It looks like I might be the first one to post a ride report. Here it goes:
A little less than two years ago, a friend of mine and I went on, what to me was, an epic ride in the Santa Cruz Mountains in the San Francisco Bay Area. For those familiar with the area, it started at the headquarters of Big Basin Redwoods State Park, crossed a couple of ridges to get to Gazos Creek Road, followed the road to the Pacific Coast, and climbed back up to the starting point along the top of Bolinas Ridge. Something like a 34-mile round trip.
The GPS track of the ride looks like the following on the map:
As you can see, part of the track is broken and also takes a few huge straight-line steps here and there. That was the part of the ride with the heaviest tree cover, where my GPS receiver gave out. It's still easy to follow the actual route, though, by following the contour of the valley on the topo map.
To show where this area is situated, here's a wider map with the track shown on it:
The beautiful aspects of the day started with this view onto the fog-filled valleys of the Santa Cruz Mountains on our way to Big Basin park:
The ride actually started quite eventfully. As we were approaching the trailhead, we encountered a ranger truck that was oddly driving very slowly on the narrow park road and lingering in front of us. The driver eventually let us pass and things made more sense once we reached the park's parking lot. Apparently, a couple of horses had escaped from a nearby property and the owners were trying to capture them with the help of the park staff. This was happening right around 8:00 am, which is the park's opening time. So, there was hardly any day visitors around other than us.
To help corral the animals, we actually temporarily positioned our car along a makeshift "barricade" that would divert the animals into a more enclosed part of the park HQ area. The CR-V on the right is mine:
After another few minutes, the two central figures of the excitement showed up:
It didn't take much for them to be taken under control by their owners. (As you may notice, it turns out that they were one horse and one mule.)
Our ride started out by climbing over two ridges to get to Gazos Creek Road. This added up to about 1600 feet of total elevation gain, which wasn't much in the total picture of the day's ride. The total climb was to add up to about 3900 feet altogether.
While crossing the ridges, one minor diversion was going past a camp called Sandy Point Line Camp. I'm not sure specifically which type of camp it is, but one interesting sight as we were going past it (and there wasn't much visible, in general) were these teepees:
(Don't ask me what the story is about them; I have no idea!)
After doing a fast descent toward Gazos Creek Road, where some portions were actually covered in a lot of loose gravel, making fast cornering a little more exciting than it needed to be in some cases, the road actually flattened out next to the deeply shaded and gorgeous creek bed of Gazos Creek. That's also right around the area where we rode past this "local curiosity":
I don't suppose the pickup truck could've been too old. Some tires still had their air in them, and most windows were intact...
Gazos Creek Road is a very remote road that reaches far into the mountains from the coast. There's almost nothing at all along the road.
While the original idea for the ride was a loop, we had kept the option open in our plans to extend it to the coast. When we reached the paved portion of Gazos Creek Road and quickly descended to the decision point, that's exactly what we decided to do, with the "since we're so close anyway" justification. This added that little spur that's visible in the southwest corner of our loop in the GPS track. That and about an additional 5 miles of riding.
When we reached the coast and had our lunch in the setting below, that all made it worthwhile though:
That's actually not me in the photo. It's my riding buddy, Ali. (He had the good fortune of being in the better looking beach shot...)
As we set out to return, the hardest part of the ride was before us (because most of the climb was). The climb up Bolinas Ridge was initially at a steady and reasonable grade. It stayed that way almost up to the airstrip on that ridge. Probably few (even local) people know that there is a dirt landing strip right near Butano Peak (around 1700 ft elevation). It's a quarter-mile-long strip right on top of the ridge! Here are a couple of images (looking left, then right):
That little "ant" in the second photo is, again, my riding buddy Ali, returning from a recon side trip to explore that end of the airstrip. By this stage, I was already bonking, and couldn't stand the thought of covering even an extra foot of distance that I didn't have to.
After that, the trail basically started following a series of humps, which I didn't appreciate. Why can't they just carve the hills to let the trail go straight?... Each of those short climbs were painful for me to even walk my bike up.
Finally, we reached roughly the point where our turn-off point would be from Butano Fire Trail atop the ridge, downhill back toward the park HQ. We had some difficulty locating the intersection (judging by our position with respect to the route shown on my GPS screen). After a couple of back-and-forths past where the intersection should be, I noticed what looked like the beginning of a trail behind a log. Well, we've come all this way; if that was the trail, we had to take it--log or no log!
So, we did. It was a singletrack and it quickly became steep and rutted. Then it became overgrown. It was basically following the line of that section of ridgetop straight down. When we finally came out onto an "ex" intersection of that trail with a fire road below, there was another large log there, too. I only realized after returning home that I had plotted that short section of our route on my GPS over the wrong trail shown on the topo map. We should have gone another quarter mile and we would have come up to an intersection with the upper portion of that same fire road we eventually met below. Oh well! I'm not sure I've ever ridden on another illegal trail before or since.
From then on, it was a straightforward fire road descent all the way to the parking lot. And it felt GLORIOUS; after 30+ miles and nearly 4000 feet of total climb. When we reached the park HQ area, the whole place was alive with families and overnight campers who were now out an about. We just looked around and amused ourselves by contemplating how no one around us would have suspected that we had just finished a 34-mile round trip that took us all the way from there to the ocean and then back again. It felt quite nice!
Ergin Guney
guney@juno.com