Tag: Rough Stuff

Off-road mud adventures with boston bike share…

Take BART -> Fremont. Bike to Alviso. Ride for hours on levees, around salt evaporation ponds and in-progress-of-restoration wetlands habitats, past trains and abandoned buildings in an alien landscape. Jackrabbits and egrets galore. Ride on to Caltrain, completing a full circle of the Bay. ...

A ride to the ocean for espresso, toast, and coconut with friends, taking some off-road trails through parks for variety: ...

This almost feels like a video game: bike through the mud directly under a large metal tank marked “flammable” suspended by an unmanned crane.

a little mud

This where-am-I-going? path through the woods led to a €10 hostel (Stayokay Dordrecht) w/ showers, wifi, bar with 7 interesting dutch beers.

I think I need to go left here. Good thing I have wide tires.

I heard about Soil Saloon a while back – a renegade cyclocross race (held at a different secret location each time– this one involved 6 laps around a 1-2 mile “course” of narrow off-road dirt trails, with roots and rocks to dodge and mud and puddles to splash through … oh, and a local beer to drink after each lap). Some people have photos on flickr. A few of us dropped by at the end of a morning city ride to watch it– and then impulsively decided to join, even with our non-ideal bikes (I at least had my heavy touring bike, unlike my friends who had narrow-tire road bikes). ...

10 of us rode from San Francisco to Montara this weekend, stayed the night in the Montara Lighthouse youth hostel, then rode back. I’ll post a full map and photos later (edit: Ok, the SF->Montara ride has been posted) – to start, I’m just posting photos of Old San Pedro Mountain Road, our detour inland from Highway 1. From Short Bike Rides San Francisco (where I read about this route) “San Pedro Mountain Road is the old alignment of Highway 1 before Devil’s Slide was built.” It’s now closed to cars and overgrown, a mix of pavement, broken pavement, dirt, and light mud (still doable without a mountain bike, though). Some people in the biking community call it “Planet of the Apes Road”– not that it’s *that* decrepit, but once you know it used to be a road for cars, you can imagine you’ve come across a collapsed civilization. ...