Mountain Biking in the Bay Area

This WE, we went back to Santa Cruz for another mountain bike ride! On Friday night, we browsed the mountain bike guide Go received from Bruno for his birthday (once more thanks a lot Bruno, it's maybe the guide we used most since we arrived). In the index we searched for a "good winter ride", as it had been raining a lot last week... We found the "Forest of Nisene, Out-and-Back" near Santa Cruz. At the end of the ride's description, the guide reads: "If you can't stand out-and-backs," --yep, that's us-- "don't mind riding the road (12 miles)," --nope, that's okay-- "have strong stamina," --we'll do what we can-- "try this beautiful 30-mile loop: From Aptos Creek Road head west on Soquel Drive [...] Enjoy 13 miles of downhill on Aptos Creek Fire Road back to the start." After these last few words, we were totally convinced by the ride (even if it was much longer than the rides we had done previously).

So on Saturday morning we loaded the bikes and drove to Santa Cruz. While it was cloudy in Mountain View, the sky was perfectly blue on the other side of the hills! After dropping Gaetanelle in Santa Cruz we drove the last few miles until Aptos, parked the car, reassembled the bikes... and "top, c'est parti!" ;-)

I won't tell you the whole ride in details (maybe next time)... only a few facts:
it was a beautiful day -- the temperature was about 20 degrees Celsius -- the ride was long and hard: 48.5km, 1000m of positive denivelee (with one 700m continuous climb) -- the 20km downhill section was lot's fun (but it seemed like it would never arrive, as the climb went on and on) -- we made it ;-) (with an average speed of 15km/h, not too bad).

We'll try to upload the pictures we took (only a few) and edit a short movie pretty soon.

Go