Six adventurous e-bikers take on the world’s roughest county road

“You can’t ride up that,” said a burly bearded man sitting behind the wheel of a Jeep Wrangler with tires tall as my chest, pointing at a seemingly vertical granite rock slab. I smiled, aimed the front tire of my mountain bike at the slab and rode up it as effortlessly as if I were pedaling up a driveway. 

Fred Stamm shows off the climbing abilities of his e-bike in the Rubicon backcountry

The equal parts dazzled and dumbfounded look on the Jeeper’s face was a regular occurrence while riding our Class 1 pedal-assist electric mountain bikes on the Rubicon Trail—the famously rugged 4×4 route through the granite-strewn backcountry west of Lake Tahoe. 

In fact, when our group of six rode the Rubicon Trail in early August, we heard the words “crazy” and “insane” a few times as we ran circles around Jeeps crawling at a snail’s pace. Perhaps they were right, but the beauty of the eMTB is that, provided you have the skill to ride it, you can experience the length of the Rubicon Trail quicker than 4x4s without burning any fuel besides calories in your stomach.

Well, that’s not entirely true. To have enough electric power to pedal, play and camp on the Rubicon Trail for three days, our crew brought a gas-powered generator (in a truck, of course). So yeah, we were technically piloting gas-powered bicycles. Absurd when you think about it, but we’re talking a couple of ounces of fuel burned to charge six bikes versus dozens of gallons to propel one truck. 

Call it blasphemous. Call it lazy. Call it irresponsible. Call it what you want. But don’t pass judgment until you experience it firsthand, if you dare. 

Trail Worthy

From a distance, our bikes look like regular mountain bikes, but up close the oversize downtube holding the battery and the motor housing sandwiched between the cranks give away its pedal-assist status. 

Marco Osbourne leads Ken Hanna through a slick and rowdy section of the Rubicon Trail

A Class 1 pedal-assist mountain bike draws a balance between a traditional mountain bike and a dirt bike. With a 250-watt peak output (barely more power output than an athletic human) and a 20-mile-per-hour assisted speed limit, a Class 1 eMTB doesn’t have anywhere near the power of a dirt bike; it’s much more akin to a mountain bike, and only delivers electric assist when pedaling.

The multiple modes of assist that our Bosch-powered eMTBs delivered was like a heavenly helping hand, from barely noticeable in Eco mode to superhuman in Race mode, allowing us to climb impossibly steep grades. You couldn’t pay me to ride my “acoustic” mountain bike on the Rubicon Trail. It would be miserable. But the pedal assist of an e-bike turned misery into ecstasy.

Don’t be misled, though: Riding an eMTB on the Rubicon Trail is far from easy. Yes, you might be able to pedal straight up the sheer face of a rock, but going downhill, it’s still essentially a mountain bike. The resulting bodily abuse on one of the gnarliest 4×4 trails in the world is considerable, like a bunch of micro concussions, even with the plush Fox suspension on the Pivot Shuttle AM e-bike I piloted. If you somehow managed not to crash into the endless sea of oddly placed boulders or wash out in the silty, loose soil churned up by thousands of chest-tall truck tires, by the end of the day you were still sore—like you just got out of football practice. 

Riding the Rubicon Trail on an eMTB is a full-on, full-contact adventure not for the faint of heart, skill or fitness. That’s right, fitness. Despite what some mountain bike elitists think, riding an eMTB on steep, technical terrain still requires considerable cardiovascular discipline. 

But what usually takes two days in a truck and a full, punishing day on a mountain bike to navigate takes mere hours on an e-bike, which also provides a lot more smiles and laughs. And unlike doing the Rubicon in a truck, which can get stuck behind a broken-down 4×4 for hours, on an eMTB, you can pedal around the rig and keep on rolling.

The Roughest County Road in the World

When people think of a county road, they generally envision a gently rolling ribbon of blacktop, winding its way through bucolic countryside, past ranch houses and fence lines as far as the eye can see.  

What they don’t think of is one of the most challenging 4×4 trails on earth, with boulders as big as Volkswagens and near-vertical rock slabs. Despite this fact, the Rubicon Trail is an unmaintained El Dorado County road. 

An e-bike crew consisting of Mark Weir, Marco Osbourne, Fred Stamm and Kurt Gensheimer follows a trusty Toyota Land Cruiser on the Rubicon Trail after an epic three days of riding and romping

Running west to east 22 miles from Wentworth Springs to Tahoma on Tahoe’s West Shore, “the crown jewel of all off-highway trails” has a documented history dating to the 1860s. But the Rubicon Trail’s past goes far deeper. 

Native tribes like the Washoe and Maidu were the first to discover the area rich with game and plentiful springs along the Rubicon River, several of which are known to have medicinal qualities. 

