Your SxS is the PERFECT vehicle to use for long adventures! We use the OnX Offroad GPS App to import maps, create your own trail, and use while you are on the ride, in a tutorial format. I’ve been on rides that would be torture in a Jeep, and not as easy as a pre-runner. If you have a SxS, you need to stretch its legs and put in some miles! But, the challenge is planning and organizing these trips... Where you do get gas? Where to you stay? What if you have issues? There are a lot of things to consider, so we laid out some tips and lessons learned from our previous adventures, to help you put together a big ride of your own!

Transcription:

Hey everybody Nick Olson Chupacabra off road and for this video we're going to talk about how to plan and organize your first multi-day adventure ride we're gonna show you how we plan one of these rides using the onyx off-road app give you some tips on what you need to bring we're also gonna give you some feedback from some of the long multi-day trips that i've been on and finally we're gonna dive into onyxmaps.com and show you how we loaded in an existing built trail map and how we added some variations to make it our own and then i'm going to show you the results of how the ride went and how it turned out so we always get a lot of questions after we post one of these videos from a long multi-day ride a lot of people always want to tag along or they want to know the files so they can plan a ride for themselves now that's all good but when you're going to be planning a multi-day ride you've got a lot of different challenges and things that you need to think of and it's far more difficult to organize a ride ultimately you're going to be parking somewhere and most likely making a loop where you're going to start and finish a couple days later in the same exact area now you have an area where you have room to park and then as you're doing multi-day trips you got to make sure you have a place to stay if you're not camping and then also a place to eat if you're not bringing your own food so these pose a new set of problems combine that with bigger mileage now you got to make sure you've got enough fuel for everybody no matter where you're going to take them all of these reasons make it a lot more challenging than going out to your local area or going on a day trip exploring for 10 to 12 hours where you know ultimately you're gonna get back to your truck and trailer so luckily for me i've done a lot of these multi-day rides in different environments so i've learned a lot i started off as someone who's just lucky enough to have some friends invite them along so all i had to do is really show up be prepared and go enjoy the ride and now i'm trying to level up and plan and organize and lead some of these rides so you know i've learned a lot and i'm trying to share that with you guys here today so one ride we've been on and documented on this channel a few times is a ride from rocky point to el golfo in mexico and now this is a really fun ride you've got a little bit of everything you do have to plan for gas you do have to pack your own clothes we haven't had a chase vehicle on this ride but geographically it's fairly simple there aren't a lot of big mountain ranges it makes for a really good ride of about 80 to 90 miles each way per day in arizona i got invited to do a northern arizona super loop which was a really fun ride that my friends put together they actually went and pre-ran the whole course to make sure there were no fence closings and this ride started up in happy jack which is really popular for those of us in arizona like to ride during the summer time we went all the way up to winslow arizona back down to heber and then finally finished back at our trucks in happy jack those mileages ranged from 50 to 80 miles per day and uh was a great adventure we had to bring all of our own clothes but we had hotels to stay at at each stop for each day speaking of arizona i was lucky enough to get invited with another group of friends to go to the arizona peace trail the northern half now to do the entire arizona peace trail it is a five to seven day adventure but you can break it off in three to four day segments so for this particular video that we shot which we'll link below we did the northern loop starting in lake havasu we went up to kingman arizona back down towards wiki up and near salome and then finished up back in lake havasu this loop we ended up doing in basically two long days almost 400 miles 350-ish we stayed the night at a hotel in kingman went into the halapi mountains which were amazing and after some vehicle issues instead of making our way to salome to then make a day 3 to desert barn parker we cut our trip short and cut back across so that's how the trail worked out and we did actually have somebody on standby as a chase truck in case one of our vehicles did have a catastrophic failure those are some really fun adventure rides but we can't talk about adventure chips without talking about baja now i've done three utv trips all ranging from about 450 to 500 miles all three day trips two of those three trips were led by a tour guide they both started out of takadi finished back in takadi and stayed up in the northern area of baja and my most recent trip which is linked below here on our