MTBGuru blog

Last friday there was a full moon and Halloween was approaching: it was time for some craziness.
Enter the Henry Coe Moonlight Madness ride! Our plan was simple: leave at midnight, ride through the night on Coe’s best trails, arrive at the Hunting Hollow parking lot early in the morning, in time to greet the big MTBR gathering that would take place that saturday.

The full moon lit things up quite nicely but we had to make good use of our combination halogen (helmet) and HID/LED (bar) lights to make it through the night and the often eerie and dark descents in the remote wilderness (for Bay Area standards at least) that Coe is even during daylight.

We didn’t run into too much wildlife, except for some deer, and lots of toads on the trail. We got pretty beat by this ride and the often brutal climbs, and dawn came as a great relief. It re-energized us and inspired us to do a last tough climb (Serpentine) such that we could zip down the fantastic Middle Steer ridge descent. Stats: about 37 miles with +8000 feet ascent.

A month after the big fire Coe is recovering and still an awesome place to ride. Perhaps we should make this Moonlight Madness ride a tradition, every last full moon before Halloween…

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What beats riding Moab?

Riding more Moab, and this weekend the participants of the 24 hours of Moab will get to do plenty of that. The course - a single lap - is shown below. Here are GPX and KML files.

The GPS track is based on the Google Earth image overlay provided by the Granny Gear website, combined with DEM data we got from the USGS to generate the elevation profile.

One lap is a good 14 miles with about 1400 feet of elevation gain. In 2005 someone was able to do 18 of these in 24 hours - totally amazing.

During the race last year we were in town to witness rather apocalyptic conditions: there were enormous downpours during the night - this year we unfortunately won’t make it but we’re looking forward to read the reports.