Mountain Bike Bill, The Dirt on the Dirt

Category: Website Updates

The Lake Davis Trail

Note: I did this ride in back in late July. I am making an effort to semi-catch up on the summer adventures

The Lost Sierras area of NorCal is renowned for its killer trails with stunning views. Your average trail out there is typically a blue trail with some black diamond bits here and there. For the occasional rider, novice, beginner or someone just not into technical terrain, most of these trails can be a bit much.

The Lake Davis trail just north of Portola is an awesome green trail that is nearly guaranteed to not get you cross threaded with significant other. The elevation change is minimal and none of the climbs are long.

The view of Lake Davis from the Smith Peak Lookout west of the lake.

The trail is currently 7 miles long along the eastern side of the lake so it a nice 14 mile out-and-back. I’m not a gravel bike guys but looping around the lake on the mostly dirt roads is a thing. It would be incredibly awesome to see the singletrack segments expanded. So much potential out here

There are plenty of views that just don’t suck!
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Here is our ridelog for the day.

Smiling before and after the ride!

Pro Tip for Family/Group Travelers: If other members are your posse are not down for the more technical or big stuff this region is known for or they can’t ride multiple days in a row, this is a great trail to do as your “Rest Day” ride.

The Sierra Buttes Trail Stewardship rocks! The Brewing Lair is not be missed. Beers, food trucks and live music nestled on a wooded hill-side…What is not to like about that! (Oh, and dog-friendly!)

Condor Peak Awesomeness!

We start off with, I am once again slacking a bit on BLOG posts. I will try to catch up at some point, but for today I have to talk about the Condor Peak Trail in the northern bits of the San Gabriel mountains. I first rode this trail in in 2007 and thought it was a fantastic trail. I was quite saddened in 2009 when the station fire tore that area and the trail up. After thousands of volunteer hours put in by the dedicated folks of the Lowelifes Respectable Citizens’ Club the trail was officially reopened back in July.

Those folks did an amazing job of rebuilding that trail. It is in fantastic shape and they did not sacrifice any of the narrow twisty exposed nature of trail which make it such treasure to a single track connoisseur .

My buddy Bill and I revisited a point-to-point ride we did that included a 12 mile climb up Mendenhall Ridge and a connection over to the top of the Condor Peak Trail. Condor Peak can also been done as an out and back, but I don’t like the idea of trying to climb some of those narrow exposed sections when you are momentum deprived. No matter what method you take to get to the top of Condor Peak you are going to put in some work.

Oh Yeah!

Santa Margarita River Trail

A while back I revisited the Santa Margarita River Trail and shot some video.

The placed has changed a bit with the primary thing being some “improvements” to the south side that has “tamed” some of the trails a little and made them slightly wider. To the east of the preserve the Red Mountain and “Hills Loop” I used to describe have been cutoff due to an property acquisition by an environmental group. There is still plenty to see out here and while summer is not the best time to be out here it was still a nice outing on the bike.

My page on this area.

Site Update – What that Flock?

Yo Bill, What is up with the BLOG?

Well, its complicated but the short answer is I have been busy. I have been doing a lot of utilitarian things with the site to make it mobile friendly and to allow for some other things I want to do in the future. The site is over 20 years old and some of the HTML needs some freshening up. Over the course of those 20 years I have had numerous revisions and code conventions that have changed resulting in genres of pages that need to be standardized before I can really move forward with things. While much can be done with scripts, I basically need to touch every page and I have over 200 hundred trails on the site.

One particularly time consuming bit is fixing thumbnails. Back in “The Day” the drop shadow effect was not an HTML/CSS function. I generated that using a custom Photoshop action script. The shadow and the background on that shadow were part of the the thumbnail image itself. Thus my site’s dirt/sand colored background is baked into the cake of all the thumbnails. Part of the project is to get rid of those baked in shadows and replace them with modern CSS/HTML functions. Once again scripts, actions, find/replace and batch processes help but I have to touch every page.

While all of the pages are now viewable to some degree on mobile, a little over 100 of them have yet to fully converted. It is an ongoing process and not one I do all the time. I still like riding my bike and I really enjoy spending quality time with my lovely wife. So that is the happenings with the site’s pages.

Now this BLOG. You may have noticed I have not done too much with it since my big trip last year. Social media plays a part in this and I have not figured out if they should supplant this or not. I have settlef on I think not. Social media has its place but I think the BLOG is going to stay around. I intend go do some “backfilling” of content from the last year. So I will be publishing some new content with old dates to when they occurred.

But hey, all of this takes time and I think it is time to go for a ride instead of banging on a keyboard.

Lusardi Truck Trail

So I have been eyeballing up checking out Lusardi Truck Trail for quite some time. I heard that it was “just” a dead end but I wanted to see for myself. I know I could have drove my truck this forest service road, but I wanted to investigate with two wheels.

Some nice views along the way.

It is mostly a climb over six-miles until it does indeed dead-end at a locked gate to some private property. I can’t really say this is much of a trail but if you want to see this back corner of the Cleveland National Forest it is well worth a visit. In the near term I have added this to Trailforks and I will probably add this to my site as well.

Harding – Joplin – Luge

You have to pay to play with this loop. 4,711ft of elevation in just under 26 miles will have your legs feeling it on the climbs and your grinning muscles feeling on the descent. You will probably stress some pucker muscles here and there as well. This route has you climbing Harding Truck Trail up to Main Divide and then down Joplin following back hooking up with the Santiago Truck Trail and the Luge.

Palm Canyon Epic

I recently got back out on the Palm Canyon Epic after a couple year hiatus. I have took the RV out to Palm Desert and setup basecamp for the weekend. My wife took us up to the top and it was quite nice to not a “commute” to do after the ride. It was a great day out of the bike.

Video from the day
Jeff heading down the Hahn
Bill looking at the way ahead
Jeff, Bill and Bill

Iron Mountain Video

Chunkage at Iron Mountain

Some fresh video content from Iron Mountain. I also got the related page on my site cut over to the mobile friendly format. That new format project is taking on a life of its own. I have not be doing too much blog posting as of late other than the video updates. I will probably catch that up at some point but hey, ride bikes or slap code on key board?

But for now, enjoy the video. It was a good ride even if I did roll out of there with slight case of PTSD from from the chunk!