youtube channel we did a baja 500 pre-run we also added on about 15 miles of our own trail as i wanted to get back to the beach and kind of work with the tools of the onyx app to make our own section and then find the uh chupacabra sign near rancho tempico a small town on the coast now this most recent trip was my first time leading down in baja and it poses a new set of challenges in that regard so it's more adventurous and also with planning a little break off section it was fun to use the tools of the app to plan out our own little segment make sure that uh we didn't get turned around too much got to the spot we wanted to go and link back up with the route that we had planned for day three of our trip so if you're watching this video you're one of those people who really wants to plan a new adventure you don't mind hurting all the cats all your friends and you want to figure out how to safely get them from point a to point b make sure everyone's got a place to stay everyone's got food and everyone's got fuel and then hopefully everyone doesn't have any issues got spare parts to fix for every year on the trail so you can click off three four five hundred miles in a few days or more as long as you plan successfully and everyone kind of goes at a good speed and has the parts to make that happen now speaking of which let's talk a little bit about prepping your vehicle now you can't do these rides without really being set up and what i mean by that basically is tools and spare parts now we're going to link a video below in our description about what tools we bring on our rides and this is kind of what we've learned from doing some of these group rides with some of my friends highly recommend you check it out because it not only has tools it also has toe straps it has spare nuts and bolts things that i've seen break on the trail instances and examples of those things that i bring now to hopefully prevent in the future if we do have one of those failures and on top of that when you're looking at a big trip like baja we're lucky enough to have a chase truck this time so i bought an extra primary clutch we brought axles we brought some bigger componentry that you know could prevent us from having a failure or being stuck in the middle of nowhere so check those videos highly uh worth watching if you want to plan a big ride because you can't be too prepared when you go on these long rides the final thing i mentioned before you get into the course design is the pace now one thing i learned the hard way one of my first trips down to mexico was i was having fun behind a bunny i was going fast and then i broke my car so luckily i had another uh razor donor car that had crashed and i got to borrow some parts with a shock and a radius rod but um keep in mind this when you're trying to do 500 miles a day and tell this to everybody who's going on the ride this isn't a glamis pace we're going to rip from pad one to olson hill pace this is the vehicles are loaded down they probably have an extra 100 200 pounds plus of gear in them so they're gonna break easier the cars are gonna respond a little bit slower ideally you're gonna make it throughout the day especially if you're gonna go more than 150 miles in one day try to pick a pace that's fun that matches what the group can do and likes to do but hopefully you're not gonna have any flat tires uh belt failures all those type of things because it's all fun and games one belt failure no big deal but that can learn lead into an extra long day if there's multiple failures in the course of one long day so just be thoughtful of that make sure you tell everybody kind of take off a little bit easy get into it and then figure out the pace that works best for you and your group so with all that being said you got a good idea of the pace you want to run you got your tools you got your spell spare parts your cars ready to go you got some extra fuel you've thought of everything you can think of let's jump into my screen share and show you how i use the map to plan out this ride all right so let's jump into screen share this is onyx's website which is onyxmaps.com if you're unfamiliar with the app there's a couple different membership options you've got free which has some of your basic tools a premium version which is 29.99 a year and then an elite version which is 99.99 a year now the biggest difference on the elite level is it gives you a full nationwide map to private land ownership now this is a really big deal if you're planning rides up in arizona in particular uh here in the us so that lets you know that if you're planning a route you could come to an area that might not be legal now this is a great feature they've imported from their hunting app which is wildly popular because as far as i know about hunting i'm not big into it but my buddies do hunt tell me that that's a big deal and you can get into a lot of trouble if you're hunting on the wrong property with the wrong permits etc so it's nice to know that for us as off-roaders so that we do come across someone's property we might expect potentially a um closed gate or uh we need to work on a workaround so we can go through someone's property that's not allowed a good example this is on our northern arizona super loop ride that my friends organized they