I caught an opportunity to repeat a variation of this ride yesterday. The description of this ride originally had only six measly photos. Naturally, I've used yesterday's ride to produce a full photo set for it.

Yesterday's ride also included a side jaunt down to Grey Whale Cove Trail. I liked it a lot. While I haven't modified the ride route shown on this website to include that portion, I did add one extra paragraph that now describes this option as a potential extension (or alternate) of this ride.

A full set of photos for this ride had been waiting in the pipeline for the last few weeks and I finally got a chance to add them to the site this weekend. I've also taken this opportunity to make a few tweaks to the ride route; namely, the section on Loggers Loop Trail is now out and the descent from the ridgetop is now via Live Oak Trail rather than via Honker Bay Trail. This makes the ride a little shorter and easier, and arguably makes it a closer approximation of the "most common" bike loop at Lake Chabot. While I'm at it, I've also extended the description of the route by a few more sentences.

This ride is in relatively new park lands about which I've been informed relatively recently and I've been meaning to try a ride here ever since I heard about it. Finally got the chance to try it out last weekend. It's not a ride that's likely to rank near the top options across the entire Bay Area, but it's a better ride than many in the immediate vicinity and it's a decent option when you're looking for something different.

I repeated this ride yesterday. There were quite a few changes. I've now updated the description and photos to reflect these:

• There are now a couple of spots on the road portion of the ride where the road is reduced to a single lane and access is controlled by traffic lights. This seems to be for some bridge (re)construction.

• One spot on the trail just before the Monte Bello Open Space gate is washed away in a slide. Access is still possible, though, by a shortcut that bypasses it.

• What I used to call "the big dip" (shortly after the first creek crossing) now appears to be permanently closed. Trail traffic is diverted to the short bypass trail that's been there as an option all along.

The other thing that was noticeable during this latest ride here was how much more water there was in every creek, stream, and rivulet throughout the ride, since I did it only about a week after the end of a weeks-long rainy period. This included the first creek crossing of the ride. I had never seen it with that much water before. It was deep enough for my foot to dunk in the water as I pedaled across it.

Those of you who may be checking this page once in a while will have noticed that I haven't been adding new rides or updates these days as frequently as I used to just a short while ago. It's not because I've lost interest in adding content to the site or because I've only been repeating existing rides lately that are already well-represented here. The reason is that I haven't been doing any rides at all for over a month because I'm trying to heal a strained hamstring. It had already been giving me grief for a few months before I prescribed myself this rest period and it finally became clear to me that "working it off" was not going to happen.

So far, the rest seems to be helping a lot, though progress has been slower than I had hoped. Currently, it appears that I still have weeks to go before I'll have enough confidence in this muscle to start biking seriously again. And that's only if I won't experience any setbacks along the way that extend this process further.

Meanwhile, I'm as willing as ever to resume fleshing out this site with new rides and better information on existing ones as soon as I am able. There are a lot more rides to cover around the Bay Area, even including some very well known ones, in fact.

So, stay tuned...

I've added a search feature to the website. I've used Google's ad-supported custom search feature for this. You'll be pestered a little by the inclusion of a few ads on the search result page, but that doesn't change the fact that it's just as effective as any search solution in pulling any matching page within the website that matches the keyword(s) you've used. It also means that it took only a couple of hours for me to throw in the new feature and that users of the site will now have a much quicker way of finding information on a particular trail name or location in which they're interesed.

My ride yesterday repeated the Redwood Regional Park ride described on this site as well as a subset of the Joaquin Miller Park ride also described here. I've used this opportunity to take a set of photos for the Redwood Regional ride (which originally had precisely two photos) and of the portion of the Joaquin Miller ride that overlaps with the ride listed here (which originally had no photos). These new photos are now added to these two rides.

I also noticed that they have a new sign at the entrance of the parking lot that I recommend on this site for the Redwood Regional Park ride. This sign says "Roberts Regional Park". I initially thought that this might be because they changed the name of the park recently, but then I realized that there is actually a small park between Redwood Regional and Skyline Boulevard called "Roberts Regional Park" and this parking lot is technically closer to that park. I've now added a few sentences to the description of the Redwood Regional ride that explains this, just in case.

