The trails I left unsampled at Rockville had been in the back of my mind pretty much since my first ride there in 2008. It took me until yesterday to arrange to go there for a second ride. Although yesterday's ride ended up being another short ride there (only seven miles), I managed to try out most of the remaining trails at Rockville that I wanted to see. This ride reinforced my impression that this place is worthy of being one of the top ride options for advanced riders in the Bay Area. I only wish it were easier to reach for me.

You'll notice that I've labeled this newer ride as "Suggestion 1" despite the fact that there already was an existing Rockville ride on the website. This is because I think the newer ride follows a more desirable route and because I expect most people to check out the "first suggestion" for a ride location first. I'd rather have those viewers start by seeing the better ride option of the two. I retained the older ride instead of replacing it completely with the new one only because the old one includes a few trails that the new ride doesn't cover. So, the old one is retained but now demoted to being "Suggestion 2" for Rockville. This is despite the fact that the order of multiple ride suggestions for the same park on this website is not normally based on desirability.

After last weekend's muddy fiasco at Fort Ord (see below), I went back there this weekend determined to do a proper Fort Ord ride. I'm glad I did. The weather was pure perfection. The trail conditions were also pretty good, with most trails apparently not yet back to their maximum levels of sandiness.

Since part of the reason for the ride was so that my riding buddy who'll be participating in the Sea Otter race in a couple of weeks can get some training in and re-familiarize himself with the race course, we followed this year's Sea Otter XC race course on this ride. This is different from the original Fort Ord ride I listed on this site, which was the course used up to 2010. That made this weekend's ride a variation that's worth being listed on the website as an additional ride option. The original Fort Ord ride on the site is therefore retitled now as "2007 Sea Otter course", because that's the year in which I had done that ride.

Yesterday, I got to do a road ride on 17-Mile Drive. Unfortunately, it came about as a result of another ride plan ending up in a fiasco. Originally, yesterday's plan was to ride the course of the cross-country race in the upcoming Sea Otter Classic, because my riding buddy will be participating in that race. However, I had so much trouble getting my bike through the muddy trails that we had to abort and turn back after the second mile. The mud piling up on my seatstays and front derailleur was causing my rear wheel to lock up and was resulting in repeated cases of chain suck, so much so that I couldn't see myself struggling through another 18 miles of riding under those conditions. I had thought the ride would be feasible since Fort Ord is known to be okay (actually even better than normal) for riding after rains, but I suppose you hit a limit when the rains had finished only six or seven hours before the start of your ride, and were coming on the heels of a particularly rainy week.

Nevertheless, I used this opportunity to update the sole existing Fort Ord ride on the website with additional directions for finding your way from the parking spot to the trailhead, as well as a caveat about the limits of the suitability of the trails for wet riding. I also added to the photo set a handful of images I shot around the beginning of this ride, which should especially come in handy when figuring out the way to the trailhead.

Looking for another ride option to do in the area, I wasn't willing to risk it with any other trail ride (it was only because we'd be riding at the rain-friendly Fort Ord that I was willing to ride trails so soon after rains anyway), so we did a road ride on 17-Mile Drive instead, albeit on mountain bikes. This had been a ride idea sitting in the back of my mind for the longest time. I had never come around to doing it, because it's not such a superior bike ride in its own right that it would be worth the long drive for me to get there. Having ended up there for another reason therefore became the ideal excuse for doing this ride. Plus, the weather was great for it: while very windy at the coast, it was at least sunny. Meanwhile, the scenery of this ride route is simply beyond reproach.

The photo set for this ride didn't have any images from the side loop over Borden Hatch Mill and Grabtown Gulch trails, because its photos were taken from a set I had shot for the other Whittemore Gulch ride, without this side loop. When I repeated this ride last weekend, I used the opportunity to take pictures on this side loop to complete this photo set. These new photos are now grafted onto the existing photos of the ride, shared with the other Whittemore ride, and I've also added the missing geotagged photo map of this ride along with that.

I also took this opportunity to expand the description text of the ride. This is one of the oldest rides I've listed on this website, and like some other such rides, its description was quite sparsely worded by my current standards. I've now tidied up the text of both rides at this park and added more description of the trails' characters.

Got to repeat the "Suggestion 1" ride at Skeggs this past weekend. That allowed me to shoot a complete set of photos for the ride from scratch, because that ride used to lack a geotagged photo map on this site. It now has one, in addition to a fresher and more complete photo set.

The ride route also saw a tiny change. On the way up Timberview Trail toward Manzanita Trail, the route now follows the more roundabout way of taking Crosscut Trail and reaching the junction with Manzanita from the other direction over Timberview, rather than simply following the shorter but steeper direct route straight to that junction. This adds an extra little bit of fun riding to the ride without any additional elevation gain.

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.