The Hard Way to 2,000 Year Old Trees: Rugged Trails and Cliffside Drops

Added: 2026-06-01

[00:00:00]Hey, thanks for clicking on our video.

[00:00:02]Today, on Old Goat's Moto, Kevin and I take our new adventure bikes up into the Sierra Nevada mountains in search of some of the oldest trees known to man.

[00:00:11]As usual, we do not take the easy route, so check out the adventure that unfolds.

[00:00:21]To give you an idea of where we're starting our ride today, I'll use Google Earth and zoom in here to a lake in Central California called Pine Flat.

[00:00:30]It's about an hour east of the city of Fresno.

[00:00:34]And [music] as we're making our way around the lake, it's probably about 9:00 in the morning.

[00:00:40]The weather is perfect for a ride today.

[00:00:44]It's nice and cool while you're on the bike, but if you stop and you're standing in the sun, it's a little warm.

[00:00:51]As we gain in elevation, the temperature will drop a little bit, but all in all, it was a great day for riding.

[00:01:01]The ride around the lake is a decent jaunt. It's probably about 30 minutes of twisty, turny road that follows the contour of the lake.

[00:01:12]The yellow dry grass contrasted with the cool blue lake is really appealing and makes you want to pull over and jump in.

[00:01:23]The road is really smooth. The pavement [music] is really nice in this area.

[00:01:28]Later on, it gets pretty bumpy.

[00:01:30]But, the only better time to be in this area is in the early spring when the hills are just bright green with grass.

[00:01:47]Pine Flat is an artificial lake. It was dammed up by the US Army Corps of Engineers in 1954.

[00:01:54]Primarily as a way of controlling floods downstream.

[00:01:58]The lake holds 1 million acre-feet of water >> [music] >> and in 1984 they installed a power plant to generate 165 megawatts of hydroelectric power.

[00:02:13]Now, I didn't know that there were bald eagles around this lake, but right here a bald eagle comes down out of the sky and snatches a squirrel off the road and then flies out over the lake.

[00:02:23]That was pretty cool to see.

[00:02:30]Now, if you're not local and you're wanting to do an adventure ride through this area into the Sierra Nevada mountains or even into the Sequoia Kings Canyon forest, this is a great [music] launching point.

[00:02:43]You could ride down here. There's plenty of campsites around this lake. You could set up camp, stay the night, and then head out early the next morning [music] for whatever adventure you've planned.

[00:02:59]Once you make it to the back of the lake, it narrows down into the upper Kings River.

[00:03:05]The road winds along the river and crosses a handful of bridges as you make your way to a small town called Balch Camp.

[00:03:14]The road along the river is pretty good traveling. The pavement is still good.

[00:03:20]Um the views are great. The river is used frequently for white water rafting, but my favorite part are the bridges.

[00:03:31]I don't know what it is about bridges. I love crossing bridges.

[00:03:35]It's great cinematography for videos like this, but aside from that, there's something that I think just brings me back to my childhood and I want to stop and throw rocks off the bridge or something. I don't know. I just really enjoy them.

[00:03:50]The next bridge we come to, if you look at Google Maps, is called Bailey Bridge.

[00:03:54]And I thought it was the name of somebody or something like that. But turns out, a Bailey bridge is a type of portable prefabricated truss bridge. It was developed in 1940 by the British military, and the British, Canadian, and American military engineering units used them extensively during World War II.

[00:04:15]There is tons of interesting information about them on Wikipedia that I won't bore you with.

[00:04:20]But one fun fact is they are great for throwing rocks off of into the river.

[00:04:40]As we cross yet another bridge, we come into Balch Camp. It's an unincorporated community that is mostly housing for people working on PG&E's Kings River Hydroelectric Project.

[00:04:53]It say private road.

[00:04:56]Don't enter.

[00:04:57]Yeah.

[00:04:59]This place is not set up for tourism by any means. We didn't find anywhere to [music] get a snack or a drink and sit down and hang out. It's just housing for people who work in the area.

[00:05:11]So, we headed on out up the road to the treacherous cliffs of Black Rock Road.

[00:05:17]That is a big pipe.

[00:05:21]Nope, can't reach it.

[00:05:23]>> Oh, fingerprints. Fingerprints.

[00:05:26]Yeah, that's Balch.

[00:05:28]That's the right there [music] is where we went in and turned around.

[00:05:31]And there's your bridge. See the bridge, the the expanded metal one goes across?

[00:05:35][music] >> [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] >> That's the best part of Black Rock Road.

[00:07:33]Those narrow roads with sheer cliffs and incredible views makes the ride totally worth it.

[00:07:41]>> [music] >> Going forward up Blackrock, the road is not as treacherous, but the road is not as good, either.

[00:07:47]The pavement starts to get a little more bumpy with some potholes.

[00:07:51]Uh and we get into an area where there was a fire, and they're [music] doing some work with tractors along the way.

[00:08:05]You can see where we're riding is in a burn scar called the Garnet fire from 2025.

[00:08:12]So, there's Balch Camp. That's Blackrock Reservoir. And then, up here is Lake Wishon.

[00:08:19]That area was pretty much untouched.

[00:08:22]And then, we ride back through the burn scar to McKinley Grove. That's where the 2,000-year-old trees are, [music] and the fire burned through there, and they had to protect those trees so that they wouldn't burn up, even though they are >> [music] >> fire resistive.

