Event Report: Rovicon IV

It’s easy to assume that the Rubicon Trail would be an overrated experience. It’s the most iconic off-road trail in America, the hub of West Coast rock crawling culture, an iconic trim line on a “lesser 4x4,” and the wistful dream of every serious off-roader. Could it really be that great when it’s become entirely saturated in the 4x4 world? Over four days with the Northern California Land Rover Club on their annual “Rovicon” event, my answer is the opposite: the Rubicon is one of the most underrated and authentic off-road experiences in America.

Rovicon was born when a group of hardcore rock crawlers from NCLR who had been hitting the Rubicon every year already decided that Land Rovers needed their own marque-specific trail run, like the Jeep Jamboree and Land Cruiser Rubithon. Thus, Rovicon was born in 2019 as the largest organized annual gathering of Land Rovers on the trail. This year was the fourth running of the event, and the third time it’s been run on the actual Rubicon – last year, fires closed the trail just days before the event, and it was run on other nearby difficult trails in California’s High Sierra.

The Rubicon is nothing to be fooled with, and the event has a lengthy list of vehicle requirements to participate. Most of the vehicles on the trip are pre-2005 solid-axle Land Rovers; though the newer vehicles excel at so many things off-road, rock crawling is one thing that the independent suspension LR3s and new Defenders just can’t do as easily as a beam-axled Discovery I or Series truck. That said, newer vehicles are by no means excluded if they have been properly modified for the trail's conditions. On our trip, we had the first New Defender known to have completed the trail, a Defender 110 V8 with a subframe lift sent by Land Rover Denver.

The fun of a single-marque trip is seeing how each Land Rover performs against the other. We had vehicles from various eras of the company's history. In the older corner, there were several Series vehicles, some of which were built by noted California Series builder (and event participant) Timm Cooper, who is renowned for his driveline engineering and engine swaps. There were mostly 1990s and 2000s solid-axle trucks, but the comparison here was seeing how different modifications worked with each other. Tire size, axle modifications, and differential setups all came into play. Although everyone made it out the other end of the trail under their own power, the way your truck is set up will decide how your experience will go.

The named obstacles on the Rubicon take on a sort of hushed reverence among off-road die-hards. Even if you’ve never been, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of the Gatekeeper, Big Sluice, and Cadillac Hill. (It’s the only hardcore off-road trail in America that’s on Google Street View in full, mapped during the filming of a Top Gear episode, so if you haven’t you can go check it out online.)

The wheeling is, of course, challenging; that's the main reason a lot of hardcore off-roaders lust after the adventure here. The Rubicon’s reputation isn’t for nothing, and this is rock crawling of a severe caliber. One of our vehicles was a relatively straight 1996 Discovery 1, sitting on 33” tires with a lift; even with an extremely talented driver, it came out of the trail with rashes and scars and a stock rear bumper bent into a smiley face. Trucks with 35” tires fared better; go higher than that, and the damages were further reduced, but some of the fun mental challenges of navigating the rocks is removed.

The biggest thing about the wheeling on the Rubicon is that it’s relentless. There are trails in America that have more intense rock crawling, and there are trails in America that are longer, and there are trails in America that are (marginally) more scenic, but the Rubicon combines all three – miles and miles of a constant barrage of rock crawling, surrounded by the stunning beauty of the Sierras. At some point, you make mistakes not from the trail itself, or because you are untalented – but because the trail has just worn you down mentally for hours on end.

We did about three to four miles a day of trails, in part because the Rovicon is organized as much as a social and touring event as rock crawl challenge – as one person dubbed it, “this is rocklanding!” Each day ended at a campground next to a body of water, and over a few days we swam in the high alpine lakes at Spider Lake and Buck Island Lake, and in the Rubicon Springs, washing off the detritus of a hard-worked day on the trail. The camaraderie of the NCLR gang was really second to none on this adventure, and although it's good to embrace all 4x4 cultures, there's something fun about a Rovers-only run on a trail like this.

This also gave us a unique perspective culture of the trail, where in many ways our Land Rovers were observing a Jeep, Toyota, and side-by-side focused corner of the American off-road scene. On a beautiful summer weekend, the culture was on full display. There was the midnight dance party of trucks with blinking RGB lights blaring country and EDM music, the side-by-side groups of locals who run the trail every weekend (one person I met said he runs it twenty times a year), the built Jeeps, and the groups of FJ-40 Land Cruiser tubed-out trail rigs.

The Rubicon's culture and beauty is all strung together by two related groups, the Rubicon Trail Foundation and Friends of the Rubicon. These groups work to keep the trail open against huge opposition from certain corners of the local environmental movement. From hosting trail cleanups to distributing oil-busting enzymes and absorbent mats to keep oil spills from ruining the ecosystem, they've come up with multiple creative solutions to keep things going.

If you're a Land Rover enthusiast and the Rubicon has been on your bucket list, there's really no better way to do it than on the Rovicon weekend. Doing this iconic trail with other Land Rovers, swapping stories, and taking in this gorgeous high alpine scenery is something that every hardcore off-roader simply has to put towards the top of their bucket list.