went and pre-ran the whole course but i know they had to change a section when they did get into some private land ownership so um just things be thoughtful and i think it's worth the extra money if you're planning these rides from scratch so i'm gonna go ahead and log in this is what it looks like when we're logged into the app and for the purpose of this example we're going to show you guys how we set up the baja 500 ride so here we are set up and you can see as we go over here to baja that the route has not been uploaded and over here on the left you've got a couple little uh discover tabs so you can see any trails that might be already marked out on onyx's app offline maps which is a feature we'll talk about in a minute right over here on the left you're gonna get into my content now as you zoom in this is where the ride took place and from here we're going to go ahead and find the file and then upload it so step one i went over to score international's website they're the federation that put on the baja 500 and once you get a particular event that we went to this is june 9th through the 13th right here you can click to the course map on gps files so like a lot of other routes you're going to get a couple popular versions those two versions being a gpx format or a kml format now here for the kml format i'm gonna go ahead and save it this is a 1.1 megabyte file onyx accepts up to two megabyte files uh for routes that you can upload and then go ahead and make some adjustments so moving back over to the app what you're going to do is you're going to import and you're going to find that file that you just downloaded you're going to go ahead and click save to my content the save was successful and here you go here is your 2021 scoreboard 500 course map all ready to go now what's really cool is this saves automatically right to your device as soon as you do this so if you're using your phone you're using your ipad honestly i recommend using both on a ride it's nice to have the phone as a backup so both of these are going to upload right once you're logged in to onyx now that we're uh we're good to go okay so now we've got our baja 500 course map uploaded and i wanted to talk about why we decided to follow this route for the most part versus any other traditional ride you'd go with a completely different route i'm bringing up this other map just to kind of give you a good idea so you can really see exactly what i'm talking about here so most importantly we had really good mileage every day it was a three-day trip and we had good mileage between each stop for fuel as well as a place to stay at night now looking at this map here on the left uh we're gonna start off here in the town of ensenada and we're gonna go about a 160 170 miles where we stopped the first day which was rancho el coyote now that's down here at a race mile 160. um like i said it was about 160 170 miles total now for these long multi-day rides you got to really make sure that you're planning quarterly for fuel for this particular ride we ended up hiring a chase setup which was you know majorly essential as one of our vehicles had an issue and once we started off up here in ensenada we uh went down we met him here at about 70 miles in to get our cars topped off now the reason we did this is our lunch stop which is here at valley day trinidad this is about 105 110 miles into our ride we didn't think these vehicles may or may not be able to go 105 miles my personal experience with turbocharged side by sides even if they're not tuned which those suck even more fuel is that i've been in baja myself and ran out about 90 95 miles even in a lighter weight two-seat vehicle so for the purpose of these type of trips load it down you never know if someone's running a tune or their fuel economy isn't that great i wanted to go no further than 70 miles without having to plan for fuel now we all brought fuel on our vehicles as an emergency but we did get a gas up at race mile 70 we also got topped off with gas we had lunch at race mile 110 and that allowed us to go the additional 50 miles from lunch up to our final spot for the end of day one so this ends up being a really good route for this reason um day two also we would go a good route get gas stops stay in the hotel and then day three and loop back up to ensenada so it worked out really well for those two reasons i think gas and stops are the most important when you're thinking about where we're gonna go how we're gonna get there how we're gonna make it a third factor is us being racers being uh people who love the the racing aspect of it we wanted to follow the course like i've always wanted to see how score marks course like i mentioned score racing is pretty open to interpretation they race from checkpoint to checkpoint and as long as the racer stays within 50 feet well you can get creative with your lines you choose so as a race fan and enthusiast i always wanted to see how they marked it how liberal it was in some sections what are some sections where there's no way people are going to be able to cut the course and potential bottlenecks could and did occur that was just really exciting as a race enthusiast to kind of see how it really trickled down and was a cool feature and finally you know there's the safety element of us following the race course so there's going to be all the same traffic going the same way which i thought was going to make it a lot safer for us leading on our own without a tour guide for our first time and then i hit a lot of our favorite hotspot stuff that some of us haven't got to hit before so we're going to go down the goat trail we got to stop at mike skye ranch rancho coyote is an amazing place i highly recommend uh staying there if you get a chance to if that's where your route dictates and then also in some new spots i hadn't been to san cantine down along the coast was beautiful a lot of fun fast miles along the beach and then also allow us to make our own little offshoot to really use the app to get a little more adventurous to get off the beaten path head back over to the coast and uh to have a good time out that way before we connected back in santo tomas so that's why i decided to use it and uh it was a good step of getting more adventurous but not completely on our own which i don't think i have the knowledge of baja to really uh take that to the next level but that's coming in the future for sure so now that the racecourse is in and you got an idea from zero to day one from day one to day two went from rancho el coyote all the way down here to san contain and up staying in vincente guerrero that's right about race mile 295 or 300 that ended up being a great second day it was really technical and we stopped here halfway um at race mile 225 went up to the small town of kamalu so that we could get fuel and we actually linked up with our friends they had issues from the day one they got the car fixed and met us there is a good halfways um and then we ended up joining back up with them going back down to race mile 255 and stopping for a taco lunch break and then finished our day there now for day three we ended up coming back up the coast race mile 300 and we went up to this teal marker right here which is a small town of san vincente so all these waypoints you can change i like marking them teal so they stick out on the map and from here we created our own loop where we wanted to do a choop loop we went along the beach this is a great spot i've been to a couple times there's a small town called rancho tampico and they've got a sign that says picasso and chupacabra so we wanted to leave some swag there sticker it up go down to the beach and get some more content and join uh just the nice weather and all that type of stuff so my plan was to link over through here and then link back up to right where the race course picked it back up which is right here race mile 385 and then that took us back up through some really fun fast uh flowy section of racecourse up here to the small town of santo tomas where we would get gas again so things you thought of you know we made 70 miles to get the fuel got the gas quick little top off at santo tomas then we finished out our day and back up to ensenada but here's where the app tools are really nice um and i started making my own line now another cool feature of onyx off-road on the app of course it's on the desktop as you got this 3d feature so i'm going to switch over to 3d mode and it gives you a good idea of the lay of the land and you've done a lot of off-roading like myself you have an idea of we basically want to get down a wash line in this instance when we get down to this small town of arindara now pretty simple and once we get along here you can see onyx already has a road or trail already mapped out along the coast and this coast coastal trail links up to a beach line which i kind of plan on stopping and then it links back up and loops back through so this is the most adventurous i had got in terms of using uh this trail and really the only section i was overly worried about was jumping in the wash we're jumping in higher we weren't going to jump on the race course going backwards but we were going to link up with this onyx route and you know you never know what could happen there could be a closed fence part of the wash could be flooded so for my hair we go back into 2d mode okay so once you've got the kind of the 3d geography all line up get an idea of what the trail looks like i'm going to go ahead and zoom way in back to 2d mode and i'm going to go ahead and use the tools up here and i'm going to start drawing lines i'm going to go ahead and start drawing in teal and we figured out a spot on the race course we could safely go down the washer without going along the race course and then we kind of started marking along this route so here i'm going to go up to this road we kind of went around to here we stayed along this go ahead and save it as you can see as i'm drawing it out let you know how long each segment is so here we kind of branched off we got down in the wash and you know as i'm looking at this i'm looking at all the geography i know that there's multiple lines down here in this wash i also know that all my crew is going to be following these lines assuming it's the exact trail so you know i kind of told the guys like look i'm designing this i'm kind of cutting it out kind of similar to the the score baja of course you know they they did a good job kind of giving you the general direction but you can't take it as it's the exact note and you might get off a little