The other thing I noticed in person for the first time during this ride is the rerouting of the Big Trees Trail in Joaquin Miller Park. I remember reading about this on the MTBR.com forums but this was the first time I saw it myself. The route and GPS track I have available on this site dates from before this trail change. I wasn't able to record a substantial enough new GPS track in Joaquin Miller during this latest ride (that'll have to wait until another time) to be able to replace the older track here, so my old outdated route remains unchanged for now. I have, however, added a paragraph to the Joaquin Miller ride description that explains this (including a link to that MTBR.com thread).

At the same time, I removed some language from the Joaquin Miller ride description that warned against entering hiking-only trails in the park and explaining that a portion of my ride through Big Trees Trail may have done this inadvertently. However, the newest map of the park shows much fewer trails as hiking-only compared to an older map that I used to have, and Big Trees Trail is not one of them. (I'm not sure it ever was.) I've also updated the original park map link now to point to this newer PDF park map.

I did a ride at Morgan Territory for the first time this morning. Naturally, I've now added a description of this ride to the site.

While the ride holds little interest purely from a mountain biking stand point, the remoteness of the location and the beauty of its nature are bound to constitute enough incentive to some riders for a "nature exploration by bike". Sadly, I had the misfortune of having all views from the high vista points along the ride completely obscured by some morning clouds that persisted until the end of my ride. However, my riding buddies and I still saw enough promise in this ride location to resolve to come back when the weather is clear, and preferably during the season when the grass is green. That should make the setting of the ride incomparably more gorgeous.

This was another ride I've been meaning to do for a long while. Until recently, there has always been a reason to postpone it. It was either that the weather was too hot, or that I was too out of shape, or that some other ride plan proved more convenient for my riding buddies. Things finally seemed to line up yesterday and I jumped on the opportunity to do it with one other regular riding buddy of mine.

The forecast used to called for cooler weather when we initially picked the ride than it did by the end of last week. But we went ahead anyway, hoping we could get through the worst of the climb in the cool of the morning. That part worked pretty much according to plan. The heat of the day (in the low 90s) really only hit us in the last mile or two of the ride.

Despite having to walk much of the steepest parts of the climb (or perhaps because of it), the climb to the peak didn't seem too hard. The challenges posed by the lone singletrack on the ride route and the numerous treacherous spots on the steep descent were the main (and unexpected) difficulties instead. Still, it was a pretty rewarding ride overall.

I've finally caught an opportunity to ride at Annadel State Park. I should have done this much earlier. I found out that I'd been missing out just as much as I thought I was. While this is only my first ride there, and I'm sure I'll be returning for many more, I just had to use this opportunity to add a description of this ride to the site. Annadel should easily rank in the top three in the list of best mountain biking destinations around the Bay Area, even by the most conservative criteria, so I'm glad to have finally closed this glaring hole in the coverage of my website, too.

I've finally done my first ride at Skyline Wilderness Park in Napa this morning. This was one of my long-overdue places to be tried in the North Bay. (The remaining ones are Annadel (still!), Boggs Mountain, and Oat Hill Mine Road.)

I loved it! There were plenty of technical spots along the route that far exceeded my skill level. Still, I found more challenging trail features here (barely) within my capabilities than I'm usually able to find in most (maybe all) other rides in the Bay Area. I will most certainly be going back many more times.

Did this ride last Saturday and I've now added to the ride description the big set of photos I've taken during the ride this time. There used to be only three photos I had available for this ride. So, this much bigger photo set should give everyone who hasn't yet been on this ride a much better sense of what to expect.

