I've just moved back to Orange County and now get the pleasure of a spirited daily carving session on the Ortega. I do the reverse commute so I am generally carving hard when I see fellow motorers going the other direction and have little time to salute, so I wanted to say "hola!" from the relative safety of my couch.

Any other regulars out there dodging the sand trucks?

Mike

 

You really gotta watch Ortega now (especially on the weekends) as there are just tons of cops crawling all over it (as opposed to a few years ago when there were relatively few). I think that with all of the super bikes that fly through there these days they've really started cracking down on it. I ride my Mtn bike off of a trail that's about half way up Ortega and so I'm there quite regularly. However, I'm only in my MINI every once in a while as we generally take our truck so that we can carry the bikes.

BTW, did you happen to get up there last November when Ortega got all of that snow? I was up there on November 21st in our MINI and there was near a foot of snow (or more) on the road in some of the offshoots. It was absolutely AMAZING as I've never seen that much snow up there before (since it's at less than 5,000 feet of elevation for the most part). It looked like a winter wonder land! It was my first real encounter with snow in our MINI and I was surprised to see how easily it moved through the snow. We were way back in the boonies and the MINI never faltered. I was laughing at all the huge four wheel trucks we encountered back there as they all had a really stupefied look on their faces when they saw our little MINI trucking through the same snow drifts as their big rigs were without having any problems whatsoever.

 

I keep a sharp eye out on the two straightaways as that is where the Smokey's like to lay in wait. They can't catch us on the twisties, so don't have to worry about them manually clocking. I do need full radar/laser protection though.

Mike