A Hot, Long Ride on Toad Day

Yesterday was the Warrior Society's Toad Festival, which I did not attend. The Toad Festival is named for the toad that the Sierra Club uses as an excuse to close Maple Springs road for six months out the year during toady mating season. Actually, it may have been conjuered up to keep over-zealous developers from cutting a major highway through the canyon and over or under the Santa Anas at that point. Anyway, the ironic thing is that the toad festival route does not include Maple Springs. The route is up Holy Jim to Main Divide over to Trabuco Trail and down. It's not a race, but more of a fun event for intermediate and better riders with lots of prizes.

Anyway, like I said I didn't do that ride but I wanted to do something that day. So I saw a post from a young kid named Kipp who is a serious rider. He is training for a 24 hour race (solo!) and was considering a 35-mile, 7200 vertical foot ride on the northern section of the Santa Anas (north of the Toad Festival). Notably, it did include Maple Springs road, home of the dreaded toad. Another rider named Mark also signed up with a 7:30 start planned.

As I was driving up to the start at the end of Mojeska Cyn Rd, I noticed the clouds starting to break up. It has been cool all winter and spring so far, and all week had been cloudy at least near the coast. But skies were blue in the Santa Anas on Saturday. Nice for views, but it promised to add to the heat factor. I loaded up about a gallon of Gatorade and water and we started up Harding Truck Trail. The ride up Harding was pretty uneventful, although there was less shade than I recall from past rides, maybe due to the time of year. It took about 1:45 to get to the top of the 9 mile trail/road.

After a break at the four corners intersection (where we would return after our climb up Maple Springs), we head down (and up) the Main Divide to the Silverado Motorway. This section of the Main Divide is very fast in spots and has one big climb with some loose spots. I was able to clean it, and although it was only about 80 degrees it felt hot due to some of the steep pitches.

Going down the Motorway is always an adventure. It is four mile singletrack trail, fast in spots, very loose and shaley in others. At the bottom we hit Maple Springs Rd. We took a short break, and started the grind up. We had already climbed about 4500 feet, and we had another 2700 to go. The worst part of Maple Springs is on the lower paved part, about 3 miles up, just before it changes to dirt. I started cranking, wanting to get it over with. Probably a mistake, especially since Mark started complaining a lot at that point. From there up to the top of Maple Springs Mark struggled, although his pace was OK. I had a few leg cramps, my first ever while pedaling (I've had others due to spinning a lot, then standing on the pedals on a downhill). But I was basically OK.

At the top of Maple Springs we were back at Harding with 9 miles of almost pure downhill to go. I felt good, but Mark was hurting pretty bad. So I stopped about half way down to make sure he was OK. At the bottom, Kipp had some ice cold water and apples waiting. Man did those apples taste great. Due to the heat, that was definitely the toughest 7000 foot vert ride I've ever done. I guess summer is here.

Mt Lowe Grand Tour With Thomas

Thomas returned but only for about a week, so we had to make the most of it. We decided to go to Mt Lowe on Sunday and do a a grand tour of most of the trails in the area. I had started a similar (but shorter) ride the previous weekend, but it was with a large group and I ran out of time and had to cut it short. So I was amped up to conquer the whole enchilada. The planned route was to start at the parking lot just east of JPL, ride streets over to Lake and Alta Loma, up Lower Sam Merrill ST to Echo Mt, up Mt Lowe Railway FR to Inspiration Pt, down Middle Sam Merrill ST to Echo Mt (again), down Sunset Ridge ST to Millard Campground, across Millard fire road to El Prieto ST, up Brown Mt FR to the summit, down Ken Burton ST, down/across Gabriellino ST back to the car. Makes me tired just listing the route!

The ride started out great, on a nice cool overcast morning at about 8:30. Going up Lower Sam was great. This is an extremely popular hiking trail. It climbs 1400 feet in about 2.5 miles. The trail is impeccably maintained. In fact there were two rangers grooming it that morning. We passed about 30 hikers, including a boy scout troop. After a short rest at Echo Mt, we started up Mt Lowe Railway. We snapped a couple pics of the fog below, and this is where I found out my battery was low and I somehow didn't bring the spare.

We started at an easy pace but soon started pumping harder. Before long, we were at Inspiration Pt and ready for the first reward- down Middle Sam Merril singletrack. As we were catching our breath before descending, we talked to a few bikers and hikers. I told one of the hikers our route and he warned us about the water in the creek that flows through the Gabriellino trail. He said we were in for a lot of hike a bike. We took it under advisement and headed down Middle Sam.

Middle Sam was in good shape, but it is usually pretty loose, especially on the lower part. Definitely a trail to use some caution on due to lots of exposure. After a short climb back up from Echo Mt, we descended Sunset Ridge. Sunset is fun singletrack with a lot of switchbacks with railroad tie steps. Makes it challenging! Rode through Millard Campground, crossed a creek and headed up toward El Prieto. At El P we took another short break and debated whether to put on leg warmers to guard against poison oak. Decided not to and headed down. We had a couple wrong turns along the way, but found our way down the fun, fast, twisty trail. At the bottom, took a short break before heading up Brown Mountain.

By now it was around 12:00, I think and although it wasn't a hot day, this fire road is totally exposed to the sun. So we baked pretty good for the 6 miles and 2000+ feet up. After another rest, we started down Ken Burton. Right away we could see it was really overgrown. But it was rideable and still pretty fun. At least until we started hitting poison oak. We got to one spot where the poison oak was covering the entire trail. We had to just plunge on through and hope we could decontaminate later. At the bottom of the trail we hit the Gabriellino. We immediately found out what the hiker had been talking about earlier. We had to cross the stream every few minutes, and it was 2-3 feet deep and about 30 feet wide. So we were doing a lot of slogging and dismounting. At one point we got to a spot where the trail seemed to go away from the creek, but was blocked off by a row of rocks. We didn't see any other way, so we stepped across the rocks and rode on. After about 15 minutes, we came to the end- a waterfall about 100 feet tall with no way around or down! So after determining we had no choice we turned around. At this point it was getting close to 2:30. Of course, it turned out that we went astray where we stepped over the rocks. When we crossed the creek at that point we found the real trail. 30 or 40 minutes and another 10 stream crossings later we were back at the car. On the way home, we stopped at a drug store and checked out the remedies for preventing poison oak. We each bought a bottle of Technu. At home I used it to wash up real well and now, 5 days later, I am rash-free. Quite an adventure!

Favorite Climbs

A post on STR of a guy's first successful tough climb inspired me to create this log of some of my favorite climbs. I decided to break them up by distance. I'll explain why I picked the #1 entries in each category. The steep climb on the Fullerton Loop is my favorite, because it is where I hit my all-time high heart rate one day when it was muddy. Always tough.
The #1 medium/lungbuster is Meadow. It's got a few very technical switchbacks that make it tough to clean. The top 1/3 is relentless and its about 700 feet in a mile. That whole Aliso Wood park is full of those kind of climbs...


My favorite long climb is Holy Jim. It is sweet, smooth (relatively) singletrack and the springtime flowers are incredible. Plus it leads to either a great return trip down or over to Trabuco trail which is a great downhill, too.

Short strength/technique testers:
This is any little "wall" section of 1 minute or less
5. Steep climb on Anaheim Hills Trail between Weir Cyn and Santiago Oaks
4. "Wall" section on 7th St loop (Turnbull Cyn)
3. Dripping Cave Trail (Aliso Wood)
2. Ridge Climb (Peter's Cyn)
1. Steep climb near Parks Rd when going backwards on Fullerton Loop

Medium lungbusters (1-30 minutes)
5. 3 Bs (Santiago Oaks)
4. 3 Bs (Turnbull)
3. Big Red-Ridge (Peter's Cyn)
2. Potato Mountain (Claremont Wilderness)
1. Meadow Trail (Aliso Wood)



Long/grinders (>30 minutes)
5. Cheney Trail/Mt Lowe (San Gabriel Mts)
4. Harding TT- Main Divide TT to Santiago Peak (Santa Ana Mts)
3. Mt Pinos (Sespe Mts)
2. Indian Creek (Laguna Mts)
1. Holy Jim (Santa Ana Mts)

Southern Backbone/Santa Monicas Ride

The weekend following the Palm Canyon ride, I joined an STR group of six riders to do a ride in the Santa Monica Mountains. I had done parts of the ride before, but it promised to include some exciting new singletrack trails. It definitely delivered. Mark, a rider from the Palm Canyon ride who lives in south OC met me at my house and I drove us up to the start in Pacific Palisades- right accross from Riviera Country Club. I had been in the neighborhood before, but this was strange parking here among the $5M homes. Anyway, the group was interesting mix of experienced riders. Two singlespeeders- one on a full rigid, and the rest of us on varying XC full suspension type bikes. Turned out that I was about mid pack on both climbing and descending. The singlespeeders were strong climbers but slow to descend and the other FS riders were mostly slower climbers. Anyway, we started by climbing Sullivan Ridge, a 1500 foot ascent. At the top, we went down Mullholland Dirt to a singletrack called Farmer's that is a fun, but very exposed little gem. Then it was a short climb up to the start of the first real technical challenge called Hectic. Wow, this was really technical for me! It was essentially a streambed with huge rocks, lots of drops, etc. Very steep. About 3/4 of the way down, I lowered my seat, which helped some. Next it was up Caballero Cyn Singletrack, which is a steep singletrack climb of about 2 miles- very nice and scenic. At the top, we went over to Eagle Rock and did that loop. The descent on the back side of Eagle Rock was more technical than I remembered- fun! After that, it was over to the Backbone -Will Rogers trail. Very fun, fast singletrack. After a few miles we turned left on J-drop. This was probably the most technical (or at least comparable to Hectic) with lots of steps, steeps, and switchbacks. I did pretty well on it for me, with my seat down the whole way. At the bottom was an abandoned house which one of the guys said was a house owned by a Nazi infiltrator or something during WW2. We climbed out from there up the driveway and onto Sullivan Ridge, then back down to the cars. An awesome ride with plenty of exciting technical singletracks and good climbs.

Palm Canyon Epic - 4/2/06

After the great ride on Chiquito, Thomas had to head back to Switzerland. The next weekend, I joined a big group from SocalTrailRiders.org (aka STR) on a ride called Palm Canyon Epic, near Palm Desert. This was my first real desert ride and it was a wild one. We met at 6:30 a.m. in Ontario- a 50 mile drive for me just to pick up the carpool. It was going to be a long day. Eight guys met and we took three cars to the desert. We left a car at the bottom of the mountain outside of Palm Desert at the lower end of the Art Smith Trail, our intended final destination. We met a local rider at the lower parking area with a really clean, new bike, who had been in contact with us via the internet. He said it was his first ride..?? I don't think this computed with any of us. We loaded up two trucks and with bikes and riders and headed up to the trailhead. However, this was a not a total "gravity" ride by any means.

At the top, we unloaded and got ready to ride. Three riders were really loaded with fluids and other supplies. All of us thought we were prepared with fluids, food, spare tubes, etc. As the nine of us were just about to head down, a group of eight local riders pulled up in a van with a trailer loaded with bikes. Our leader, Tom, went to pump them for directions. We ended up all riding in one humongous group for most of the ride.

The ride started out with a series of fun up and down mildly technical twist, turns, and climbs. I was hanging near the back of the pack taking pictures. I passed two riders but after about three miles, the local rider in our group was complaining that he couldn't keep up. He stopped and decided to turn back. I didn't try to talk him out of it. This was definitely not the ride for an inexperienced rider. I noticed that my rear brake was having no effect. I chalked it up to maybe contamination from lube spray and hoped it would improve with the ride. I needed both brakes on this one.

After about 6 miles, the terrain started getting really rocky and gnarly. One of the other locals crashed hard, and had to walk out with a local hiker and her dogs. So our group of 17 was down to 15. Shortly after that, I was ripping down a really rocky, fast section and I hit a big rock. I flew over the bars and landed on the top of my helmet. My knee and shoulder also hit, and I had cactus needles in my glove. I was a little dazed and my knee hurt a little, but fortunately the head and neck were fine. I was definitely not the only one to endo on this one. There were at least four other documented cases.

The ride continued on varied terrain- sandy, rocky, up and down, through brush, until we reached a huge sandy wash at mile 11 (I think). At this point we took a good break. It was warm- about 75 degrees, and very dry. The climb up the wash was hard. The sand was packed in spots but in others it was too loose to pedal and we had to walk. About 1 mile up the wash, the local group turned off on the Hahn/Buena Vista trail. We said our goodbyes and kept climbing. I ended up walking about 1/2 mile out of the 3 miles up the wash and arrived at the top first. The others came pedalling or walking on up. It seemed to take a lot out of some folks and a couple were showing signs of dehydration and muscle cramping. Not good, as we had 9 tough miles left to go.

