Over the Christmas Holiday we took a trip to Southern California to visit some family and do some riding where it was Sunny (Obviously this was before this cold spell down there). We visited my cousins in Pasadena and saw the very cool Gamble House and checked out the floats they were building for the Rose Bowl Parade. While there I was able to sneak a couple rides, made some new friends and hooked up with some older friends. I met up with Doug (AKA Pacman) and his son and they showed me around Chesebro Canyon. Then Al, whom I met up here in NorCal some time ago, along with Jeff and Ron showed me some really cool trails in the San Gabriel Mountains about 5 miles from my cousins house. After that we headed south to visit with my Aunt and checked out the San Diego Wild Animal Park. On Sunday I met up with Mountain Bike Bill and we rode the San Juan Trail near San Juan Capistrano. Pictures and a tiny bit of commentary here.

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I’m in bed at 12:30AM on Saturday night and my cell phone starts ringing (it’s the rocky theme song… the ringtone I’ve set for all my MTB friends). It’s Joseph the TROG. Turns out he got hooked up to demo some bikes with Francois from MTBR. They had the latest crop of 29” full suspension bikes direct from the makers and wanted some folks to come down and demo them for a review. Did I want to go? Well… shoot, what a choice. I’d planned to fly and was still a bit sore from the previous days ride, plus that meant short sleep. But how often do you get the chance to go and play on a bunch of brand new high end bikes? Sure I’m game. Read the rest of this entry »

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Mark from the Dirty Avocados Adventure racing team (Read his impressions of this ride) was having a birthday ride on Saturday. His choice for trails was the route from Round Valley regional park to the summit of Mount Diablo. The Round Valley -> Diablo route didn’t have any singletrack but since it was Marks birthday he got to make the call. The route Mark planned was about 30 miles and included about 6000’ of climbing. To make things more interesting rain was predicted for the day. More details + Pictures »

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While on MTBR I noticed a new site out there called MTBGuru.  The site allows you to upload a GPS track and your images,  it then combines the two in a nice layout with elevation profiles and a Google Earth based map with the route displayed and clickable image icons.  All in all pretty cool stuff.  Here is the MTB Guru himself giving a rundown of the features of the site.

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Thanksgiving holiday was great, I managed to get 2 days of riding in, on Thanksgiving itself my brother and I rode Redhills (Older Ride Report). It’s been a while since I’d been there and it was a blast, everything seemed rockier than I remembered it being and every bit as steep as usual. Redhills makes a great winter ride because it’s close to home and the trails have great traction even when wet.

Friday after Thanksgiving the weather was great so I flew the 206 up to Grass Valley and did a South Yuba ride with a group of guys from MTBR. Unfortunately, my camera did a horrible job and the few photos I took turned out blurry or out of color balance (I’m certain the photographer had nothing to do with it). In any case… South Yuba is probably one of the best rides you can do this time of year. It’s a phenomenal trail along the South Yuba River. Not an extremely technical trail, but a great cross country route. We parked cars at Purdon Crossing and then drove up to the Omega Road drop in which is above the town of Washington. It’s actually less driving then driving into the town and you add 4 miles of downhill riding. Last time I did this trip I took some video and a few pictures which should give you an idea of how great this ride is.

Finally, today Fiona and I flew up to Rancho Murietta and rode the Latrobe Loop (link of previous ride)... or part of it anyhow. We didn’t realize it until we landed, but right now Rancho Murietta airport is closed for all night operations. We didn’t get there until around 3:00PM so we hustled as far as we could in 35 minutes then turned around and came back so we would make certain we didn’t get stuck.

I flew low and slow (130MPH anyhow) on the way back. We cruised by the Rancho Seco cooling towers. We were so close we could almost look down the top of the cooling towers. Then we were just in time to overfly the beginning of the Stockton Lighted Boat Parade. It was a very cool perspective to see all the boats lit up from the air.

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If you are in the racing mood or if you just want to get motivated and in shape during the off season there is a bi-monthly mountain bike time trial at New Melones Reservoir.  The first event is this Sunday (November 19th) at 1:00 PM and they will have time trials every 1st and 3rd Sunday at 1PM after that.  There is no entrance fee.  The start finish line and is at the parking lot by the boat ramp.

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Recently a developer has been bulldozing trails and installing barbed wire fencing in Rockville Hills Park. For those who are not familiar with Rockville it is a small park just off of highway 80 outside of Fairfield, it’s not very big but there it is a rats warren of fun MTB trails. Since Rockville is such a small park even a small amount of destruction seriously impacts the whole park.

If you would like to get involved or just learn a little more about what’s going on there is a a citizens group called “Restore Rockville Commitee” (Link goes to Yahoo Groups) which is trying to work with the government agencies involved in the management of the park to prevent further damage and restore the park to it’s previous state. The group is meeting on Tuesday night at the Rockville Inn, please refer to the Yahoo Group for details about the meeting.

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Over the weekend I hooked up for a couple of Tahoe rides and I have to say that as great as Tahoe riding normally is it is even better right now.  The early snow we had followed by a dry weather since has made it sort of a mini spring up there.  Dust is at an all time low and even the ubiquitous sand and pulverized granite seemed much more tame than it usually is.  On Saturday hooked up with my brother from his time-share at Heavenly for a 13 mile out-and-back towards Star Lake along the Tahoe Rim Trail (TRT).  TRT is as always great, this time it was better.  The trail was sticky and much less dusty.  There were some little patches of snow on North facing mountainsides and in a few places on the trail the snow crossed the trail. Generally where it crosses the trail it was thin and melted off but a few places it thawed then refroze into a slippery ice pack.

On Sunday I met up with Gary (Finch Platte) and Johnny (JFR) for a Toads run.  We my favorite Toads route up Oneidas to Armstrong Pass trail then Gary and I took a bit of a detour towards Star Lake and Johnny who’d been chasing us the whole time just kept cruising towards Toads. We hooked back up with Johnny just about in time for the DH. Then it was our turn to try and play keep up with him.

Toads was incredible. I can attest from my position in the rear of the Downhill that Toads was exceptionally dust free. The trail was also super tacky going down Toads. I’ve never bombed down those bermed out sections the way I did Sunday. Sweet!  On a personal note, I rode more of the technical sections that I even have, and I climbed better than ever as well. All in all a personal best performance all around on the climb and on Toads.

If you can get up to the Sierras before it snows… It doesn’t get any better than this.

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