Members of the Stevens-Townsend-Murphy party were likely the first non-natives to cross the Rubicon River in 1844, two years before the Donner Party. A handful of years later, the California Gold Rush was on, but due to its geology, the Rubicon River never held any auriferous gravels, so the area was spared from the intense gold prospecting that scarred other parts of the Sierra Nevada.

In 1869, the Hunsucker brothers built the first cabin in the Rubicon Valley near today’s Rubicon Springs, using the emigrant route, which later became the Rubicon Trail, for access. In 1877, El Dorado County approved a road connecting Wentworth Springs to Tahoe City, but with a caveat that citizens had to supply one-third of the funding. This provision became critical for the fate of the Rubicon Trail as a legal off-highway vehicle (OHV) route. 

The environmental movement of the last 50 years threatened the closure of the Rubicon Trail to vehicles on numerous occasions. The trail faced litigation from conservation groups, citing erosion and sediment damage to watersheds. But the Rubicon has remained open to the public thanks to the private funding used to originally create the route.

Revised Statute 2477 (RS 2477) was established by the federal government with the 1866 Mining Act, granting a “right of way for the construction of highways over public lands, not reserved for public uses.” Although the statute was revoked with the passage of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act in 1976, the Rubicon Trail pre-dates the revocation. Because the trail was partially built using private funds, public right-of-way access cannot be revoked despite it running across the federal lands of Tahoe National Forest and the private property of Rubicon Springs.

Beyond its access status, the Rubicon Trail is one of the oldest recreational assets in the Tahoe region. In 1888, George Hunsucker sold the 40-acre Rubicon Springs property to Sierra Nevada “Vade” Clark, and in 1891 she completed construction on the Rubicon Springs Hotel, turning the remote location into a destination. 

Marco Osbourne passes Ken Hanna’s Land Cruiser on day one on the Rubicon

Adventurous souls from San Francisco took an overnight train to Truckee, then a stagecoach to Tahoe City before boarding a boat to McKinney’s Resort. From there, they endured a bumpy—surely grueling—wagon road 7 miles, roughly following today’s Rubicon Trail down to Rubicon Springs Hotel, where they experienced swimming in the healing waters along with fishing, boating and hunting. 

The first motorized vehicle to successfully navigate to Rubicon Springs from Tahoma occurred in 1908, with A.E. Hunter driving his 1908 Mitchell Touring car from San Francisco with reporter Marion Walcott, who documented the entire week-long journey.

After the Rubicon Springs Hotel closed in 1926, the Rubicon Trail saw little use until the 1950s, when it became a popular OHV route. When World War II ended, a glut of military surplus Willys Jeeps found their way into the hands of citizens. Considering the low 4×4 gearing, leaf-sprung suspension and torquey engines, Jeeps quickly became the vehicle of choice on the Rubicon Trail. 

In 1953, the first Jeepers Jamboree crossed the Rubicon, and today the jamboree is considered the oldest, largest and most challenging organized 4×4 event in the world, welcoming thousands of Jeep enthusiasts each year. 

The rustic caretaker’s cabin at Rubicon Springs

A Trail for the People

The annual Jeepers Jamboree is held at Rubicon Springs, where the Hunsucker brothers built the first cabins in the 1860s. Rubicon Springs has always been privately owned, surrounded by Tahoe National Forest lands. Since it was first deeded in 1861, the property has changed hands 11 times, held longest by the current owners, Rubicon Soda Springs Incorporated (RSSI), which purchased the now-400-acre property in 1985.  

RSSI consists of 16 owners, all of them avid 4×4 enthusiasts who purchased the property to prevent the Forest Service from closing the trail to vehicle access. The owners team up to host the annual Jeepers Jamboree each July, along with other 4×4 events. 

Our group spent two nights camping on the beautiful and expansive granite slabs abutting the Rubicon River on the Rubicon Springs property, falling asleep each night to the soundtrack of a nearby waterfall. Over its four decades of ownership, RSSI has been instrumental in the stewardship of not only its own property, but also the Rubicon Trail, a mile of which passes through the middle of Rubicon Springs. 

As part-owners and seasonal caretakers of Rubicon Springs, Maria and Mark Barnes welcome thousands of people to the property each year. In addition to hosting numerous events, they also mill their own lumber, maintain all the buildings and conduct trail work with volunteers along their stretch of the Rubicon Trail. According to Mark, the land stewardship of RSSI has a positive effect on the behavior of trail users.  

“People pick up after themselves,” he said while taking a break from a metal roofing project. “We’ve never had a real problem with trash.” 

Resting tired bones at an old stone cabin on the Rubicon Springs property

One problem the Rubicon Trail did have in the past was human waste. In 2004, due to the exploding popularity of the trail, human waste threatened its closure. But due to the efforts of El Dorado County, Rubicon Trail Foundation and Friends of the Rubicon, in partnership with Tahoe National Forest, the issue has been greatly reduced by serviced chemical toilets along the trail. 

