Backbone and Chiquito Rides with Thomas

Since I just started the blog, thought I should go back and recap what was one of the best months of riding ever for me. Four weekends in a row of epic Socal springtime rides on some great trails. Three of them were new or partially new.

The first ride was on the Backbone Trail in the Santa Monica Mountains between Mesa Peak and Encinal Cyn road. This is an awesome stretch of about 28 miles of pure singletrack (14 miles one way out and back), that I try to do about once a year, preferrably in the spring. I've ridden it a couple of times in the past with Mario (now Super Mario, the racer) and with a couple of others. This time I went with Thomas, my friend from Switzerland. Thomas and I are very like-minded when it comes to mountain biking.

We both like long rides with plenty of climbing and some nice technical singletrack. This ride had plenty of both. About 4000-5000 feet of climbing and almost all singletrack. The highlight of the ride for me was playing on the rock formations near Corral Canyon. But there was plenty of other fun including some great, fast singletracks and plenty of challenging climbs. The weather was absolutely perfect- about 70 degrees and sunny. It just doesn't get any better than that- or does it?

The next weekend, Thomas and I went to ride a trail in the Santa Ana Mountains called the Chiquito Trail. It starts across from a little candy store on Ortega Highway. This is an extremely challenging trail, especially for us since we chose to climb it up to the top where it intersects with the San Juan Trail (another great trail). From there we had a few options, depending on time. It is 100% singletrack, very rocky and some sections have to be walked when climbing, but not too many. It had rained the day before, but the trail was reasonably dry due to it being mostly sandstone. But my pedals were gunking up a bit. At about the 5 to 6 mile point, the trail descends down a technical section into a very cool canyon (Lion Canyon, I think) with a little waterfall and rocks that are poular rest spot for hikers and bikers. We took a break there, then headed up to San Juan. At that point, we ran into tons of bikers that were doing downhill-only rides on San Juan (ugh). We decided, due to time constraints, that we continue up to the top of San Juan, which was about 2 miles up, then retrace our route. The return route was really fun down to the rest spot. Then we had to climb out of that canyon. I figured it would be pure hike-a-bike, but it turned out to be pretty rideable. Unfortunately, I stalled a lot and my pedals were gunked. Not a good combo, and I fell into some rocks a couple of times and got shredded a little. After we made the top of the canyon, it was all downhill to the car. Thomas took the lead, but he soon had a little crash. Not too bad, but he hurt his ankle and lost his mojo a bit. So the rest of the descent was a little cautious, but really fun. Next time we do it, we will bring some pads. As we were loading up our bikes, it started to hail on us.