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, near the highest elevations of the ride, you get some very wide views worthy of sitting and meditating over. 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.

This weekend was like an early instance of the warm and sunny fall days in San Francisco. Using that opportunity and the excuse that the "Golden Gate to Sausalito" ride on this site did not have a full photo set, I repeated this ride. All of these additional photos (over 100) are now available on the ride page.

This weekend I repeated the "Braille Trail" ride described on this site. It was my first ride at Demo since I started this website and, therefore, also my first opportunity to add the long-overdue missing photos of the Demo Forest rides. So, that's what I did. Not only did I add a full set of photos to that particular ride, but I also added slideshows to the other two Demo rides on the site made up of subsets of these photos representing their portions that overlap with this ride.

I also took this opportunity to expand the ride description of all three rides. (Quite a bit of the language is common across all three anyway; since a good amount of the routes are also in common.) The route of the Braille Trail ride is also renewed; its old version used to start further up Hihn's Mill Road from a spot where the road used to be closed due to a slide. The new route starts from the parking lot in the park, representing what's arguably a more "normal" Demo ride.

Recently, I noticed that there is one flaw in the GPS tracks that are downloadable from this site. This was something that would affect users who download a GPS track from this site and upload it into a Garmin unit in order to view it on its screen. Its effect could range from an annoying additional step that is required to make the track useful (for tech-savvy users), to complete unusability of the track for this purpose (for the less-geekily-inclined among you). I've now updated all the GPS tracks available on the site with fixed versions that should not be subject to this problem. If you're not concerned with this scenario, that's all you'd need to know. Those who might have been affected by the issue or who have enough technical curiosity to want to know what the problem was may read on for the details.

The story starts with the way Garmin GPS units treat the tracks they "save". Your unit may have recorded, say, 1300 trackpoints in its track log during a ride, but it would simplify this track to something like 500 track points when you save it as a named track in the unit's memory. For those who'd want to obtain a saved copy of the original unsimplified track, the trick is to download all the tracks from the GPS. This would download all the named tracks that were saved, plus a track (or a few) named "ACTIVE LOG". That last one would have the original unsimplified 1300-point track log contents in the example above. I've been extracting and using this unsimplified track from my Garmin unit to make it downloadable from this site, so that the ride route could be represented with the highest detail level possible.

The minor problem started from the fact that I didn't rename this "ACTIVE LOG" track in the GPX files that I make available on the site. The issue is that, when you upload a track by that name back onto a Garmin unit, the device makes the track part of the current contents of the in-progress track log, rather than treat it as a saved track. This could be a problem in that (1) you wouldn't see the track in your saved track list on the unit, making it look like the upload may have failed; (2) if you were to clear your track log before starting your ride in order to record your own ride's track, you'd be clearing all the track points of the uploaded track as well; and (3) the Garmin models I've experienced so far show the active track log as a faintly dotted breadcrumb trail rather than the solid line of a saved track, making it harder to distinguish on the screen. The way to work around this is to edit the GPX file you've downloaded to make the name of the track in the file something else, before uploading it into your Garmin. While this could be easily done by any old text editor, it may not be obvious to all users, and it's still a hassle even for those who may understand what's going on and know what to do.

So, this problem is no more. I went through all the tracks available on the website and renamed the track defined in them. From now on, all of these tracks (and those of all future rides) should show up directly as a saved track on all Garmin models.

There aren't too many good beginner mountain bike rides in our area. A lot of them are either too urban, too tame, or have at least one or two climbs that are too difficult. This one is an honest-to-goodness mountain bike ride (other than being purely on fire roads and having no climbs) out in the middle of a wilderness, while still being suitable for most beginners. Therefore, this was a ride I've been meaning to add it to this website since day one. I just didn't have a good GPS track or any photos for it. Thankfully, it's a quick enough ride that I could get it in before work on a weekday morning (if I could muster the will to wake up hours before sunrise). So, that is just what I did today (finally) and the ride is now part of this website; description, GPS track, photos, geotagged map, and all...

Another update that had been waiting in the pipeline recently is a set of photos for the Old La Honda Road ride. This ride description originally included no images. I repeated this ride on a weekday morning a couple of weeks ago (as I say I do in the ride description), and the images I shot that morning now add this ride to those that include a full set of photos.