This is a rare case. I typically don't act this quickly to post on this site a newly opened trail. (Crockett Hills is the only other example I can think of that comes close.) The peak of Mount Umunhum was officially opened to public access only last Monday. Having done a ride there yesterday, here I am posting it on my site on the very first weekend that it's open to the public. I was motivated to do this partly because this was such a long-awaited opening, and partly because there is also a brand-new, 3.5-mile singletrack trail (okay, "multi-use" trail) in the mix that I couldn't wait to try. You can read the rest in my description of the ride. Suffice it to say that this one is virtually guaranteed to become one of the classics among South Bay mountain bike rides.

I'm labeling this entry as an "updated" ride, though, in one sense, this change is a bit like a "new ride" addition as well, because what I've added to the "Mount Diablo (Walnut Creek to South Gate Road)" ride today is a standalone page for the shortened version of that ride. I'm not considering it truly a new ride since it's not listed on its own and is linked only from the page of the longer ride instead, and since it doesn't feature a full text description. However, it does have its own GPS data, maps, stats, and photo set.

The reason I found this worthwhile is not only the fact that I think this shorter version of the ride is good enough to deserve stronger representation, but also the fact that the most recent time I was able to do this ride was in the extra-lush conditions of the early spring that followed the super rainy winter of 2016-2017. While the full ride's photo set was also shot during the green-grass season, that was in a drought year and the greenery was, therefore, not at its best. So, I took the opportunity of my recent ride to shoot a full photo set of this variant of the ride. I feel this additional photo set of the ride's shortened variant will serve to demonstrate the full extent of how pretty this landscape can get at the right time. On the flip side, I did this new ride right on the heels of the worst of the winter's cow damage inflicted on at least one trail segment and when that stretch of trail hadn't had enough weeks to dry out after the most recent rains. For that reason, part of the Briones to Mount Diablo Regional Trail looks like a quagmire in this new photo set. Just know that the trail surface there rarely gets as bad as some of these photos show.

It's been a while since I added a new Bay Area road ride to the site. (Not counting The Geysers ride for a moment, since that's in the out-of-area ride list.) The wine country is an area rich in excellent road ride options. My coverage here of those rides has been weak so far. I aim to remedy this and this new ride should be of help in that regard. This is a ride that would be my top recommendation so far to anyone who's primarily after a ride through vineyards. I expect this ride to be a fairly popular option because it fulfills this requirement while requiring fairly low physical effort and relatively little interaction with busy traffic.

I've given the Saratoga Gap ride a thorough refresh. The photos of this ride used to date from 2010, around the time when I first launched this site. I can't promise to refresh the photos of each ride on this site that gets to be seven years old. However, Saratoga Gap Trail has also undergone some sanitizing trail work late last year that completely changed the nature of the trail for most riders. Keeping the old photos up after that would have been a bit misleading, even if it might have carried a whiff of sweet nostalgia. The ride's overall popularity added to that recent significant change to prompt me to make this update.

The ride has a brand new photo set now. I've also taken this opportunity to expand the text of the ride and bring it up to the standards of the more recent additions to the site, rather than remaining the kind of brief, cursory description that some of the oldest entries on this site still carry. Fans of the ride might also be interested to notice that the total climb figure for the ride has been adjusted down by 150 feet now. This is how it came out on my latest ride, and I trust my current GPS much more than I used to trust the GPS receiver I had when I originally posted this ride.

I have a piece of news that, to me, is one of the most exciting updates I've ever shared on this page: I've completed the implementation of and started using a brand new geotagged photo map feature! The need for this has been one of the most nagging shortcomings of the website for me for about three years. This new geotagged map gives me a clear path to leave that problem behind permanently.

Just a little bit of back story on this: Mere months after launching this site, I had started to use an external website, EveryTrail.com, to show the locations of each ride photo on this site. This site's geotagged photo map feature was not exactly lightweight or compatible with all device types (being based on Adobe Flash) but it was very slick and had excellent usability design. Unfortunately, this site started to become frequently unavailable some time in 2014 and, despite recovering some functionality later on, it never again worked as well as it originally did. More recently, EveryTrail.com got absorbed into AllTrails.com. My geotagged maps were retained and even the original links continued to work fine, but AllTrails.com never replicated all of the capabilities that EveryTrail originally had. Finally, some time around September 2016, even saving new geotagged photo maps on AllTrails.com stopped being practical and any rides I added or updated since then went without any geotagged photo map at all. That development ramped up the sense of urgency for me of coming up with a new and more reliable geotagged mapping solution.

