to sand.
Ocotillo Wells SVRA
Free, no permit, mixed sand and desert terrain in one of the largest state vehicular recreation areas in California. Blow Sand Hill, Shell Reef, Gas Domes, and Pumpkin Patch cover everything from whooped-out washes to soft dune faces.
Barrett Lake / Wentworth Springs / Loon Lake (Rubicon-adjacent)
The Rubicon Trail itself, Georgetown to Lake Tahoe, is free to run but a full-size Raptor genuinely does not belong on it — Little Sluice and Cadillac Hill are body-panel and rocker-panel damage waiting to happen. The forest roads around Barrett Lake, Wentworth Springs, and Loon Lake give you the same granite-and-pine High Sierra scenery on routes actually sized for a full-size truck.