Cybertruck Adventure Log: Trying to Be the First (documented?) EV Through the WA-BDR

[once-set]

I've driven a little bit of the WA-BDR in May of 2025; it was still snow-blocked by that time, but the route is absolutely gorgeous!

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[JCERRN]

Good luck! Enjoy your trip! Are you driving in off road mode?

 

[thefsm93]

End of day update, Section 1 is complete! Sorry I am typing this update on my phone at camp so forgive any bad grammer, typos, etc.

Overall the day went extremely well, except for one mishap towards the end of the day. More on that later.

We started our day after sleeping in a rotting (literally floor was squishy and the roof was bowing in one bedroom) 3 bedroom motel in Cascade locks. Worse yet, it has a Stab-lok circuit breaker panel "protecting" the building.

Interestingly, Cascade locks has a Burger joint that opens at 7am serving burgers so of course this is how we started our day. Not gonna lie, surprisingly good burgers.

From there we started our journey across the bridge of the gods. Things went extremely smooth and fast for about the first 20% of the trail. This is where we encountered tons of puddles and beautiful fall colors. Shortly after we hit what I'd consider a slightly more technical area, but honestly any 4x4 could handle that section. Just big dips, whoops, washboards, and puddles.

After a while we stopped in to checkout the Ice Caves, and those were pretty cool. For those who don't know they are lava tubes that you can walk around in. I guess when it gets cold out they form ice crystals, but it's not late enough in the season for that.

From there things were extremely smooth sailing. Nothing really technical or problematic, just general forest service road driving. Lots of great views, but not many photoshoot opportunities. Trucks handled it fantastic, and my friend on the WR250 was having the time of his life. Funny enough I hardly had to watch the GPS because you could see his tire tracks on every turn!

We have 4 dogs with us on this trip, and got plenty of opportunities to let them out and run around.

At some point we hit what was supposed to be a view point of Mt Adams, but was extremely confused because there was no obvious view point from the truck. After looking around for a bit I decided to climb a massive gravel mound and at the top received an glorious view of Mt Adams. I'll leave a photo of the truck looking down from the top of the mound.

After leaving the view point I decided to let FSD take the wheel, and wow did it truly impress. This was not on pavement, it was slightly beat up forest service roads with various obstacles. The only thing about it was it was slower driving than me, and did not avoid puddles (although I literally aimed for every puddle I found so it didn't bother me).

And this is when we had a small mishap happen. As we got closer to Packwood the road widened and FSD decided to start flying down the road. While I was comfortable with it, we eventually hit a massive patch of potholes and washboard... And it decided 45mph was a perfectly acceptable speed for it. (In fairness, it handled it incredibly well). Then all of a sudden, I saw a black object go flying off the side of the road in my driver's side mirror. It hit me immediately, it was one of my wheel covers. (Of all of the "incidents" I could have this was best case scenario).

I stopped immediately, backed up a good ways and scanned the ditch looking for the cover. Luckily for me I found it. Even more interesting, it came off my passenger rear wheel! I installed it right back on and continued on.

Not too long after that I made it to Packwood. I arrived at the Charger there with 37% battery. I started with 99%. This was significantly better than my worst case scenario, but worse than the testing I had completed a month earlier. In the end I drove 126.1 miles, and averaged 542.4wh/mile. Not too shabby at all. I feel much more confident in the ability to complete this journey now.

When we arrived at the charger it was in use by another car, which was disappointing because we knew we would need to be there for a while and that delayed us a bit more. Once we got charging we anticipated being there for a while because it was only a 62.5kw charger.

I was anticipating this to be my last favorite experience of the trip, except it turned out to be a fantastic opportunity to cook dinner. We pulled out the induction stove and cooked up a delicious steelhead mediterranean dish.

Like most of my charging experiences, the vehicle was done charging before I was ready to go! We had just finished eating when the truck hit 100%, and we still had to clean up. If anyone follows behind me, I highly recommend you plan for this. Makes the wait no big deal, and allows you to focus on building camp when you get there.

Sadly, it was dark out by the time we left so we just went down the road, found the first dispersed camping spot we could find and got camp setup.


I'm incredibly impressed by how the truck handled everything today. Suspension worked great, never worried once about ground clearance, and range ended up not being a problem at all.


