Rockville Hills Regional Park might qualify as one of the well-kept secrets of mountain biking around the Bay Area. It's not a large park, but it features more singletrack trails than it does fire roads, and enough of them to give you a full day's worth of riding without repetition as long as you're willing to keep weaving back and forth in the park. Moreover, many of these are technical enough to satisfy even the most advanced riders. There aren't any extended climbs, but there are plenty of short ones, so you can still feel spent at the end of your ride.

With a tight interconnected network of many short trails, it might be hard to point out one typical route to ride at Rockville. This particular route happens to be the one I picked for my first ride there. I could describe it as a short ride intended to hit a couple of highlights of the park. One of these highlights is Rock Gardens Trail. It meets the expectations set by its name. The other one is the Lower Tilley Trail loop, which didn't disappoint either. In fact, you might want to extend the latter with a second higher loop along Manzanita Trail. I didn't have the energy left at the time to include that part, though I had initially intended to.

One mistake that I made with this route choice that you might want to avoid is using Cave Trail to climb to Rock Gardens Trail. It became obvious soon after my riding buddies and I started up that trail that Cave Trail is a trail intended mainly for being descended on a full-blown downhill bike. The steps and steep turns along the way really only leave the possibility of hiking your bike uphill via this trail. Taking any other trail you see on the park map to get to Rock Gardens Trail will be preferable, I'm sure.