Clawhammer
Trail name: Clawhammer
Trailhead location: 34o26'20.8"N, 116o28'40.6"W
Length: 1.1 miles
Elapsed trail time: 2 hours 30 minutes
How to get there: From Means Dry Lake bed, head north on the main road. You will be paralleling a low ridgeline to the east. Follow the road through the gap in the ridgeline and veer right after going through the gap. You will be driving along a smaller dry lakebed. There are tracks running every which way in this area but the trailhead is in the largest drainage to the southeast. As you head south and east, the tracks will eventually converge alongside a wash. Follow the wash and pick a good spot to drop in. The wash is the route to the trailhead. The trailhead GPS location above marks the point where the four wheeling starts to get rough.
The trail: Sometimes called the Baby Hammer, Clawhammer was the third of the "Hammer" trails built and is arguably the easiest of the three. The trail is pretty typical of the fare offered by Johnson Valley. Clawhammer snakes up a narrow watercourse that most people would not think of as a 4WD route. Of course, the 4WD routes in Johnson Valley were not created by "most people" but by the rock crawling visionaries of the Victor Valley Four Wheelers. As such, the trail creeps over, around, and through rocks ranging from basketball to washing machine sized. As this route was used for a rock-crawling competition in recent history, the trail sometimes offers multiple paths but is typically only one vehicle wide. There is a steep right turn over a ledge to be scaled about halfway up the canyon. The ledge can be a bit loose and stubborn. Once over the ledge, it is more rock crawling until the last two hundred or so yards of the trail. Here the character changes a bit as the trail is becomes loose and traction can be hard to find in the powdery dirt and loose rock. Second gear is useful in several spots to get enough wheel speed to reach to the top of the hill. The trail ends in of a small saddle with the exit route from Wrecking Ball coming down from the right. Follow the trail straight ahead to exit down into the valley below. |
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