Off-roading at Hollister Hills SVRA
We are back on the road again! Back in May 2020, we took a camp host gig at WeatherTech Raceway (Laguna Seca), and after nine months, we felt it was time to move on. As part of our shakedown trip, we did not go far from the Monterey/Salinas area and spent three days in Paicines at the San Benito Thousand Trails campground.
Nearby was the Hollister Hills State Vehicular Recreation Area (SVRA) which offers off-roading trails for horses, OHV, and 4x4 vehicles on 6,800 acres along with camping. Since we own a Jeep Wrangler and have minimal off-roading experience, we thought it would make for a fun day trip to go there and spend a few hours on the trails. How did our stock Jeep Wrangler do? Great! Don’t have time to read now? Pin it for later!
Hollister Hills SVRA
The Lower Ranch entrance is where you pay the $5 day use fee (what a deal!) and get a trail map, but the Lower Ranch is purely for OHV vehicles. We were directed to head up to the Upper Ranch entrance for the 4x4 trails. The gates are color-coded for easy identification and your day pass fee gets you the gate code to enter. Unfortunately, it had just rained a few days earlier so the Hudner Ranch area (also for 4x4s) was still closed due to mud so we only could explore the Upper Ranch half.
Upper Ranch
The trails are marked similar to ski/snowboard runs which are green circles for beginners, blue squares for intermediate, black and double black diamonds for the experts. Over the next couple of hours, we planned and drove a trail route that did most of the green circles and then a few blue square trails once we felt more comfortable.
For the trails we chose, there wasn’t anything serious that our stock Jeep Wrangler 4dr couldn’t handle although we did see a few blue square trails branching off from ours that looked a little intimidating, and luckily we did not accidentally end up on one of them. It would seem just like on a ski mountain, some blue squares are harder than others! Bonanza Gulch Rd was a great beginner blue trail.
The black diamonds we came across looked absolutely insane, especially the McCrayZ obstacle course trails (pictures below), and unfortunately, we didn’t get to see anybody giving them a try. Most of the trails are clearly marked with signage. I believe online you can find trail apps or sites that have a more granular difficulty scale with other information on the specific trails, but we did not bother.
In addition, there are limited campground sites, first come first serve so some people bring their RVs and toys to spend the whole weekend here. The people we saw at one campground were mostly trailers and gas Class As and Cs. Due to the unpaved roads to/from the campgrounds, I’m not sure I would have felt comfortable driving our bigger diesel pusher to one of them although we did not see all of the campgrounds and cannot be sure what’s really possible based on the quality of the roads.
Even for a Friday, it was not busy at all (morning to mid-day though), and we barely saw anybody else on the trails so it was almost like having the place to ourselves. We read online that the weekends are much busier and probably COVID19 is having some impact on how many people are coming these days (they had just re-opened camping in fact).
Wineries Nearby
On the way back to our campground, there are a couple of wineries right off the highway so of course, we stopped at De Rose Winery and had a couple of wine flights to end the day. Very tasty, we might have ordered a bottle of their Hollywood Red to take with us!
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