One curious thing I noticed about China Camp this time is about the parking. It had occurred to me after my preceding ride there before this last one that I had gotten into a habit of always parking on the roadside when going for this ride, possibly upon seeing, since my first time there, that that's what most people do there. However, China Camp is a state park and, like all state parks in this area, parking in its parking lots is subject to a day use fee. My policy at state parks is to make a conscious effort to park in the paid parking lot, in order to help the park system monetarily a little bit, since I don't do any volunteer trail work or anything to contribute otherwise. So, last weekend, I took a close look at the booth at the parking lot entrance near the trailhead for this ride. Sure enough, it mentioned a $5 day use fee. However, the booth was empty and there was no self-pay mechanism to be seen anywhere. I'm not sure why that is exactly, but this might explain the popularity of parking on the roadside instead. So, I suppose China Camp will be an exception of my policy of always parking in the paid lot at state parks, from now on.

This is a ride option that's at the "farther reaches" of the East Bay. It's in an area where there doesn't seem to be too many other mountain biking options. So, while this is not necessarily a ride that might serve as a riding destination for riders from other parts of the Bay Area, it's likely to be a valuable local option for people in the immediate area. There are plenty of trails (enough to string together into day-long rides) and the terrain is beautiful, not to mention the interest that the historic sites in the park would hold for anyone who is interested in history. It's just that all the trails are well-manicured fire roads that don't hold much interest for mountain biking on their own.

This ride is "from the archives". I'd been meaning to add it to the site for quite a while but hadn't gotten around to it. It should help a little bit in fleshing out the coverage of the site in the Upper Peninsula.

Another new ride that I could qualify as little known and possibly little understood. On the whole, its characteristics seem to be very much like those of Henry Coe (general type of terrain, frequent hike-a-bikes, climate, etc.), except for sheer scale. It's not even that much farther than Coe in drive time. So, you can almost think of this one as "Coe annex".

This is a fresh one. I did the ride yesterday. This was only my second time riding this route, and I had had to leave it unfinished on the first time due to time constraints.

I have to say that the ride surprised me. It had more technical challenges than I anticipated. The trails were more technical than I expected, though it was in a manner that is different from what I'm used to: Instead of hill-side singletrack with tricky roots and rock gardens, these were rutted and eroded climbs and very bumpy flat and narrow trails across grassy plains. Add on top of that vistas of rugged bluffs and wind-beaten open meadows, and you end up with an atypical ride for the Bay Area that is uniquely rewarding in its own way. Any Bay Area rider should try this one once.

I did a ride at Skeggs Point this morning and got to take a bunch of additional photos. I've therefore updated all six suggested Skeggs Points rides currently described on the site with some new photos. Some got only a couple of additions, and some got many. Ride descriptions that include one or more of the trails I used this morning (mainly El Corte de Madera Creek, North Leaf, and Methuselah) got the highest number of additional images, naturally.

I've recently revisited the Russian Ridge ride and taken plenty of additional photos to add to the ride photos posted here. The number of images for the Russian Ridge ride is now 72, instead of the earlier 5.

I've added a large number of new photos to the Arastradero ride. There were originally five photos for that ride. Now there are 47.

The other thing that's new is the status of some trails at Arastradero. When I did this most recent ride there this morning, I noticed that a number of singletrack trails were graded to widen and smoothen them. I've added a paragraph to the ride description that points this out, so that anyone planning a ride there in the near future knows what to expect. Not that there were any significant technical features on any of these trails that are now gone, but riding on newly widened fresh trail soil is just not the same thing as riding on an "aged" singletrack.

Another thing that I saw there for the first time during this same ride was a warning sign about "aggressive territorial coyotes". You'll see it in the new photos, and I added a mention to the ride description, as well. I don't think any mountain biker is at any risk, but it's something that might be good to keep in the back of your mind for the next time you encounter one of the coyotes of Arastradero, which were never really shy to begin with.

The first thing that's new is this "What's New" page on the website...

It's been roughly a month since I opened up this site to public use and I noticed that, as the list of rides listed on the site grows and the number of newly added or updated rides slows to a trickle, it is becoming harder to notice, at a glance, what's new here since the last time you looked. So, in case some viewers may have already started checking the website with any kind of regularity, I thought I should save them from having to scan the entire list or map of rides to look for a new one. From now on, this page will have a new entry added any time I add content or make a substantial change to an existing ride.

With that in mind, I should also point out that the most recent addition to the site before this "What's New" page was the Stevens Canyon ride, which I had added yesterday.