Trail riding

With the wet season mostly behind us in the Bay Area, and drier this year than most, my attention is turning to trail riding. This summer I'll be picking up a new 29er frame in the UK. While collecting parts for this project, I'm increasingly daydreaming about forest rides, and yesterday I had a chance to act. I stripped the fenders off my Peugeot in order to make way for fatter tires. 55 mm IRC Notos were perhaps 2 mm too wide, so I settled for 44 mm Mythos XC tires. I headed out from Alameda through Oakland streets using the 37x15 gearing, heading for the bottom of Joaquin Miller Rd. An online preview had piqued my interest around trails riding in Joaquin Miller Park, an Oakland city park I often ride past while riding up Butters Rd and Skyline Blvd. There's an apparently out-of-date map on the web. I printed it but didn't take it along, believing a ranger hut near the entry to the park would have fresh ones. But I entered the park from the back side and missed the hut, riding up the very steep access via the bottom of Sanborn Dr. instead of the top. Huffing to a stop at the Nursery plot, I asked for advice from a volunteer who was tending the gardens. "Do you know the name of the nearest trail?" - I asked, hoping to re-orient myself. "Do I?!" came the response, "I've hiked every trail in this park with a GPS device to generate a new map." And she had a draft printout in the shed that I was allowed to take with me, a map with much helpful detail. Switching to 37x18 gearing via the flip-flop hub, I set off on a loop on the Sunset Trail, then N on the Bayview-Sequoia Trail, hike-a-biked down the Chaparral Trail, and finished near Lookout Point with a view across the Bay. I had great fun. It was excessively sunny as I left Alameda, and I worried that I was overdressed, but halfway up the hills to the park the fog rolled in. It would have been cool under the trees but for my level of exertion. The Bayview trail was the highlight, following the contour halfway between ridgetop and creek below, fully in trees with occasional peeks across the bay. On my way down the steepest bits I was passed by a mountain unicyclist riding a very fat tire and accompanied by his two dogs. He rode down trail sections that were impassable on bicycle and challenging on foot. When he stopped to rest he drew an interested crowd, me included.

I'll be coming back to explore more trails in this hidden gem.