We pedaled an easy mile or so up to the top of the Art Smith trail and regrouped. We started down the trail. Immediately, we were in deep sand, although this time at least it was downhill. I was in the back again, and another rider back with me was experiencing really bad muscle cramps in his legs. It turns out the Art Smith trail is a series of ups and downs for the first half or more of its length. The cramping rider had to rest on every climb. He was out of water, too. I told him I would stay with him and gave him my remaining Gatorade (I still had a little water). After a while, I started worrying about how much daylight was left. A couple more riders joined us at some point and we all took our time moving on. We took a good rest at a little palm oasis and right after that I had a major problem with my chain. All the delay was frustrating, but it afforded the cramping rider time to recover. After that he was fine. We all descended the last few miles- extremely technical as it turns out- at a good pace. After recovering the cars, getting some food, returning to the rendezvous point in Ontario and driving home, it was 10:00 pm. What a day!
p.s. I found out a few days later that my back brake (Avid BB-7 mech disc w/only 200 miles on it) had failed. The caliper shaft had sheared. So I rode this entire ride with front brake only. Oh well. Got it fixed under warranty.

Five Oaks and A Thousand Sagebrush

My brother and I went in search of Five Oaks this afternoon at Aliso Wood park in the OC. We had the sketchiest of directions: "take the first street uphill from Canyon Vista park". OK, so we did. Came to a park and saw a steep trail uphill toward the water tank (see pic at right). A guy was there walking his dogs. He thought there was a trail up around to the left of the tanks. So we went for it.

At the top, we started looking for the trail. We went up onto the top of the ridge and down a trail we later found out was Bong Drop. Very steep and ending in 10 foot drop. We weren't up for that, so we lowered our bikes down. From there, we couldn't really find a trail so we ended up bushwacking betwen thousands of sagebrush until we got to a fire road that went back up to where we started. Went down the little singletrack and street back toward Canyon Vista Park, when we saw two riders going up to Five Oaks. This time we followed them and they showed us the entrance. It was unmarked, although in hindsight the trail is easy to spot on the ridge.

Anyway, turned out to be a really fun downhill (see pic at left and below) Went up Rock It, Down Lynx, then up and down Cholla to finish the ride. A few scrapes and ticks from the bushwacking, but all in all a great ride. And I'll definitely never forget where the entrance to Five Oaks is.

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.

STT-Old Camp-Luge Ride with Gap Jump Fun

Rode today with 5 of the STR guys from South OC. Matt, Kip, Dell, Lance, and me. Matt and Kipp are both really strong riders and are still in high school. Lance is in his 20's and Dell in his 30's, I think. Anyway, it was really hot today when I left work at 3:00. I think it was upper 80's, which was a bit of a shock to the body after such a cool winter. On the ride, the start up from Cook's Corner on Santiago Cyn Rd wasn't too hot, but on the STT it was getting pretty hot for a while. We get to the first "bonus side trail"- an uphill that looks long and steep, and Kip says "follow me". So I do, and the others don't. Hmm... Anyway turns out to be a definite leg burner, which Kip cleans, but I come up about 20 feet short. Anyway, the downhill on the other side is pretty extreme, but doable and fun. We catch up to the others pretty quick. Matt was riding a rigid singlespeed and was going strong to the Luge. On the steep climb up just past the Luge, he stopped or something and we never saw him again. Turns out he rode home and is OK.


We hammered it pretty hard up to Old Camp clearing. Kipp is really strong and I couldn't quite keep up, but almost. Lance came a few minutes after me. Dell decided to rest and enjoy the view a few miles below. I nearly lost it coming down on a little twister in one of the bush tunnels, but pulled it together with one of those emergency saves. As we were about to head down the Luge, Dell and Kipp started talking about jumping the gap near the top. Dell takes the first attempt with me and Lance watching from below, off the trail but not too far down (can you see it coming?). Dell clears it with room to spare, but lands at an angle. Before I can think, "He's going to hit me", he does! Lucky for me he hit square on my tire and I get away clean. Unlucky for him, he flies off the bike and does a nice roll. A few scrapes and sore shoulder. The fall freaks out Kipp so he passes on the jump. Going down the Luge, Dell crashes again- lost his mojo and this time gets a flat. He decides to walk down. So we change the tire at the bottom and ride out. There's one little grunt climb just past the bottom of the Luge. I usually clean it, but the little grunt at the beginning of the ride when I followed Kip takes its toll and blow up. Oh well. We cruise back down to the cars just as the sun sets.

A few days later, Dell rides the same trail and does the jump again- this time someone took pictures. One of him sizing up the jump (note the intense expression!) and another of him clearing it: