We Went to Big Bear & Broke an Axle on Gold Mountain (3N69)

We finally made it to Big Bear! Sadly, our rear passenger axle didn’t exactly survive the trip.

We arrived in the evening on a Saturday, hit our first trail (Clarks Grade) and picked a camp spot in the San Bernardino National Forest for the night. We woke up early Sunday for what was supposed to be the first of two Jeep Badge of Honor Trails we would hit in Big Bear: Gold Mountain.

To date, we’ve kept our trailin’ mostly moderate, so the difficult-rated Gold Mountain was going to be an adventure. But, as Badge of Honor trails go in the Big Bear area, this seemed like the one to start on before attempting John Bull or Holcomb Creek.

We ran the trail starting at the South (going up the mountain), which is the harder direction…although I’m pretty sure we would have ripped our rear bumper off if we ran it from the North (coming down the mountain). The views starting out on this trail are killer!

Pretty quickly, we hit our first obstacle: the first waterfall. We made simple work of it and continued up the mountain to what I will now refer to as “axle-breaker”: the second waterfall. There was a line for this one, as it’s no easy fete. We got out to watch others work their way up it, and we made friends with a two-Jeep group who we ended up running the rest of the trail with.

The first in our group of new friends took the right line in their XJ and made easy work of a waterfall we saw so many before them struggle with. The second in our group also took the right line in his Grand Cherokee but got stuck in the middle. Luckily, a quick tow from the XJ got him up. Then, it was our turn. We opted for the left line, which in hindsight was a mistake, but hey…live and learn 😉

While the right line is a general mess, the left line has a three-foot ledge that is not easy to get a back tire up on, especially with a rooftop tent and tons of other gear weighing us down. As our new friend Mike said, “this might just be the hardest obstacle on Big Bear right now.”

In Michael’s second attempt to hammer it up, the Jeep came down hard, and we heard a crack. Gotta love the universal “oh shit” from our new crew. We heard the same crack on another Wrangler that made its way up the waterfall just a few Jeeps in front of us, so I have a feeling we weren’t the only vehicle to break an axle that day.

After the crack, we couldn’t immediately see the damage, so we made our way up and continued on the trail.

As we neared the summit, we got to use our winch to help our new friend in the Cherokee out of a tricky spot. And then we hit one of the coolest parts of the trail: the rock garden. It literally sounds like you’re driving on broken glass over this spot, but it’s relatively easy to make it across. I regret not getting the drone out for this part, but it was pretty windy up there. You can see a video on our Instagram.

From this point, the trails gets pretty easy: a few little obstacles here and there, but overall, the hard work was behind us. It wasn’t until we got off the trail and onto a dirt road that we realized something was definitely wrong with our rear passenger wheel or axle thanks to a very obvious “chirp” and a little wobble.

While we intended to camp the entire time in Big Bear, we opted to grab a hotel so we could get the Jeep to a local shop quickly in the morning. And that’s how we learned we bent our axle flange. Being in an off-road mecca like Big Bear, we thought parts would be readily available…but it’s a small town at the top of the mountain. The new axle was going to take a week to arrive, so we opted to spend one more night in a hotel before limping the Jeep to our final destination: Lake Tahoe, where a new axle would be waiting for us.

Overall, we didn’t to do everything we planned to do in Big Bear, but hey, we really earned that Jeep Badge of Honor for Gold Mountain! And let’s be honest: we would totally do it again.

Our Super Basic Video of the Hardest Obstacle on Gold Mountain