Bill O’Neil and I met for a cruise through Aliso and Wood Canyon Park in Laguna Hills of Orange County today. My last ride out here was cut short due to a mechnical so today was really my first time seeing the majority of the trails in some number of years. I found it amazingly depressing how bad some of the trails have been widened with go-arounds that seemed to be at nearly every minor obstacle. The Cholla trail for example is just a complete mess compared to a handful of years ago. I wish people could just check their ego and get off and walk the stuff they can’t ride instead of making or taking the go-arounds. (I know preaching to the choir here)
Here is a shot at the top of the Rock-It trail. Plenty of go-arounds here as well. This was a mighty fun descent (following the original lines). Once down Rock-It we worked our way over to Mathis. My memory of the steepness and length of this climb has been dulled over the years. It was quite vividly refreshed today as it took quite a bit of gruntage to get my Intense UZZI up this climb.
Once up to the top of Mathis we continued up along the ridge fireroad to “Top of the World” This was a good place to take a breather and enjoy the views of the Pacifc and Laguna Beach. From here we went back down to Mathis and picked up the “Car Wreck” trail.
This was my first time on this trail and it was quite a bit of fun. I managed to not get any pictures taken of the technical bits. The picture above is just after all of the technical bits along with the namesake remains of an old vehicle. This trail feeds right into the Oak Grove Trail. A pretty section of trail.
The next trail we hit up was the Dripping Cave trail. There were some nice tree lined bits as well as some short grunt working climbing in the direction we were going.
We farted around a bit at the at actual dripping cave
Some of it was just downright photo posing. It was right about this time we thought we heard the sound of tiny bubbles trying to escape from finely crafted brown glass bottled far off in the distance. We set out to investigate the sound and found the offending bubbles (in my truck). Ballast Point’s Sculpin IPA and Mission Brewing’s Dark Seas Russian Imperial Stout were tasty accompaniments to post-ride chit-chat. Another NON-Bad day to be on a bike.