[00:08:36]The Sierras have had a pretty bad run of fires the last handful of years.

[00:08:43]It's pretty rare [music] for us to go on a ride up here and not be riding through some sort of burn scar with dead trees along the road.

[00:08:53]>> [music] >> Now, we're on dirt.

[00:09:18]I'm not going to lie, we got a little bit lost. We were busy staring at the tractors that were cutting down trees, [music] and we missed our turn to Blackrock Reservoir.

[00:09:27]By the time we realized it, we were >> [music] >> deep in dirt two-track road on our way to Wishon, having a blast, and there was no going back at that point.

[00:09:48]Quite a bunch of bass in [music] there.

[00:09:55]Now we came to a creek crossing and [music] it didn't look like anything too difficult.

[00:10:02]It was shallow, rocky, and then [music] it went to I don't know if it was like a paved road underneath, but it was really [music] slippery.

[00:10:10]Kevin rode up and took the easy way across and I was feeling tough, so I was going to go right up the creek.

[00:10:18]And uh I gave it a shot.

[00:10:20]It didn't go the way I wanted it and I dumped the bike in the creek.

[00:10:24]But that's what happens. Pick it up.

[00:10:27]Move along.

[00:10:29]>> [laughter] >> Woo.

[00:10:58]This is down to the Wasatch I love it.

[00:11:03]>> [music] >> This is This is not a normal Jason route here, but I but I love it.

[00:11:17]>> [music] >> This section of road is between Black Rock Road and Wasatch Reservoir.

[00:11:24]It's not too difficult.

[00:11:26]Kevin and I are new to big adventure bikes and we didn't have any problem with it, but I can imagine someone relatively new with like a GS 1200 would have struggled uh through some of these rock sections.

[00:11:41]But all in all, it was really fun. The bikes handled it really well.

[00:11:53]Back on pavement.

[00:11:57]This is the Wishon Reservoir Dam that we're riding across.

[00:12:02]This lake was built by PG&E for the hydroelectric system back in 1958.

[00:12:08]There's camping around the lake.

[00:12:10]And compared to some of the other nearby lakes like Shaver and Bass Lake, Wishon feels more remote, quieter. It's rockier and has that kind of high sierra feel to it.

[00:12:20]It's really popular for fishing. You can catch rainbow, brown, and brook trout.

[00:12:25]Just outside the lake is a place called Wishon Village. It's a small office and general store. And it's a great place to stop and get a beverage and a snack.

[00:12:35]If they're open.

[00:12:36]Oh, we're a day early. Opening Friday, May 15th.

[00:12:40]That's funny.

[00:12:42]Leaving Wishon and heading towards the 2000-year-old trees, I mapped in a little detour just to check something out. And you know how those always go.

[00:13:00]Pretty sure.

[00:13:05]Whoop. There we go.

[00:13:07]Found it.

[00:13:18]Yeah, our first our first big one.

[00:13:21]Popped that wheelie up. Whoop.

[00:13:33]>> I did it in the slow.

[00:13:39]Uh you made it look easy, I'm sure.

[00:13:44]That's what That's what I'm here for.

[00:13:50]Make it look easy Make it look hard.

[00:13:57]Uh-oh.

[00:14:07]Uh-oh.

[00:14:13]New New rule when we're riding adventure bikes, no one picks up a bike by themself.

[00:14:21]I heard that rule on someone else's channel.

[00:14:24]And I'm like, I'm like, you know, that's a good rule.

[00:14:30]And I laughed cuz I watch your other videos. People fall over and you just laugh and ride right past them.

[00:14:37]>> [clears throat] >> All right.

[00:14:38]>> This is real difficult.

[00:14:40]>> You need the handlebar here.

[00:14:42]1 2 3 Keep going. Keep going.

[00:14:46]Oh, not too far.

[00:14:53]>> Easy. Easy. Easy.

[00:15:24]>> Woohoo!

[00:15:26]>> Oh, buddy.

[00:15:27]Now we're Now we're dirt riding.

[00:15:31]I want you to remember, this is your trail bike.

[00:15:34]>> [laughter] >> Woo.

[00:15:55]>> [music] [music] [music] [music] >> It's a beautiful day uh to be out in nature and be on the motorcycle.

[00:16:52]Like, I mean, every day is good on the motorcycle.

[00:16:57]Somebody has drawn a sequoia on the ground here.

[00:17:06]Giant sequoias are the most massive trees on the planet in terms of volume with tallest exceeding [music] 275 ft tall and the widest diameter exceeding 36 [music] ft at the base.

[00:17:19]They're also amongst the oldest living organism on Earth, which is determined by counting their tree rings.

[00:17:25]Scientists have determined that some are over 3,200 years old.

[00:17:42]After I got this amazing shot with the drone, I was bringing it down and saw a hole in the tree and went over to investigate.

[00:17:49]It looks like there's a nest in there and maybe some bird or something is living in there. So, we didn't stick around very long. We didn't want to harass whatever was living in there.

[00:17:59]So, we made our way back to the bikes, [music] jumped on, headed off to my favorite spot on almost every ride.

[00:18:28]Bob and Grub in Shaver Lake is one of my favorite places to end a ride. I love to eat fried pickles and have a beer.

[00:18:36]Tell them Old Goat's Moto sent you.

[00:18:38]They'll have no clue what you're talking about.

[00:18:41]Get out, get dirty, and we'll see you on the trail.

[00:18:45]>> [music]