Friends,

Once again, we will be hosting SoCal Toyota Off-Road Fest at the Calico Ghost Town in September. We are actively planning the event and engaging sponsors from throughout the off-road industry to join us this year. As with each following year, we hope to make the event bigger and better.

Stay tuned for news and links to the event! I will update as soon as our website is up. In the meantime, you can follow us on our Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/socaloffroadtoyotafest/

Our planning team this year has grown a little and the event will be permitted through BLM this time .

-The Sentinel

Reserved for follow on news.

This was an awesome event last year, glad to hear it’s up for discussion this year. Looking to run Odessa with all of you if this gets the green light. Rig wasn’t ready last year but now I’m better prepared.

I've loved visiting Calico ever since I was a kid, especially for Halloween. The campsite reserve prices for those weekends have gotten nuts though!

I'm interested in checking out the offroading up there, I hear the Odessa/Doran loop is pretty gnarly.

It’s likely the entire campground will be reserved for the event and prices may reflect that....as in maybe cheaper and worth every penny

There are plenty of trails for every skill level but yea Odessa/Doran is the highlight trail for good reason

Looking forward to this again!

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YEESSS! Been waiting for this!

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Little late on the planning this year and right now I'm already committed to another event on the same weekend. Site reservation is made and I'm slated to lead a John Bull run.

Which leads me to a suggestion:

Probably too late for this year, but if you guys decide to do this again next year, there's a very very large Tacoma World trip every year that's typically the second to last weekend of September. It's an unofficial thing where they basically take over San Gorgonio Campground near Big Bear. This takes a lot of rigs out of the Toyotafest equation (it did last year as well)

That being said, I'd love to come to Calico again. Odessa still owes me. If something comes up and I can back out of the TW run I'll definitely be coming to this.

We all appreciate your support. I don't want to speak out of turn but we had to do a lot of work with BLM to make this event legit and not cause any problems. Unfortunately the dates were already submitted to the BLM and I don't know if they can be changed.

The BLM is always cracking down on these large events and we learned after last year they monitor the forums and the talk so that they can show up and shut it down.

We thought we had it covered last year, but learned we needed it in writing.

Yep, absolutely. The TW thing is a non-sponsered event so I don't think it's as big of an issue for permits. It's literally just a bunch of us taking over a campground and either running trails or hanging out.

I was simply mentioning it because both have fallen on the same weekend the last 2 years. The TW thing is on it's 4th year, roughly the same weekend each year, and I know there were quite a few Tacoma guys that wanted to come to Toyotafest last year. A lot of them bowed out because they do the San G trip every year.

I'm not speaking against it in any way shape or form but for their sake I really hope they have permission. It was 2007 I believe that I was apart of TTORA and we use to do a big bear run every year since 2000.

They monitor these forums closely. We even contacted the forest service and had permission (we thought).

Until the Thursday night before the event 8 rangers showed up to our camp site, we all had passes and they shut us down. We had I believe 200 people coming that year. They waited (imo) intentionally till we were there in hopes of fining us. I don't think anyone got a ticket because at that point we weren't in violation, had they come the next day it would have been bad.

It's not a matter of being sponsored, it's a matter of being organized. We pleaded our case with them and they would rather have 200 people all over the mountain un-organized than organized.

Nothing sucked worse than having to wait all night for people to show up and tell them they are welcome to camp but we can't have any organized runs. Every year since then the event was reduced down to a very quite day trip event.

Last year at calico something similar happend we had permission we thought we actually talked to the BLM and because we were on private property we thought we were safe. We weren't and they threaten us with tickets and court dates. Cali doesn't mess around with this stuff anymore. It's a lot of foot work and a lot of hoops to jump through, Jason (not me) has been working on this since last year so we are completely legit with insurance and proper paperwork.

Looking at Youtube videos, that loop looks really tight in spots even for a TJ! Maybe too intense for this mall crawler

Exactly why I didn't do a chilitown this year. Didn't wanna deal with the permits or the risk of someone I've pissed off in the last year giving rangers the coordinates and pointing the finger at me.

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Article from last year The Inaugural Southern California Toyota Fest
Nothing to be scared of

Nothing to be scared of at all. Best case you get upgrades.