And seriously... Hit some puddles with your truck. It's great fun!

I'm uploading raw video footage to YouTube until I get out of the land of tall trees. Probably not worth watching, but if anyone needs something to reference it will be there.

Anyways, I'm heading to bed. Y'all have a good night and I'll update y'all tomorrow!

 

[thefsm93]

Good luck! Enjoy your trip! Are you driving in off road mode?

I drove a bunch with it on, and a bunch with it off. This trip is easy enough you really don't need off-road mode. However, I preferred to drive in it because you can keep it in a high suspension setting above 25mph.

But then you can't use FSD

 

[Aces-Truck]

Best of luck! Make us Washingtonians Proud.

Makes me think about doing a father/son trip on this DBR. He'd drive his Yota. And I'd do it Cybertruck. I wonder how early the snow would be gone?

 

[Crissa]

Oh, wow! Glad to see that place still exists.

-Crissa

 

[cadamo001]

Amazing trip and adventure. Ditch the wheel covers and remove the aero cover things before the BDR does it for you. Other than that incredible.

 

[thefsm93]

Amazing trip and adventure. Ditch the wheel covers and remove the aero cover things before the BDR does it for you. Other than that incredible.

If I could fit them somewhere I would, but we are packed to the brim!

 

[thefsm93]

Having the time of our life right now!

 

[thefsm93]

Well Guys, Section 2 is a wrap! (Okay that's a lie, I'm camping about 4 miles from the end point). Once again, I'm typing this on my phone so please forgive grammer and other problems.

Today was one heck of an adventure. All started normal with a bit of a late start after eating a delicious breakfast. If you haven't already, you should try toasted croissants with Nutella and a whole banana in them.

We started on our journey excited to conquer what is known as "Bethel Ridge" and "Baby Head Hill". However we quickly got distracted by the fact Rim Rock lake was completely empty, and we saw dirt bike riders out on the dry lake bed.

Of course we had to go and play, and man did we have a blast. Got to play with all sorts of off road settings, had fun doing donuts and did some extremely light rock crawling. Probably some of the most fun I've had in the truck yet. And, it was all live streamed to YouTube during it! Check out timestamp 49:10 onward for the lake action.

Sadly we couldn't hang out there for too long as we had a large day ahead of us. In fact, once we got on the trail we realized we were completely misled by the speed at which we traveled yesterday. Today was a much slower and rougher ride than section 1. Section 2 was nothing but large baby head rocks, large ruts, and rough 4x4 roads. (In fairness we did take the alternative "harder" route today).

My friends described today as "Shaking baby syndrome for adults"... For 8.5 hours Even with that, it was an incredible journey and the views were absolutely astonishing.

Bethel Ridge was one of the major highlights of the day. You climb up thousands of feet, and drive the length of a ridge with views on both sides. When you first get up there is a "hidden" view point that requires some fairly serious off-roading. Tight corners (thankful for 4 wheel steering), large boulders, and some sandy hill climbing.

This is where I broke my first wheel cover, going through a tight section and it got clipped by a log sticking up. I also smashed my passenger side rear mud flap trying to keep a large boulder from potentially hitting my battery. Turns out, I don't have much experience off roading in this large of a vehicle. Lessons were learned but the adventure and camaraderie made it a blast. Zero regrets.

After conquering Bethel Ridge we started the long and grueling crawl towards Baby Head Hill. I think we averaged 10mph through this section. It was beautiful, but even land rovers were taking it real nice and slow.

However, at some point the road smoothed out just enough to get a little too comfortable so we picked up our pace. Sadly the trail quickly turned into the home of extremely sharp rocks. In my infinite lack of wisdom, I kept up the pace because the truck was handling it incredibly well... Until I heard the classic Tesla warning chime. When I looked down I saw my passenger side rear tire was at 9psi.

I hopped out of the truck and immediately heard the sound of air spewing out of a tire. That's my first tire I've ever punctured off road and I'm sure it's not my last. This was my second lesson for today: Slow Down!