What I've started using on the website today is this new geotagged map solution, which is one I've cobbled together myself. This time, the feature is not dependent on any external websites or hosted services other than Google Maps. My expectation is that this will keep it working for many years to come without any further need for major change. As a bonus, the map also happens to use responsive design, making it usable on mobile devices. On phone browsers, its usability is a little hampered due to the restricted screen space, though it's still usable with a little pain. It's certainly better than what AllTrails.com does on phone browsers with its geotagged maps right now, which is to show no map at all and to merely list thumbnails of the photos.

Converting all rides on the site to use this new type of geotagged map will take some time, because a large part of the process will be a manual one. We're easily looking at several months, at least. I expect it to take a little less than the (nearly) one year that my recently completed photo set overhaul took, but it might be close to it. To start with, I added this new geotagged photo map to most of the new and newly updated rides that are dated later than the Summit Road ride I had posted last September, which was the last ride that got an EveryTrail/AllTrails geotagged map. If you'd like to see these, go back on this page to the entry dated September 21st, 2016 and look through all the new and updated rides that are listed after that one. You'll see the geotagged map when you follow the "View on a map" link on the thumbnail page of the ride's photo set.

One important note: As you're giving the new geotagged maps a try, please let me know if you encounter any bugs, incompatibilities, or scaling issues. It would be best to catch these as early as possible, so that I don't have to go back and redo too many entries. Just use the "Contact" link and shoot me a quick email if you see any problems.

This update to the site is actually a bit of a removal more than anything else. Or at least a "demotion". Until today, the two versions of the Whittemore Gulch ride route I represent here were reflected as two separate ride listings, although the two differ from each other only in a small portion of their mileage. While that used to be enough to deserve separate listing status in the early years of the site, more recently I've been showing such small variations of any ride route as merely an "alternate version" linked only from the ride description of the main ride. So, I've fixed this inconsistency now and changed what used to be titled the "Whittemore Gulch (with Grabtown Gulch)" ride into an alternate version of the shorter Whittemore Gulch ride listing, and removed it from the listing pages and ride maps.

It's not like this is such a noteworthy change to the site, but it is the first time the number of rides reflected on the listing pages on the site has actually decreased. I just thought I'd mention it in an entry here so that I'll at least have a record of when it happened.

Looking at the date of my announcement on this same page, it was just under a year ago that I started revamping the photo sets used on this site to make them more helpful (with a title on the thumbnail page and a link back to the ride page), mobile-friendly, keyboard-friendly, and simply nicer looking. Earlier this evening, I replaced the last photo set still using the old format with its newer version, completing this overhaul. These kinds of site-wide changes are a mostly manual affair for me, and I'm frankly a bit pleased with myself that it didn't take even longer than this to finish this piece of work (given the number of other things also vying for my free time and the exceptionally busy travel season I had last year). I just thought this little milestone is worth a bit of recognition here. (Yay!)

I have a couple more site-wide revamp efforts still in the works. The foremost of these aims to address what is possibly the site's longest-standing pain point: the geotagged photo maps. I now have a home-grown solution completed for this that does virtually everything I want it to do. What remains to be done on this is the mostly manual process of replacing each existing geotagged map with a new one that uses this new solution, which I expect to be another slow and incremental process that's likely to take an amount time of similar to how much the photo set overhaul took. The other big rework effort that's also on my plate is a redesign of the site's main content pages to adopt a responsive design (and, thus, make them mobile-friendly as well). I expect this one to involve more design work than manual overhaul, so it will hopefully be completed in a more wholesale fashion and it's likely to be finished before the geotagged photo map work is. So, stay tuned for those updates before too long.

There are a couple of rides on this site that were originally brought to my attention by suggestions from viewers. However, I can confidently say that there is only one ride location about which I received suggestion emails from multiple unrelated people, and that's Garin and Dry Creek Pioneer parks. I wish I could say that this was because this trail network is such an attractive one, but I can't. It's fairly obvious that the actual reason was that, as the coverage of this site expanded to nearly all parks in our area with trail networks on which bikes are allowed, these neighboring parks were among the few that were conspicuous by their absence. The reason for that absence was my low expectations of the ride opportunities in these twin parks. They were on my radar, but never close to the top of my to-do list. I finally got around to trying out this trail network late last year. I can't exactly say that the ride blew away my low expectations, but this ride locale certainly has its place on the option list of at least the local riders of the nearby area.

This first Briones ride listing on this site was yet another one of the "inaugural" entries dating back to the site's initial launch and that had been languishing here with slim content ever since. This step-child treatment was a little undeserved. This is a ride that can be simply gorgeous in the spring and is very scenic year-round, so it's a worthwhile option at least for those riders who can stomach some steep climbs. On top of that, it includes one of the two singletrack trail segments that I'm aware of in this park on which bikes are allowed. I'm happy to say that, with this update, the ride now finds the representation that I think it deserves here. It now features a full photo set that demonstrates the ride's great scenery in the area's pretty spring garb. I've also expanded the description of the ride to explain more of the experience you can expect across the different parts of the route. Perhaps more importantly, the direction of the loop is now reversed, to be counter-clockwise, so that the brief singletrack portion in the mix can be enjoyed in the fun, downhill direction.

