I’ve biked to the Santa Cruz / Capitola / Watsonville coast a handful of times, but this is my new favorite route from San Jose (BART or Caltrain), using the one-lane, often-empty Mountain Charlie Road:

Most routes I’ve seen start the same:

  1. Take the Los Gatos Creek Trail from San Jose to Los Gatos (mostly paved, with some mild gravel bits and one very short but steep bit of gravel as you approach Lexington Reservoir)

  1. Cycle around the East side of Lexington Reservoir on a beautiful paved and low-traffic Alma Bridge Road

  1. Turn onto Old Santa Cruz Highway, a scenic two-lane road under towering redwoods. There’s some traffic on this but it’s generally fairly chill.

From here, there are many possible routes. This version involves turning onto Mountain Charlie road for some uphill, and then the payoff– the quiet, narrow, slightly bumpy ride down on it, with occasional open views or clouds of mist depending on the weather.

I then turned onto Bean Creek Road (also very scenic downhill with light traffic) and Glen Canyon Road (slightly faster/busier downhill but still very reasonable to bike), with just a few blocks of busy Scotts Valley road traffic in between. From there, the route depends on where in Santa Cruz you’re going.

Here’s the route, about 43 miles and 3000’ of climbing: https://ridewithgps.com/routes/54530790

I also took some video while riding to try to capture the vibe of the route, I’ve quickly edited it together here: