A new twist on the Saturday ride

So I’m starting to get a hang of living out here and I’m slowly getting more familiar with my surroundings. Saturday I was able to get out for another bike ride, it’s really kind of sad to realize that I used to easily ride 15 hours a week, now I’m lucky to ride for 3 hours. Though I’m also starting to wonder if I could even ride that many hours in a week at this point, my fitness seems to be taking a beating sitting on my ass as much as I do.

But this week I found a pretty good listing of local mountain bike trails on the web. Looking around I found a few that were within a reasonable distance, sadly I mean driving distance. But just the same I packed the bike into the back of the Prius, which has a surprising amount of room when the seats are folded down, and took off to Crystal Cove state park.

Now I should say that riding out in hills of SoCal is rather different than doing mountain biking in Minneapolis or Edmonton, first of all there are hills...my god are there ever a lot of hills. The trail I took just started going uphill and kept going that way for what I would have to say is far too long. I can only imagine how the dad and his little kid felt, I passed them as they were walking their bikes, this was about 3 minutes into my climb, I didn’t stop climbing seriously for about 20 minutes. Then it seemed like there was an endless series of short descents followed by longer and steeper climbs. Have I mentioned I hate hills?

The other difference is that there really aren’t any trees. It is after all a virtual desert, so despite all the imported palm trees and manicured lawns (watered nightly) the real SoCal environment is dry, sandy and dusty. Oh and hot. There were signs warning people to bring extra water on the trails. Because without any trees there really is no shade so no escape from the heat. So needless to say that losing a full water bottle from my cage while on the longest, fastest descent sucked ass. Oh yeah, the other bottle was empty.

The other thing that is different is the wildlife. Sure deer and foxes are the same everywhere, but it’s the non mammalian wildlife that had me a bit more concerned. It seems that this is pit viper country, you know, rattle snakes, diamond backs and sidewinders. So when I found myself off trail in an area with a lot of short dead vegetation, at the base of a valley, the realization that my cell phone was still in the car was not very comforting. I didn’t see any snakes, but I wasn’t pleased to need to walk uphill part way. You think that paying $10 for parking at a state park could get you some good trail signs and fencing.

So I learned that I really prefer mountain biking without the hills, risk of venomous attack and potential desiccation. But somehow I think that twisty, forested single track and only worries of deer ticks is part of my past. Eventually I’m sure I’ll begin to embrace mountain biking out here, though that won’t likely be until my fitness improves to the point where I don’t have to get off my bike; because I don’t think I’m ever going to get used to the idea of being killed by a snake.