The Corral Trail ride has been in the position of a black sheep in the family of Demo Forest rides listed on this site since I first launched the website. Arguably this is justifiable. This version of a typical Demo Forest loop gives you the least amount of fun singletrack mileage while leaving much of the fire-road climbs intact. Still, if this ride deserves to be listed on the site (at least as a gentler "introduction to Demo" option), it also deserves a little better representation than what it had until now. This update is mainly to the photo set of the ride. Before this, the ride had photo coverage only through photos borrowed from other rides, which naturally showed only the extent of the ride that overlaps with those other rides. This update gives the ride a full photo set of its own. Along the way, I've also realized that I had miscalculated the percentage of singletrack mileage on this ride. I've now fixed that too, in addition to slightly expanding the wording in the ride description that explains Corral Trail itself.

I'm sure the name of this ride will be instantly familiar to any experienced rider who has spent any time on the saddle in the Tahoe area, and possibly to some such greener riders too. Mr. Toad's Wild Ride is probably the most famous trail of advanced difficulty level in that area, as far as I know. Roughly a 2.5-mile stretch of this trail easily qualifies for a double-black-diamond difficulty rating even by the most conservative assessment. Several miles of the rest of this route can occasionally feel like a never-ending rock garden too. Once I made it through the worst drops on the trail by lugging my bike, though, I quite enjoyed the majority of this ride. While it would take a rider with quite serious downhill riding skills to give this ride its due, I think the trail is quite manageable and often very enjoyable even for intermediate riders who would not be completely intimidated by frequent encounters with tough trail features where they'd need to get off and walk. If the idea of a shuttled descent on that kind of a technical trail appeals to you, take a closer look at this.

Ever since I tried a short loop covering part of Bolinas Ridge Trail and found it to be more fun than I expected, I've wanted try a longer loop that would include all of that trail. The fact that such a loop could include Olema Valley Trail, a rarity in terms of being a singletrack of sizable length in Point Reyes that's open to bikes, was an additional aspect I looked forward to. Earlier this year, I've found the opportunity to try out this longer loop and I've now added it to the site. I'm sorry to say that Olema Valley Trail was a bit of a disappointment, but I can't say anything bad about Bolinas Ridge Trail. The most fun and scenic parts of this fire road are still in the portion included in the shorter loop I had listed before, but this extended version of the ride should satisfy those of you who approach the ride with a bigger appetite for miles and more variety.

This addition is to the Out-of-Area Rides section of the site. Emigrant Trail is likely to be on the short list of the trails familiar to any rider who has done more than just one or two rides in the Lake Tahoe area. If you're not a part of that group of people, this new listing should help you get acquainted with this trail and see the reasons for its popularity for yourself. I don't believe there are very many long trails around Tahoe that traverse open country but could still be considered suitable for less experienced riders. Emigrant Trail is one such trail, while it still has enough variety and challenge to hold the interest of advanced riders as well. This is not a trail that experienced riders are likely to make their primary destination for, say, a mountain biking weekend in Tahoe, but those who do include it in their ride plans are unlikely to be disappointed.

This is a road ride from a portion of the East Bay that, I must confess, had been off my radar until I tried this route. It did not disappoint. On the contrary, it made me resolve to explore other overlooked backroads of the East Bay hills. The beauty of the setting rivals much of what the Peninsula, Marin, or the wine country has to offer. That should make it a treasure for any cyclists who live in the vicinity. Parts of the route offer a good amount of peace and quiet as well, away from traffic as well as from too many cyclists. In that respect, this wouldn't be an unreasonable option to seek out on days where more popular routes may be too busy with bicycles, in case you feel tired of that.

As a mostly shady country road that starts from Santa Cruz and stretches for more than 15 miles with great pavement, very little traffic, and few distractions, it should come as no surprise that Empire Grade is popular with cyclists. Some riders may find the repeated steep stretches in its climb a bit less than palatable, but at least there are just as many gentle portions on the climb, too, that give you a break. This loop was my way of sampling the majority of Empire Grade while boosting variety by returning to Santa Cruz via different roads. That alternate return does add the potentially thrilling descent down the steep and curvy Jamison Creek Road into the mix, but it also forces you to contend with the busy traffic on the narrow and twisty Route 9 for quite a few miles. As I explain in the text of the ride, for those who don't mind dialing back the "variety" and "sightseeing" considerations, a simpler out-and-back ride on just Empire Grade itself might be a more rewarding alternative.