and etc but it's that just means that you know we're going in the general direction like i said using your geography you want to be able to get down the course the this instance the wash to get down to the spot that we wanted to get the little town of arindara now i had a little inside knowledge i've been down there a couple times i know that you need to go slow through that town as there's a lot of produce and the farmers will get mad at you but i also know too knowing that onyx has a trail marked out that we can also join on and link it back up as we did so i keep going this way and i'm going to show you guys uh the complete loop that i mapped out and then also going to show you how closely i was able to follow it you know what were the discrepancies and maybe how those kind of varied to the score course map versus the actual trail map that we rode so i keep on going on we're going to hop over i'm going to log in log out of this log into mine so you can see how well i align the course out how well we followed it and just some other things i've learned through this whole experience okay so now i log back into my account so you can see the ride that we did uh you can click on the line for each of the three days but let's since we're talking about this little loop we did here is the double line so the red line is what i drew out the teal line ends up being the trail that we rode on so starting from the beginning you can see here we kind of followed along and then right here we jumped into the wash no big deal but for the most part it isn't exact right you're going to get off the course a little bit just like we did with scores course map and we learned a lot but basically we made our way down the wash we ended up linking up with part of the trail that was already outlined on onyx's map we jumped back in through the town of verendura which was really cool i hadn't actually seen the downtown part of it and then we followed along pretty much exact which is also the onyx course map which is kind of the only trail here that goes along the beach now here you can see where we jumped off the beach we stopped and hung out for a minute so we shot some of the content for our video got some cool drone clips and then from here i did have a little issue i got i took us all down to this private beach and we got stuck and had to turn around and what happened was when i'm lining up the course you can see the red line here i thought we could go along this beach section from past memory i was wrong this is a private little beach and there wasn't actually a trail right here and what i was trying to do was make sure i didn't go too far over to the right and missed the chupacabra sign i hadn't been down here in three years almost four years so i want to make sure we didn't go past it and miss it so no big deal we ended up looping back around we come back up and we get back onto the trail which is the onyx trail um here it kind of wise and comes back together it links back up this would have been a really good spot right here on the beach to go it just had more room but uh beautiful beautiful area i mean how many times you guys get to ride your off-road vehicle along the beach pretty much only in mexico excluding pismo beach so really rad and then um links us back up here's where we saw the chupacabra sign it was right here um got some photos shot some content which is really cool and then we continue along this kind of climbs up away and once you get back on it's really sad because you make a turn and you no longer get to see beach for the rest of our ride it is pretty fun and flowy and once you got back up to this section here we had to make sure we hung a right and didn't go back down towards the beach we started heading back in and up the coast also too right up here there's a big t on the road and you can see right here this is the big thing where i made a checkpoint and i called out hey right turn everybody make sure you don't go left you go back to the beach because uh this is on the route that we have planned to make sure we don't have any issues with fuel and with time this linked us backed up to the small town of race mile 385 the small town of santo tomas and then we hopped on the race course which was really fun and fast like i mentioned excuse me and this is where i jump back on to santo tomas boom speed zone baja racing they want to limit the speed of 37 miles per hour during these in these small towns to keep things as safe as possible so that was a little branch off it was cool a couple little slight turnarounds couple people got on the radio said hey nick um did you check your gps are we all good you know it wasn't too much of a a long route but you know keeping these things in mind it's day three of a long day ride want to make sure again we have a fun safe experience the 3d feature was really nice just to have an idea we know there's some big hills here and keep that in mind it was cool to see how it worked out it worked out really well as that idea of the layla land from being there three or four years ago and what it was gonna look like using the app so good features uh very helpful highly recommend and it's going to really help help you plan out your routes link onto some of these onyx trails if you can they're known routes they're