I had planned for this exact issue and brought with me a full size spare wheel/tire and tools. This was my first trailside tire swap I've ever completed. My friend who is a bus mechanic and is 6'5" graciously helped me. 15 minutes later we were on the move again, and now I get to drop off my tire at a tire shop while I supercharge in Ellensburg tomorrow Hopefully they can patch it so I can use it as my spare. (Punctured through the tread, not sidewall)

We continued on and while the trail was rough and slow going we eventually made it to "Baby Head Hill" which was supposed to be one of the hardest sections of the day... Except it was incredibly underwhelming and my buddy on the WR250 just now told me it was "The 25th out of 20 hardest hill climbs". It was a breeze. The road leading up to it was rougher than that hill.

As we continued we came to the conclusion it's probably best for us to setup camp just outside of Ellensburg. It seemed like the right choice because the sun was setting and the truck had plenty of juice left to cook dinner. Even with camping out the night before and cooking breakfast this morning, the truck still had 22% battery.

Oh, I almost forgot! Today's efficiency number was 678.5 wh/mile. This was over 116.8 miles.

So my three lessons learned today:

1. Don't bring wheel covers on these trips. So far I have 1 left out of 4. I managed to recover two, but one is just gone. Luckily I have another set back at the house. The small ones might be fine, but the large stock ones can not handle these rough trails.
2. Slow the "f" down.
3. I need to learn more about the "Correct" way to jack up the truck. We couldn't get the truck to only lift the rear tire, so we ended up lifting the entire passenger side of the vehicle off the ground.

Anyways, here are a few photos from today. Hopefully I can get my tire patched up as a spare before I start section 3

 

[L3it3R]

The truck has a jack mode in the service menu - it’s important to use it because the suspension can actually auto adjust while the truck is on a jack!

I had a nail puncture a few months back and took it to my usual shop and we had to figure it out because as soon as they started lifting it the suspension started going to work

https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/cybertruck/en_us/GUID-9E6DD5CB-40BA-4A29-B20D-457303555037.html

Sounds like a great trip! Thanks for the updates - and yeah, definitely don’t want to use those covers while off-roading - I still need to get rid of my set - once I saw how bad they scratched the wheels I went back to the small covers they sent us early owners as an apology lol

 

[thefsm93]

The truck has a jack mode in the service menu - it’s important to use it because the suspension can actually auto adjust while the truck is on a jack!

I had a nail puncture a few months back and took it to my usual shop and we had to figure it out because as soon as they started lifting it the suspension started going to work

https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/cybertruck/en_us/GUID-9E6DD5CB-40BA-4A29-B20D-457303555037.html

Sounds like a great trip! Thanks for the updates - and yeah, definitely don’t want to use those covers while off-roading - I still need to get rid of my set - once I saw how bad they scratched the wheels I went back to the small covers they sent us early owners as an apology lol

I tried Jack mode and a bunch of different suspension settings. I'm not at all sure why we kept lifting the front wheel off, other than the fact we weren't on level ground which made it a bit sketchy.

Admittedly too, the truck kept automatically putting it in jack mode on its own

 

[thefsm93]

We are starting back up for the day

 

[thefsm93]

End of day update, I'll keep this one short. We are all tired

It turns out where we camped last night was a fairly popular road, so off-road traffic started waking me up at 5am. By 6am I gave up trying to sleep, and decided to run the few miles into Ellensburg to recharge and stop in at Les Schwab. Figured it was a good use of time while everyone else slept.

When I got to Les Schwab in Ellensburg the technician was confident we could patch it. 15 minutes later he had it all patched up and it held air, so I'm back to having a spare and can confidently proceed. I want to give a huge shout-out to the technicians there. Very friendly, helpful, and eager to help. To my amazement, they even patched it for free (I tipped the tech, he deserved it).

After getting back to camp, and packing up all of our soaking gear we reviewed the wildfire closure maps and Section 3 was closed. I came up with an alternate route, and it was incredible! Had a fantastic blend of smooth roads, rough rock crawling, and rough roads. Best part was the incredible views on the route. I'll attach the GPS tracks, and I might even send them to the people who created the original tracks to have as an alternate route!

During that I conquered an awesome hill climb.

Anyways, it's late here and I need to get to sleep but we averaged about 628wh/mile. We started section 4, and we are about 20 miles outside of the Jungle. I'm excited to see how it goes

Goodnight all!

 

[thefsm93]

We heading to the Jungle!

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