I've adjusted the route of the Mission Peak ride to comply with a trail access rule change that was made since I first posted that ride. The ride originally included Peak Meadow Trail, but part of that trail is no longer open to bikes. I was originally made aware of this fact by a viewer comment. (Thank you, by the way.) I've recently repeated this ride without including that trail and have now posted this updated version so that my ride description does not mislead anyone. The ride stats changed slightly too, since the route is a bit shorter now. I've also elaborated a bit more in the description of Hidden Valley Trail, now that the entire length of that trail is traversed during the descent of the ride that I describe. The changes aren't huge but, given the surprising popularity of this ride on the site, they are bound to be significant to quite a few people.

The originally posted version of this ride was not really lacking in any significant way. Still, I wanted to do a minor update to it in order to tweak the route to become what I would consider the ideal version of itself. By "ideal", I mean the most fun, peaceful, and scenic version of it possible. In practice, this only means two changes to the ride route: it now continues north on Stage Road from San Gregorio in order to get to Highway 1, and it also follows an inland detour via Bean Hollow Road near Pescadero around the halfway point of the loop. Both of these were suggestions I used to make in the description of the original ride anyway. It's just that they've now become part of the shown version of the ride. Meanwhile, I've kept the older, shorter, and easier route as an alternate version that's still accessible.

Three Bears Loop was possibly the biggest gap in the road ride coverage of this site until now. Given the popularity of this ride, it probably should have been listed here much earlier than most of the road rides I've added in recent times. I don't have a valid reason for delaying this, but I have a few excuses. This is a case where the ease of the ride and its closeness to me actually meant that it took me a longer time to get around to trying it. It seemed a bit shorter than a "full-blown ride", making it not always worth devoting a Saturday to, and the thought that "I could always do it when I have less available time" since it's so close to me ended up delaying it even further when that occasion with less available time didn't really materialize. In any case, the stars did align a couple of weeks ago and this gap in the site's coverage is now closed. It also didn't hurt that I could do the ride while the grass is still green and, after years of bad drought when the area's reservoirs had ultra-low water levels, that they are now back to a more natural-looking water level, making the reservoirs encircled by the ride look better in the photo set.

Calaveras Road is a road ride option about whose desirability I've become aware very recently. This 14-mile stretch of road that lies within a few minutes' driving distance from several East Bay towns is mostly free of traffic, rich in scenery, and almost completely devoid of signs of civilization and any slopes that one could consider a serious climb. I'm sure it must be old hat for many cyclists living around the East Bay and South Bay, whether ridden out-and-back or as part of a loop that straddles both sides of the East Bay hills. While the loop option must be preferable for many riders living close by at least due to its practicality, I like riding it as an out-and-back and doubling my time on it much better than doing it as a loop with half of its mileage on suburban East Bay roads. So, I opted to represent this road as part of such an out-and-back ride route as I add it to the site today, but decided to include an optional six-mile (one-way) extension that multiplies the ride's difficulty and might expand the ride's appeal to more hardened riders as well, while including clear instructions in the ride text that can be followed by the less ambitious for doing only the gentler portion of the route. If you're a road cyclist who lives within easy access of this road and you haven't tried it yet, you're missing out.

With the recent increase in the number of our weekends that are too wet for a trail ride, the proportion of the riding that I do on roads has seen a sharp rise. It looks like this trend will continue through our strong El Niño winter. While the ride I've added to the site today is a road ride, it's not one of the rides I've done due to the recent rains. This one is actually left over from last spring. This is a ride I've tried based on the advice of a book. Given the long list of road rides in the far North Bay that I have yet to try, I'm not sure I can claim that this one deserves to be prioritized over the other ones I haven't done yet. But, for anyone who can get over the one cruel climb on the ride, this is a pleasant route with a fair amount of side attractions included. I haven't regretted trying it out.

The new ride I'm posting on the site this time is not an option that would immediately spring to everyone's mind. With featureless fire roads, tough climbs, and the long drive to get there, Morgan Territory is best for those riders who are interested more in backcountry beauty than in a prime trail ride experience. I already had a Morgan Territory ride listed on the site, but that one was not from the most heavily used portion of this trail network. This one is. Plus, I love riding in the East Bay in the spring, and this ride is one that's left over from last spring, which—despite our extreme drought—was green enough to be quite pretty in this area.

In the early part of this year, I've had the opportunity to repeat this tough East Bay ride. While the first incarnation of this ride I had posted on the site included only one of the two sub-loops that I consider as making up a "full ride" through the historic core of this park, this second iteration includes the whole thing. It took me a long time to get around to it, but I've now updated the information for Black Diamond Mines with the data and photos of this more representative route. This version provides a more complete sampling of the historic sights in the park that can be visited by bike. It also doesn't hurt that this newer ride took place while the area still looked its best, covered in the green grass of spring, as opposed to the straw-colored setting seen in the photo set of the earlier version of the ride.