This is not exactly a very interesting ride on its own, not to mention the fact that it's a road ride. It is, however, a stretch of road that is very popular with road bikers in the South Bay and a significant component of many long road rides that start in the valley and snake through various parts of the Santa Cruz Mountains. So, it couldn't hurt to have it listed on this website, especially when it's so easy to throw in by doing it as a quickie ride on a weekday morning before work.

This is a post-rain ride that I got to repeat over a week ago, on a road bike. Considering how well the ride option is known in its local area, I found it worthy of inclusion on the website so that more riders may become acquainted with it.

The ride might make more sense as a regular workout ride for locals (though it's not a very strenuous workout) than a ride that riders from other parts of the Bay Area should come over and try once. Still, it does hold a few points of minor interest. (See the text.)

This past weekend, Robert Louis Stevenson State Park became the latest North Bay location at which I've prepared a new ride for this website. The ride itself doesn't offer much to advanced mountain bikers, however it offers almost "cartographical" vistas, especially from the summit, and if you can use your bike to get there to see them, then why not? I think that's enough for this ride option to qualify for representation on this site.

I've really gone overboard with the ride material this time, when it comes to documenting the views available from the peak. Some of the photos for this ride include labeling to indicate what some of the points visible from the peak are, and there is even a secondary photo set (from an earlier visit) that includes zoomed-in and enhanced photos to better show some of the most distinct geographic targets that may be spotted on a clear day. It's probably not surprising that I've felt the urge to do these, when you consider that lines of sight can reach as far as 190 miles from this peak.

There is also one special significance of this ride option: I'll treat this as the northernmost point I'll consider as being "within the Bay Area" when representing ride options on this site. That doesn't mean I'll never feature ride descriptions here that are farther from the bay than Mount St. Helena. In fact, I'm already preparing to introduce an additional "Surrounding Areas" section to the site that will cover really distant rides that couldn't reasonably be considered to be "in the Bay Area". (I should be able to make the first few such rides available in a few months' time.) But, it's just that this ride will mark the northern boundary of the existing "North Bay" area on the site and of the main list of "all Bay Area rides".

I had received a reader comment in response to the original Tilden ride on this website that some of the more fun biking trails in that park are actually in the southern half of the park. Even without that suggestion, it was obvious that this first Tilden ride listed here was completely excluding anything in this lower portion of Tilden. I've been meaning to catch an opportunity to do a ride in this portion of the park for quite some time, in order to see it for myself. This weekend, that opportunity presented itself. The product of this is now listed on the site as a second Tilden Park ride. It's not a ride that I've felt I've been missing out on for all this time, but I am glad for having tried it out. These are some fairly good trails right at the doorstep of a large number of East Bay communities.

It had been a while since my last ride at Skeggs Point. So, when we had another weekend of ideal riding weather a couple of days ago, it wasn't a bad opportunity to fix that. And, while I'm at it, I made sure that I repeated the route of one of the existing Skeggs ride descriptions on this site so that I could add photos. "Suggestion 4" was one such ride, and it's one of the better Skeggs routes represented here. So, I've now remedied this popular ride's lack of a full photo set as well as its lack of a geotagged photo map.

In addition, I did a couple of minor tweaks to the route itself. This route originally used to follow Sierra Morena Trail initially from the park entrance, before turning onto Methuselah Trail to cut through to the beginning of Manzanita. That portion helped in adding a short distance on the nice Sierra Morena Trail to the ride, but also added a fairly pointless fire road descent and ascent on Methuselah Trail. That's now out. On top of that, the route now turns left at the southern end of Manzanita to take Crosscut Trail along the way (because, why not) before it heads down to Giant Salamander. I think both of these are genuine improvements to the ride experience.

The weather last weekend provided me with the opportunity (quite an excellent one, actually) to try out a relatively recent "discovery" for the first time. Rancho Cañada del Oro is one of the newer (and smaller) parks of the South Bay. While the trails are too new and smooth to satisfy the urges of hard-core riders, they're still fun in their own way and the landscape is simply gorgeous. On top of that, you get some very wide views worthy of sitting and meditating over, near the highest elevations of the ride. This all adds up to a ride option that all local riders should try at least once. I'm definitely coming back here during the months when the grass will be green.

This is another "quickie" option. That's what allowed me to put it together for the website by doing it on a weekday morning before heading to the office, during a week that has been pretty wet, which made me look for easy road ride options. It's still a pretty well-known loop option for its area; known enough to be represented in at least a couple of unrelated printed guides. Perhaps more importantly, it's situated where there are several options available for extending your ride, whether you're doing this on a mountain bike or road bike. So, I've been meaning to have this route added to the site for quite some time now. And here it is.

This one is actually a pretty simple route (and another road ride) but it's such a well-known biking option in the Peninsula that not having it represented on this site would constitute a shortcoming. For that reason, I threw this one in as a quickie last Wednesday morning before going to work. I couldn't do the entire route that I meant to (all the way to the Crystal Springs Golf Course) due to a temporary road closure, but the ride still succeeded in amazing me with the almost spiritual vistas presented by the reservoir lakes in the near-dawn hours when I rode there. (Check out the photos.)

I had learned about the existence of this park in the first half of 2010. Between catching a spot in the required orientation session, remembering to book it, and picking a date that would work for my usual riding buddies, it took me this long to be able to try out a ride there. I did the ride yesterday.

I can see why most riders recommend Willow Creek. While it's not exactly a mind-blowing ride location, in an area that's not exactly known for the choicest trail networks for mountain biking, this is a "mighty fine" ride option. Those of you who are not from the immediate area are very likely to return home satisfied after a ride at Willow Creek, if you can stomach the driving distance to get there.

I feel pretty good about including this ride on the website. I hope it'll help make this place more popular among the mountain bikers of our region.

I've been wanting to ride Oat Hill Mine Road for quite some time now. It's therefore a bit sad that, when I finally came around to it, I not only made the novice mistake of not checking trail closure information in advance and ended up doing the ride on the last weekend of the annual closure of the portion of the trail that's beyond the junction with Palisades Trail, but I also attempted the ride with not enough time left to get even to that junction. As a result, the ride route I've been meaning to make available on this site ended up being much shorter than a normal Oat Hill Mine Road ride.

However, I'm not going to let that stop me from adding the ride to the website. I think it will still be worthwhile to provide the location, parking, and the GPS track of at least the beginning of the full ride, not to mention an admittedly partial photo set to show what can be expected.

I loved the ride, by the way. The climb is manageable enough to be a juicy challenge, and the descent is a pure blast! This one is definitely not to be missed.