The California Overland Adventure and Power Sports Show returns to the Fairplex in Pomona on October 24 and 25, running 10am to 5pm both days. Organisers describe it as the biggest edition yet and expect 15,000 to 18,000 people across the weekend. Children under twelve get in free, and there is an early-bird price on the show's own site.
The floor is broad. Overland rigs, slide-in and towable campers, roof tents, recovery and storage gear, e-bikes, and a substantial power sports presence covering ATVs, UTVs and adventure motorcycles. Falken, Forest River, Triumph, BMW, Westin, Harley-Davidson and Polaris have exhibited alongside the overland builders, and the Cal 4x4 Association, CORVA and the state and national park services have taken stands as well.
For anyone in Southern California weighing a camper or a rooftop tent, this is the most efficient weekend of the year. Sitting in forty campers in an afternoon and talking to the people who built them settles questions that no amount of specification reading will, particularly around headroom, door placement and how a pop-up actually behaves when you are tired and it is dark.
It is a trade floor rather than a teaching event. There are no driving courses and no classroom track, so go for the hardware and the conversations rather than for instruction. Bring the measurements of your truck bed and your payload figure; both come up constantly and neither is something you can look up on the stand.
The same organiser runs shows in Sonoma and San Diego on other weekends, so check you are buying tickets for Pomona specifically.
Up 234 acres since yesterday morning. Containment holding at 15 percent, personnel steady, and the park's closure list unchanged.
Perimeter as mapped on Sep 25. 4,129 acres. Outdoor Unc, drawn from NIFC perimeter data and USGS geographic names (public domain). Schematic — not for navigation.
The emergency order that closed the Chilnualna Falls trail ran until 11:59 last night unless extended. It was extended. The park's own conditions page this morning still lists the Ostrander Lake Trail and everything south of it as closed, along with Chilnualna Falls and the routes toward Buena Vista and Crescent lakes, with the closed area running east of the Wawona Road between Chinquapin and Wawona. No new expiry has been published, so treat it as open-ended.
The fire is at 4,029 acres on the latest interagency mapping. It was 3,795 yesterday morning and 1,177 a week ago. Containment is holding at 15 percent with 789 personnel assigned, down from 840 earlier in the week — the first time that number has fallen since the fire started on September 15.
None of that is a reopening and none of it is containment. It is a fire that has run out of the easy ground and is now creeping in country crews can partly work. The 2017 Empire Fire footprint it burned into is doing some of the work, because a nine-year-old burn scar has less to give.
What has not changed: every road in the park is open, there have been no evacuation orders at any point, and smoke remains the part that reaches most visitors, with periods of unhealthy air around Wawona and into the Valley.
The two pilots killed on Sunday are still the story that matters here. The investigation by the FAA and NTSB continues and no cause has been released.
Everyone is watching the Dome Fire, so two ordinary closures are going unnoticed. The trail between the wilderness center and Lembert Dome is shut for construction, with an alternate available. And a trail along the Merced River is closed on weekdays through December for bridge work, which means a midweek trip and a weekend trip are different trips. Both are on the park's conditions page, below the fire notice where nobody is reading.