Sorry to leave you in the dark . . . I will now overcompensate

Arcata, CA

Okay, okay, so I’ve gotten a little behind and now it is too great a task to catch up, which doesn’t make me very motivated to start. SO, we made it in time to put on the Trinity River on Aug 2 with my family and a whole bunch of Jen and Damon’s friends. Eric and I started in the Mini-Me with my dad and a friend named Matt, but it soon became clear that jumping ships was a common theme. Some people abandoned rafts all together, opting to float on a Poco-Pad instead. It was toasty and with all our stops along the way managed to kill the entire day floating about 7 miles. Since I have abandoned my blog, I also had a birthday! I am now 28 years old! I don’t recall that we did all that much, but we had a great breakfast out and a giant salmon dinner followed by a party made complete with mint chocolate chip ice cream and hot fudge over a chocolate cake. Carrie knows what I’m talking about. We played Yahtzee, Dice, Up-the-River Down-the-River. The usual assortment of red vines and smartees were also plentiful. I love birthdays. The next morning, Aug 4, needless to say, I had a bit of a sugar high. I got up early, begged Eric to go for a jog with me (which he almost did!!!) and ran for about an hour in the Arcata fog. We then decided to go biking in the redwoods on the Ossagon Trail (20 miles), which toured the famous Fern Canyon. Once my fam joined us we followed the ride with a 6-mile hike through the big trees. That’s right, it was a three-sport day for me. By the end, I was pooped. On Aug 5, we journeyed to the Lost Coast for a day at the beach collecting neat rocks, shells, and sea glass. We saw sea lions in the water and sun bathing on rocks. I was a bit sore from the previous days adventures, but looking at the sand and walking at a snails pace was a-okay for me. Our turn around point was a light house where we snacked on rainbow Twizzlers and other assorted snacks. My collection now lives in a small ziplock baggy in the motorhome waiting for a more permanent establishment to call home. On Aug 6, we decided to celebrate Jen’s birthday (usually occurs on Aug 11). I mean, who wouldn’t want to turn 30 five days earlier than scheduled? We biked in the local community forest with Jen and her dogs Lily and Joule (which you may have noticed hung out with us a lot during our stay in Arcata). This involved one solid climb to the top of the CF and several short single tracks linked all the way back down. For more fun, we went to the theater and saw The Hangover. I laughed very, Very hard. Highly recommend. Later, we headed to the local Brewery for dinner where we listened to live music and met even more of Jen and Damon’s friends (they really are the most popular people I know!). To complete the birthday, we headed to the Plaza (town square) for ice cream. Jen had the most amazing ice cream sandwich I have ever seen. They smash whatever kind of ice cream you want between 2 chocolate wafers and finish it off by rolling it in smashed Oreo cookies. On Aug 7, we said “Good-bye” to my folks, packed out of Jen and Damon’s house and headed South to Shelter Cove. This small community boarders the southern part of the Lost Coast that we visited earlier. After some off-roading in the RV, we parked at a cool little campground up in a forest away from the beach, but close to the Paradise Royale Bike Trail. That’s right, hikers yield to the bikes. We arrived in time to get established in camp before catching the sunset. We played cards for a short while, but the wind picked up and the air really wasn’t all that warm, so we all headed to bed early. The next morning, Aug 8, we awoke ready to ride. After a leisurely breakfast, with multiple rounds of French pressing, we (Jen, Damon, Eric and I) took off on the PRBT. It started with a cool twisting decent through leaf-covered ground and small whoopties. Our major climb followed and lasted, mmm, quite some time with a false summit or two before heading down our major decent. The trail widened and had many options for lift-off. I mostly kept my tires glued to the ground, but Eric and Damon took flight on several occasions. The last bit climbed back to camp, which we find it hard to do, because you know that all the fun is behind you. We grunted it out, made a dinner complete with hot dogs and tortellini. Eric and I found Juliet and Wes to be friendly and spent a couple hours past everyone else’s bedtime chatting around the camp fire with them. We broke camp in the morning, saying Good-bye to my Bro—Matt and his dogs Kilo and Bullet and drove back to Arcata to reconfigure the motorhome, take care of laundry and sort out our camp gear from the rest. It took so long, we ended up staying the night of Aug 9 in front of Jen and Damon’s house in Arcata. The next day, Aug 10, we drove out of the fog and into the sun to Kimtu Park in Willow Creek. From there, we road about 7+ road miles to our climb up to the Tish Tang Trail. This trail involved looping back up the road to hit the next section (which there were 3 sections). There were no trail markers and I think Jen and Damon may be the only folks who know the trail exists because even when physically riding on the trail it is nearly invisible. I think I called Jen 12 times and Damon twice to figure out how to ride each section. We hit the bottom section about the time we finished our water. Only seven more miles of road riding in the heat of the day to get back to the home! In all we road over 30 miles and over 8,000 vertical feet!! This was by far the most vertical we had climbed in a day. Needless to say, we were exhausted!

