Trail Wanderlust
San Diego Trails
It came to my attention some time ago that the segment of the California Riding and Hiking Trail that I used as part of my Otay Mountain Loop has gotten horribly overgrown.
It was pretty faint in spots back in 2008. I have updated my page to reflect that riders may want to go around on the road. Or better yet, check out this route and take some pruning gear along on you. 🙂
It was time for another round of playing on the rocks out in Alpine yesterday. There was going to be four of us on this ride. Brian was going to start later in the day and meet us up top. Jim was joining us today and this was going to be his first excursion out here. It was an amazingly nice day out which made the climb not too terrible. After a big ride on Sunday and a really descent workout at the gym yesterday my legs felt flat for the climb up to four corners. After that point the kinks in the legs seem to work themselves out and climbing was a bit better the rest of the way up.
I ride out here a plenty and still think a bunch of this stuff is just crazy so I had forgotten just how shell shocking the first time can be out here. Jim seemed to be digging the place in “You gotta be f$%^ing kdding me” kind of way. I recognized the look and it reminded of the things that came out of my mouth during my first exposure to the technical riding of the North Shore of Vancouver BC in 2003.
We fiddle farted around on some of the features while waiting for Brian to catch up with us.
Steve messing around on the “Collar Boner” section of the “Triple Bypass”.
An Old Skool wheels on the ground line.
Jim rolling along
Brian boosting a rock
Brian working the 911 roll.
The trail was in pretty good shape and the descent back down the main trail was a blast. (Meaning No Pictures!) The Exponential Hoppiness from Alpine Beer Company after the ride was a mighty tasty beverage to enjoy while chatting up the ride and chimping pictures. There are far worse ways to spend an idle Wednesday afternoon.
Wednesday Stoke ride was going off again this week with great weather out in Alpine. Due to my own discombobulations at the trailhead, I started climbing about 10 minutes after Steve and Evan did. I tried to tell myself to just do my normal climb but I did not listen and decided to make a go of catching them by “rest rock”. I was making pretty good time hustling up the mountain but unfortunately for me it was unsustainable and about 2/3rds of the way up I cracked and went into cardio meltdown. I was bit of an energyless mess for the rest of the climb and the start of the descent.
Calm winds = excellent flying conditions
Evan on the 911 roll
Steve got himself a flat on the descent which gave us some time to enough someof the great light of the “magic hour”
It was the day before Valentines Day so Steve was practicing his puckering up skills!
After the flat tire delay it was back to downhill funnage!
Here is a special contribution from a long time riding friend of my mine. Iron Mountain is (rapidly heading towards the “was”) a classicly technically challenging hike/ride in San Diego County). People enjoyed this trail because it was hard. Once again we have well intended but misguided people in charge listening to the vocal minority of the trail users who want to “say” they did something hard without “doing” something that is hard. There are plenty of sterile dirt sidewalks being touted as trails in the city of Poway. The city has plans for additional trails, how about putting the sparse resources they have to making new trails instead of screwing of the ones we already have.
by: Steve Gordenker
Mark and I had a chance to get up to Iron Mountain, yesterday. We witnessed firsthand, the latest round of “Trail maintenance”, by Poway parks and recreation trails manager, Bob Hahn. Recall if you will, last year, I spoke in front of Poway’s city council, sat in on parks and trails planning meetings, wrote letters, and emails, and made phone calls to city council members and the Mayor.
What a complete, colossal waste of my time.
The slow death of Iron mountain continues, at the hand of Bob Hahn.
This is towards the top, at the “Hemotoma” area. Large swath of granite removed.
Wheelchair accessable.
Ironic, no?
They dismantled the Iron Meatball.
Two military guys were hiking down Iron from the top. This poor guy slipped on the loose, powdery mess that Bob Hahn’s butchers left when they removed large portions of granite. He rolled his ankle badly and was unable to put any weight on it. With no way to walk out, his buddy had no choice, but to carry him out on his back. They were 2.5 miles up at this point.
Thank you, again, Bob Hahn, for making Iron Mountain a “safer” outdoor hiking experience, by completely obliterating all of that dangerous grippy granite.
Another iconic section of trail at the top , sanitized for your protection.
Yet another switchback section cleaned and smoothed out by Bob Hahn’s wrecking crew.
This past week I made a long overdue appearance at Steve’s Wednesday Stoke ride in Alpine. The weather was great which made the climb up to the top go pretty well.
I was playing with both my Digital SLR camera as well my GoPro Hero 3 today. This was the second outing with thing so I doing quite a bit of tinkering with mountings and camera setup.