going to be safe and easy to follow and then you get a rating of how hard they were these are greens they were basic simple fire roads all good i mean we encountered so much different types of terrain it was good to just make sure we clicked off good steady miles so so a couple other features i want to point out now that you've got the app inside of your phone or your smart device i'm going to do screen record here so you can kind of see one thing you're going to notice you can see the same route that we went if you want to see the mileage now we documented all of this each day but for instance here is a ride day one you can go ahead and you can share this with one of your buddies you can text them you can email them pretty cool to share your route all three of those days are linked in the description of our youtube ride you add your waypoint so at day one um here's a waypoint i called this one overheat hill because that's where my buddies first started having issues with his razor lo and behold he needed a new intercooler and uh our chase crew the guys at a baja powerhouse uh jc and the gang had an extra intercooler and saved basically the last two thirds of their trip one thing you're going to notice here's one more waypoint here towards the end of day one boom rancho el coyote where we stayed but as i zoom out you're going to see some green rectangles and those are where i downloaded high-res apps now you can download offline maps and if you want to create a new one you've got three options you've got a 5 mile 10 mile and 150 mile resolution now i like to do some 10 mile resolutions which i thought was pretty good and i chose to download those maps before we took off because those are situations where we'll be stopping for fuel maybe when you have some chase support that's what we're going to need the high resolution map so i did that up here around ironically we started having issues around race mile 70 into lunch 110 i did also the second one as we were coming out of mike sky ranch to end day two and then down at the bottom here i did the bottom half of the loop where we're going to stop for tacos and kind of where we right below where we cut off and grab some some fuel and then most importantly on day three here some downloaded some maps of our loop so that we had high-res imagery in case we needed it in case we got turned around we had that to call on on our smart devices now like i said run a backup i ran an ipad which i use the xgps 160 sensor that updates 10 times a minute the beautiful thing about that sensor it's 150 bucks but it'll take any old tablet or non-gps lower cost tablet and it makes it work better than your gps unit so we use that the gps starts to die just the uh the charging on the razor just doesn't keep up because i need to charge it all day we're using it so much so i use my phone as well so we kind of had that as a backup in case we needed it and i'd highly recommend doing that so i used a ram mount for my phone sometimes i had it in my door back but i always had it at fingertips reach in case uh my dad got turned around a little bit so that x gps sensor will go ahead and link it you can simply purchase off amazon it's a nice addition to have like that most everyone's got an old ipad laying around it makes it work really well for this scenario you have to make sure it's not underneath your roof and has access to the satellite so it can work so a couple other features on the app the double tap is nice it allows you to zoom in go right over here where we kind of stop just like on the desktop your smartphone has the 3d feature as well so you can kind of look and get a good layer of land and we use this actually a couple times we're down in baja just as i always know i'm thinking ahead i'm planning for everybody making sure okay that was supposed to be a hillside yep it feels like it feels like we're going the right way so a little memorization using the 3d feature of the geography really if you have a good memory it's going to pay big dividends just that peace of mind so you know someone gets on the radio nope we're on the right spot this is good trust yourself believe in the route that you planned it's working out okay and that's what worked out for us so it worked out good so app's a great tool guys i hope you liked this video i hope it's really helpful hopefully it motivates you to start planning out your own multi-day trip i know after this we have more baja in the future but also some more chupacabra rides here in arizona i think peace trail will be pretty easy they've got the maps on their website arizonapeacetrail.org i think is the website we'll link it below they've got the map there if you want to do part of it it's a great ride it'd be fairly easy because also from day to day you've got have a suit of kingman kingman to wiki i've wiki up to salome salome to parker you've got places to get to destinations that do have motels get a shower get a meal grab ice and gas so you can keep on keeping on and i think the azp show right very much reminds me of baja in that regard and an easier um you don't necessarily need a chase to get it done and it's a lot more close for most of you watching this so hope you guys like the content if you guys do please like and subscribe we've got a lot more coming your way.