Lessons of Experience

I’m remembering back a couple of years to my first mountain biking adventure in Northern California...

This is what some would consider the spiritual home of mountain biking. I was working in Santa Theresa County up in Almaden. Almaden and Los Gatos are nestled at the base of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Fox isn’t far down the road at Watsonville and Specialized HQ is almost on the way at Morgan Hill.

 

The terrain around here is fascinating and breathtaking. It certainly lends itself to mountain biking. There are flat valley floors that wind their way between mountain ranges which form long ridges of high lands. There are many miles of singletrack and fire road. The rides typically use a fire road to climb a hill or mountain and once at the summit you’d generally find some nice singletracks for a flowing ride traversing its way back down the hill.

 

I was there for work and knew no one. As a result, I’d wind up riding alone (Slowman and all his mates) exploring the area and using the internet to do a little research on what trails were nearby. This is where self sufficiency becomes a virtue. I found myself riding into some fairly remote places on my lonesome. It’s important to have the basics like spare tubes, patches, tyre levers and some basic tools. The question you often ask yourself is how much should I take? Do I stop at the kitchen sink? Experience answers all these questions in time! I rode the Nisene Marks Forest trail that begins in Aptos, which is like one of the suburbs around Santa Cruz. It is just a little south of Santa Cruz. I wanted to ride there because it seems to have a place in the folklore of mountain biking, so off I set one weekend on what would turn out to be an epic of sorts. The trail was really just fire road and really not that interesting— the challenge was to get to the top I suppose. My plan was to get to the summit and celebrate with a drink, then take a look around and probably come back down. For what seemed like an uninteresting trail there sure was a lot of traffic on the lower slopes but the higher you got, the more rewarding the scenery. Views took in large tracts of redwood forest looking over the coast line—from this perspective it was truly breathtaking. After about two hours I reached the top and could see on my map there were some more trails over the hill a little way in an area called Soquel Demonstration Forest. I decided to have a gander and what a great find! Sweet singletrack trails winding and switch backing their way down the other side of the hill.

 

The trail was fast and flowing and oh so beautifully groomed. It had me riding in such a rhythm that I was going faster than I’d normally dare, but on these trails it seemed to come naturally. On the tight switchback turns the dirt was a nice damp but loose consistency that allowed you to slide the bike through—just magic stuff. I was in mountain biking heaven! I had been riding down the side of this mountain for about an hour and hadn’t seen anybody. Eventually I came across a couple of guys wearing Xterra jerseys and said hello, as it turned out I was wearing mine too. As much as I thought this might promote some conversation it failed to invoke more than a grunt so I continued on my way. At that point I came to a steepish technical section and I baulked a bit. I stopped to survey it a little before taking it on, deciding that it was pretty easy after all. When starting at low speed I glanced off a little rock, got off balance and stepped off the bike—the bike went down but ever so gently.