One of the angles I really like was using the roll bar mount near the bottom of the downtube to view the front tire action. One downside to the roll bar mount was I needed use one of the extender arms on the mount to get the angle right. No matter how hard I tightened the the knob for teh extender arm. It would still sag down after some hard compressions like a landing or bigger chunk. I will have figure out some kind of secondary support strap or something to use this angle much.
My Canon 7D DSLR can also shoot HD video so I played around with shooting video with it. It will be interesting to show how the whole video editing workflow is going to pan out with multiple formats and frame rates going into a single project.
I also used the seat post/handlebar mount for a rear facing shot. I did not use an extender arm for this mount as the angle looked good.
The “good” angle was based on the seat post being up. Once I started going downhill and play in the chunk I lowered the seatpost and found that I was unable to get the camera angled up enough for my liking with too much of tire being in the frame and not enough view behind to keep from chopping off the head of a rider behind me.
For the main run back down the trail I had the side mount for the helmet on. The trail conditions were pretty freaking awesome that begged you to stay off the brakes.
Early this week I got out for a lunch time ride out at La Costa. The weather was nice and you good see Catalina and San Clemente Islands out on the horizon. 
I got a GoPro Hero3 HD Black Edition for Christmas and it was high time that I tested it out. Other than some futzing with it on the couch this was my first time rolling with camera. I decided to go for a side mount on the helmet for this test. I slapped the curved sticky mount on about the right looking spot and stuck it on. I was also using the double hinged adapter that came with the kit. The kit also came with a WiFi remote but I did not even break that out on this test. Instead I used the GoPro app on that I installed on my Android phone to control the camera. The cool thing I like about the app is that it allows you to preview the angle you have setup instead of guessing or having to buy LCD accessory for the GoPro. Right off the bat I’m rather impressed with the video quality and I’m sure it could be made a bit better some some of the advanced settings I have not tinkered with yet. Of course there is no way to get image stablization with this setup but overall this thing is nice enough that and maybe another one are going to make it into the video equipment stable. Oh yeah…tighening down those little adjustment knobs is highly recommended. Here is a short completely non-fancy clip.
Time to catch up on some photos that have tried to get lost over the last few weeks in a smorgasbord of work, holiday parties, family visits and a cross country road trip (non-biking..but some intel was gathered). A few days before I headed out to the east coast to start all of the festivities, I meet up with some of the SDMBA folks and Leslie Kehmeier, IMBA’s Mapping Specialist. Noble Canyon is one of IMBA’s Epics and Leslie while on a Southern California swing wanted to refresh the information of Noble Canyon and check out the trail for herself. Mark (SDMBA’s USFS Liason and Board Member) had put together all of the logistics together for the ride and a great day out in this awesome area soon followed..
The route that was put together for the day was a point-to-point route from Red Tail Roost in the Big Laguna Recreation Area, down into the Big Laguna Meadow proper and then onward to drop Noble Canyon.
Leslie is an avid photographer and was sporting a DSLR along with a couple of lens. I know first hand what a pain carrying that gear can be sometimes and she was carrying around more stuff that I normally do. Here is Leslie getting some monkey action on to get the shot on the Gatos Ravine trail. Some of the pictures in this post are from Leslie.
Los Gatos near the top
Big Laguna Meadow has brown up for the winter but it is certainly still pretty. At the time of this posting, the meadow is most likely covered in snow.
Mark working the “Stairway to Hell”
A shot by Leslie of me on “Stairway to Hell”
Leslie working through the chunk of “Extra Credit”
Mark riding the “Roman Wall” near the bottom of the trail.
With my various travels over the late summer and fall I have not spent too much time riding in the usual SoCal spots. Home was home base long enough last week to allow for a bit of playtime out at one of the usual haunts in Alpine, Anderson Truck Trail.
The weather was pretty freaking awesome for December with perfect temps and great winter afternoon light.
I always find it interesting how the rocks look bigger upon my first return out here after some time away from the place. I was quite happy to stick to two-wheels-on-the-ground play for the day. Whenever I ride while on work trips I make a point to not push my technical limits as the last thing I want to do is have to make a phone call to tell my boss and tell him he needs to fly someone halfway around the planet to take over for me because I jacked myself up out on the trails. All this riding well within my limits makes jumping back into the pushing your limits in the technical arena a bit of a mental adjustment.
Steve of course was up to his usual airbourne antics.
Brian was sporting some air time himself.
With the shorter days we finished up the ride with a only a handfull of minutes of daylight left in the day. It was nice to be back on some local tech stuff and catch up with some friends I had not seen in quite some time. I am pleased to report that the beers at Alpine Beer Company still are mighty tasty.
So after getting back from Japan on Monday, I got in some quality time with my youngest son Jake on Tuesday and Wednesday. The boy has been growing like a weed and was in need of resizing/refreshing some of his hockey gear. HockeyGiant.com has a large store in Anaheim so a shopping outing was added to the day’s to-do list. The San Clemente Single Tracks (aka “The Weedpatch”) was right along the way so a pit stop in order. There a couple of ways to get into the area and we parked off of Cristianitos Road. This is real popular place for the local surfers hitting up Trestles to park so we looked like the odd men out without a surfboard in tow when we headed out.
We had not started out our morning planning on going for a ride so I had made the breakfast equivalent of a extra large all-meat pizza comprised of eggs, toasts, grits (the real all-natural stone ground stuff) and copious amounts of thick-cut applewood smoked bacon. (Just for the record, all-meat pizza itself a breakfast food group!) While breakfast had been mighty tasty we were still pretty stuffed when we started pedaling. Jake had kicked my ass on the climbs during our last outing but that was not the case today. My youngest buck soon learned that one of the skill sets that Dad honed while obtaining his official old guy qualifications was the ability climb hills with a belly full of bacon.
One nice thing about this area is that even when you are climbing there are plenty undulations here and there that break most of the climbs up. Bacon burps on the climbs and smiles on the descents was the theme on this outing. I always enjoy all the flowing swooping goodness out in this area. The trails conditions were also good out today. My favorite time out here is in the spring when everthing is green but there was nothing to complain about with it today.
We did about a 15 miles of trails out here before loading up the bikes and continuing on up to Anaheim to beat up on Dad’s wallet at the hockey store. Another good day out a bike made even better by spending it with one of my boys.
A wad of short blonde hair going in 27 different directionsu nearly buried under a pillow was all that could be seen of youngest son, Jake’s this past Sunday at 6:30AM when I went to wake him up. 13 year old boys are not fond of this time in the morning and he fully looked the part of a coma rattled teenager when I rousted him out of dreamland. We were headed out to Laguna Mountains for a different kind of bike ride.
A few week ago a good friend of mine Cliff Walker made an unscheduled dismount from the ride of life. I can’t use the word “close” and “dear” without feeling some sense of guilt. Cliff had lots of friends who were much more involved with his day-to-day life than I. Cliff was one of my “MTB Buds”. One of those friends that you primarily assoicate with while mountain biking. We have done a couple of road trips and races together as well as many rides and some epics together. A solid good person you just a joy to be around.
Jake and I were headed to the Laguna Mountains to join some of Cliffs other friends for a memorial ride. Twenty-nine riders gathered up to take a spin around Big Laguna Meadow and honor Cliff’s Life.
The ride was timed to end at about the same time that some of his family and no biking friends could gather up as well to celebrate Cliffs life. The gathering swelled to over 70 people who sit under the shade of the meadow’s pine trees to share and tell stories about how Cliff had touched each of thier lifes in some way. Cliff had a very diverse group of friends and the stories about Cliff I had never before really showed just how impressive a life he lived and how he had touched so many people’s life in a positve way.
There was more than a couple of stories that included Cliff’s perpencity to be the first person up the hill. More than a few of us recalled getting up to the top of the hill to find Cliff walking around in circles looking under the various bushes and behind the trees. Once we questioned Cliff would look at you with this devilish smirk and reply “I dropped a hammer have you seen it?” It was always good for a laugh and the celebration of his life gathering was no different. A special thanks goes out to Chip Brent for making the celebration event happen.
Afterwards, Jake was down for just a father/son ride. The memorial ride was just along the meadow and he had not down some of the other trails in the area before. We decided to add Wooded Hills and Los Gatos Ravine into the mix. A pretty significant event happened on the Wooded Hills climb. Jake was riding strong and then you decided to see how quick he could go. I saw him lift the pace and I was having a tough time matching it. It was not long before kicked up the pace enough more.
I saw the half-sly turn his head to see how far back I was. That was his moment. The moment when a Son knows he is beating his Dad something. Not just something, but his Dad’s thing. He knew he had me and he was not letting up. I knew he had me too, I was not going to catch him, the best I could do give a good showing for second place. I was weird mix of pride in my Son and a relevation that I’m slacking. Sure I could make excuses and rationalize things like the fact I weigh about 90lbs more than he does and I did a respectable climb after a couple of beers at the celebration but no matter who you slice it my son kicked my ass up that hill. I got to the top about 45 seconds behind Jake and he was already off the bike with his helmet off and was hoofing and puffing. After a bunch of praise from me, he looked a me with a very smirky look on his face and calmly said, “Yeah, I dropped a hammer. Did you see it?”
