MTBGuru blog

It’s the time of the year to make plans… as in MTB race plans. Someone posted a great calendar of mountainbike endurance events in the US on MTBPath. As it’s so handy, I’ve inserted it in an extended post, in slightly reformatted version. Follow the link below to make the jump.

When I find myself suffering through these endurance races, I often can’t help but think how much more fun they were during the planning stage, so I’d say enjoy them now! Though after they’re done they generally tend to turn into great memories…

This calendar focuses on the US, but I know there are plenty of amazing events organized all over the world. The Grand Raid Cristalp for instance is one I’d love to do some time…

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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…

Technorati Tags: Henry Coe

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.

They call it the Lick Fire but to me it’s the Coe Fire, as it’s raging in the middle of Henry Coe State Park, one of my favorite riding areas in the Bay Area. (The area around the Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton on the other hand is untouched by the fire.)

The whole South Bay has been covered in a smoky haze for the past few days, and on occasion the air is smelling of burnt oak and pine. This time of the year (fall), the sky is usually very clear instead.

The haze and particles in the air create spectacular orange and red sunsets and sunrises (see photo below). I’m pretty bummed though, as more than likely a good deal of trails and riding area will either have been flattened by fire trucks or closed indefinitely for restauration. Not to mention the tons of ash and dust that will be all over the place. Vegetation should be back in good shape after a (hopefully) wet winter - there will be some more open meadowland than before, as the fallen trees obviously won’t be back any time soon.

Pictures, maps, renderings of the fire in Google Earth and reasonably up to date info can be found on this discussion thread on mtbr.com - there’s even a firefighter/mountain biker chiming in once and a while…

Technorati Tags: Henry Coe, Lick Fire

That E100 was something else. Read here more about the gorgeous trails, the Spiral of Pain, the Aspen Labyrinth and how I’ll need to revisit this one…

Next saturday the Endurance 100 Solo, aka the E100 is on in Park City. Organizer Boris Lyubner’s tagline is ‘mind over mountains’ and promises to deliver ‘100 miles of technical, alpine singletrack’ - needless to say this has made be quite enamored with this event and a couple weeks ago I finally decided to sign up. We’ll have to see how my mind deals with the mountains, as it will be my maiden offroad 100-mile race. The course looks great - 90% singletrack, not too much fireroad - but intimidating.

This is how it looks like in Google Earth:

A profile with teeth!

There are 5 ’stages’, the 100 mile race consists of stages 1, 2, 3 (times two), 4 and 5 (the latter two are in fact also two laps of the same loop). Follow the links to check out the separate trip pages we created for the stages. And here is the overall 100 mile course (embedded map below). There’s also a 50 mile (stages 1, 2, 3) and 100 km event (1, 2, 3 and 4).

Needless to say, you should check out the official website to get all the latest info if you consider signing up. See you in Utah next week if you do!

This weekend I went up to Tahoe with a plan: circumnavigate the entire lake by bike, on trails, as much as possible.
Bikes are only allowed on parts of the Tahoe Rim Trail (TRT) and some sections on paved road would be unavoidable.

I’d try to do it solo and unsupported (except for Starbucks breaks), in a day-and-a-half, and I wanted to camp out in the wilderness so I’d need to lug quite some stuff along. My original route proved to be a bit over-ambitious, but I did manage to close the loop, as the below map attests! (didn’t have much choice, actually…)

It was tough but a great and rewarding experience - only noticeable really after it was done ;). Read the full report, download the GPS track or check out many more photos on the trip page.

Highlights are too many to summarize here - ‘gorgeous singletrack with equally gorgeous views all the way’ would probably do it. A truly memorable trip, and if you take some more time than I did, you could add the Stanford loop, the Mount Rose section of the TRT as well as the Punisher to Big Meadows and Christmas Valley towards the end, to make it an all-encompassing best-of-Tahoe trip: over 100 miles, good for two or three days of epic riding.

Soquel Demonstration Forest, aka Demo Forest, is definitely one of our favorite local riding spots. Though it does take some determination to get there these days: it’s located in a remote spot in the Santa Cruz mountains and to to drive to the traditional starting point (coming from San Jose) one needs to negotiate a section of road which has almost completely been wiped out by a landslide - because of this, a part of Highland road is officially ‘closed’, though no one pays much attention to this fact. One of these days the road will probably disappear completely - just think that the probability that it happens while you’re on it can be considered to be pretty small, unless you’d be hauling a semi truck over it or so. Another concern is the occurrence of car break-ins at the parking spot, in particular on weekdays, when there aren’t much people around.

No problems whatsoever this Saturday though - only bliss and happy faces. The fantastic singletrack (Ridge! Braille! etc) was responsible for this but also the excellent folks of Trailhead Cyclery in San Jose who put up another one of their great ‘Demo at Demo’ events. Riders who showed up were able to test ride Yeti’s, Intense, Ibis and Specialized rigs. I took the occasion to give the Intense 5.5 29er a spin, a pretty sweet ride indeed.

A bike shop that goes through such efforts (hauling all that stuff into the middle of nowhere and staffing it the whole day) to please the local bike enthusiasts can only be recommended - thanks again THC!

On the photo below, some Demo candy of yesterday… more on the trip page!

It looks like it’s the month of Henry Coe: this weekend is the official Backcountry Weekend, in a couple of weeks the opening of the new entrance at Dowdy Ranch will be celebrated during a ROMP/MTBR/IMBA Coe Epic weekend on May 12-13, and Tom Stienstra from the San Francisco Chronicle recently wrote a column about Coe and the opening of Dowdy Ranch.

Henry Coe State Park is the Bay Area’s backyard wilderness and it’s a dream of a mountain bike destination - at least if you’re the type that likes to throw in a bit of adventure in your bike rides. The Backcountry Weekend is sold out (due to overwhelming interest from both hikers and bikers, the park set up a lottery and ticket system, to limit the amount of campers in the Orestimba wilderness area), but the ROMP/MTBR event on May 12/13 is open to everyone.

Thanks much to ROMP and IMBA for the great work they’ve done in the park, building trails and tirelessly campaigning for access here and elsewhere - please support these organizations!

Technorati Tags: Henry Coe, mountain biking

Last friday I got this message from a bike friend:

He was planning on doing a ride with a few folks in Henry Coe State Park the next day, and the 10k from the picture was referring to *10000 feet of climbing*.

Henry Coe is notorious for its steep trails, and 10k feet of climbing in over 40 miles sounded like… a good challenge, though of the rather nightmarish kind.

It turned out to be one of the greatest and toughest rides I’ve ever done - the Durango race was perhaps a bit harder but that was mainly because of the weather conditions and altitude. Some of the climbing on our ‘Kitten ride’ was brutal and relentless and we had to hike-a-bike more than we’d hoped for. A lot of the downhill on the other hand was fantastic and my Yeti was great on this - though a bit heavy and with a non-ideal gearing for the steep climbs (largest cog in the back only 32 teeth), it was coasting like a dream on the rollers and felt awesome on the fast, winding descents. The two thoughest climbs, Mac’s Corral and Vasquez, felt like they would never end though.

As per Jeff, a very nice stretch of the legs indeed!

Route below, and here are links to the trip page, to a thread on MTBR discussing this ride, and to a gallery of pictures including ones not found elsewhere.

Henry Coe by the way is listed as one of IMBA’s ‘epic ride’ destinations.

(This is a bit of a cross-post from my personal blog.)