Ride for Charity Ends Charitably for 2 Who Escape Crash Unhurt

The sun was shining brightly atop the chaparral-covered Santa Ana Mountains when Eddie Castro of Sunnymead eased up to the starting line in Ortega Oaks campground Saturday morning.

He and navigator Glenn Sharp of Pasadena were competing in their first four-wheel-drive road rally--a 35-mile jaunt over the tortuous, rugged roads of Cleveland National Forest to raise money for the March of Dimes.

The two were still enjoying the drive a couple of hours later, Sharp said, even though they had descended into the thick layer of clouds that shrouded Orange County and western Riverside County for most of the day.

Then things got really gray. “We went around a turn, coming down pretty fast from a long, straight area,” Castro recalled. “The turn was a lot sharper than I expected and I hit the brakes.”

But his Toyota truck skidded in what other drivers coming through the turn described as a “soft, silty area” of road, flipping over a berm and leaving the two men in a slightly uncomfortable position.

“We were hanging upside down from our shoulder straps,” Castro said. “But I was determined to drive out. There was no way I was going to wait until after dark for somebody to pull us out.”

After righting the truck--with the help of a tug from another team’s Jeep--Castro and Sharp made some repairs and hit the road again, minus their roll bars, a rear window and a little bit of dignity, perhaps.

Despite being passed by nearly two dozen trucks, the two were still cheerful when they saw the official race timers through a shattered windshield at their final checkpoint above Tin Mine Canyon.

“Nobody was hurt,” Castro said, “. . . except the truck.”

At a post-rally barbecue in Corona, the pair was nearly as surprised as the teams that sped passed them to learn that their finishing time was the third closest to the target of 2 hours, 48 minutes set by race officials.

The Sandak-March of Dimes Celebrity 4x4 Rally raised about $7,500 for the Inland Counties Chapter of the March of Dimes, said Jim Wright, a professional off-road racer and president of Sandak Footwear Inc. of Corona.

Individual teams, led by Vance Blair of Riverside, raised as much as $713 from their own sponsors.