Rubicon Springs used to have pit toilets, but a few years ago after completing a county-permitted septic system, RSSI now has chemical toilets with a septic tank rock crawler truck to transfer waste from the toilets to the septic system—one of the other jobs the caretakers are tasked with performing. Despite all the work and effort RSSI has done to steward their land and host huge events, including corporate events for Jeep’s parent company, Stellantis, nobody makes money. 

“Everybody involved does this because of love of a place, and we care about the people,” Mark said. “My tax liability for working here last year was 56 dollars. That’s how much I claimed on my taxes.” 

The Itch for a Niche Pastime

You need a lot more money than that to afford playthings like e-bikes and Jeeps. The old joke in 4×4 circles is that Jeep stands for “Just Empty Every Pocket,” as building a rig capable enough to tackle the Rubicon can hollow out a bank account. In 2003, Chrysler Corporation introduced the Jeep Wrangler Rubicon, a special edition Wrangler with specific modifications to more readily conquer the Rubicon Trail and other challenging OHV routes. The model was a huge success, and two decades later a new Jeep Wrangler Rubicon costs $55,000, a far cry from the World War II military surplus Jeeps that first crawled the Rubicon in the 1950s.

Considering I’ve always been a Toyota guy, that’s where my knowledge of Jeeps ends. And because Jeeps on the Rubicon have basically become a cliché, I called my friends Ken Hanna and Brian Sullivan to see if they’d want to join us on our e-bike adventure with their heavily modified Toyota Land Cruisers, hauling in all our camping gear and food to Rubicon Springs so we could fully enjoy the benefits of our e-bikes. 

A radio-controlled (RC) rock crawling truck provides some fun as the sun sets on camp

I first experienced the Rubicon Trail in 2001, sitting passenger in my friend’s Toyota pickup. I was instantly hooked by the sensation; never before did I have such an adrenaline rush going so slowly. A year later I bought a 1985 Toyota 4Runner with a removable top and a blown motor for $800 and—without any prior experience—fixed the engine and built it into a rock crawler so I could cross the Rubicon Trail.

More than two decades later, and after many miles on the toughest 4×4 trails in the American West, I still have that 4Runner. But my desire for rock crawling is gone. The stress, the time and the expense of fixing broken parts and how slow everything moves ran its course.

I recently discovered radio-controlled (RC) rock crawling, which is far more enjoyable and less stressful. The little trucks are astonishingly similar to the real thing, almost perfect-scale models of a full-size rock crawler, capable of the same climbing feats as a real truck. And if you roll over, you can simply pick up the pint-size truck and try again—something you definitely can’t do with a real truck. It’s the perfect evening campground activity—bordering on meditative, especially amid the endless granite of Rubicon Springs.

No Going Back

“Crossing the Rubicon” is an idiom meaning “passing a point of no return,” attributed to Julius Caesar when he crossed the river Rubicon in Italy more than 2,000 years ago. Caesar’s river crossing breached a physical border between a Roman province and an area directly controlled by Rome. By crossing the Rubicon, Caesar precipitated his own civil war against Rome, which led to his eventual dictatorship. 

In mountain biking, the advent of e-bikes has crossed its own metaphorical Rubicon. There is no going back. In both the U.S. and Europe, most new mountain bike sales are Class 1 pedal-assist e-bikes, and the percentage grows every year. 

A generator is used to recharge the bikes

Despite this new reality and popularity, recreation destinations like Moab, Utah, Breckenridge, Colorado, and Bend, Oregon, are still trying to keep Class 1 e-bikes off their trails. But stopping e-bike use on trails is like trying to hold back a tidal wave with sandbags. 

The Tahoe National Forest understands this well, and instead of the futility of trying to stop Class 1 e-bike use on trails, they are looking for ways to incorporate them where it makes sense. 

Although there are no access issues with Class 1 e-bikes on OHV routes like the Rubicon Trail, there are only so many mountain bikers masochistic enough to attempt the Rubicon on an e-bike. Through studies over the last five years, the Tahoe National Forest has found little difference in trail impacts between traditional mountain bikes and Class 1 e-bikes, and as a result is working to expand legal access for the e-bikes. 

The Rubicon Trail has delivered 150 years of adventure to millions of families spanning horse-drawn carriages, the earliest automobiles, military surplus Jeeps, modern 4x4s, motorcycles and, now, e-bikes. 

The continuously maintained status of the Rubicon Trail by the public and volunteers is proof that motorized recreation can be sustainable—and that providing motorized opportunities helps maintain the diverse and inclusive reputation of Lake Tahoe as a world-class recreation destination.

Kurt Gensheimer is a freelance writer and co-host of Mind the Track Podcast who has a passion for storytelling, trails and mountain biking. Follow him on Instagram, @trail_whisperer and @mindthetrack.