Whoops! I managed to forget some of our favorites!

July 26-Aug 1

SO, we have been busy and lazy. We had a change in schedule that basically meant that riding in Cali would be shortened considerably. My family all decided to meet in Arcata at my sister’s house. My folks were really excited to get us all together. The last time was at our wedding over 4 years ago. Eric and I had to prioritize our trails. We decided to hit Tahoe hard and then head to Downieville to finish it off before rushing out to the coast.
Tahoe was amazing! The views are spectacular and the trails immaculate. We started with the classic Rim trail to Flume. This was by far the lamest trail. The Rim trail section was really fun, with a few challenging rocks and super fast downs. The Flume, was scenic, boring, crowded . . . . pretty much a big disappointment. The Rim trail surrounds the lake with around 200 miles of trail. We decided to try some other sections that were open to bikes. After a short regroup, we set out with our lights for an evening ride. We did the Kinsbury section until the light faded. It was beautiful. No wild animal sightings. Actually, we didn’t see anything bigger than a squirrel the entire time we were in Tahoe!

In the morning we chose the famous “Mr Toads Wild Ride” trail. After a brutal climb, we were met with some technical drops and loose sand. Although we were warned this trail was for downhill riders and required more suspension than our cross country bikes, Eric and I had little trouble navigating through rocky sections. I got off my bike a couple times, but rode the majority of the techy section. One cool spot was a staircase of wood with sand to make it slick. Although not too challenging, it was something Eric and I had never experienced before. After the little tricky spot, we bombed through the winding fun and fast trail that led us to the bottom. We were happy with the ride, but it left something to be desired.

The next day, we took the advice of a local bike shop guy (Wattabike), who said to ride from Heavenly, up the Rim, down Armstrong. All our rides required shuttling a car (motorcycle) to the other side in Tahoe, but that didn’t mean we were doing downhill rides. The reason to shuttle was to get from one point to the other without backtracking. I didn’t realize that. The climb out of Heavenly was really decent. There were technical sections, one of which, ate me. My knee took the brunt of it only 2 miles into our day. I cried. After cleaning my wound with hand sanitizer, we decided to continue on our ride as planned. It was sore for the rest of the day, but this was the ride I will remember when I think of Tahoe riding, and not because I split my knee open. It was hellish climbing (hmm, not selling this well), but everything was part of the adventure. The views were amazing and changed drastically from overlooking farmland on an exposed ridge to alpine desert. We even passed a lake (Star Lake). Once over the top of the final ridge, we had beautiful foliage and large odd looking trees. We made it to Armstrong Pass with huge smiles on our faces. From there, we took a super-duper fun downhill down the Armstrong trail. Seriously, it was sooooooo fun. Looping and banked! Then we took a trail called Sindwinder that made us dizzy with all its banked turns and finally finished with Corral Trail.

To finish off the Tahoe area, we hit yet another section of the Rim trail. This one started up Martis Peak and finished in Tahoe City. This was supposed to be our big downhill shuttled ride, but again, to my surprise we had at least 3 major climbs, which led us to conclude that there are no “downhill” rides in Tahoe. We had a few sections of fun downhill and one good section of ledge riding. Although this trail was better than average for most of the rides we have done, it didn’t really compare with the previous day’s ride. Also, the weather was on the edge of dangerous. The sky rumbled and lightning was visible jumping between clouds. I was scared for most of the ride and looked forward to seeing the end. This came several hours later. We left Tahoe with most of our skin and blood and lots of good memories. We drove all the way to Truckee for the night (not very far).

The only ride that people will tell you about in Truckee is called Hole-in-the-Ground. I agree, it was realy fun, but a lot of the trail (~10%) had these giant concrete pavers. It took away from being out on a trail and the people who put them in could have done a much better job with the placement. One in particular dropped you onto a rock that would perfectly positioned to endo you. I mean, come on! Everyone also warned that the climb was horrendous!, but we didn’t think it even came close to some of the riding we had just done in Tahoe. It was like people in Truckee hadn’t made it to Tahoe for any riding. It was a good ride and the hill was pretty good. Eric had gotten up on the wrong side of the bed, so everything was annoying to him at Hole-in-the-Ground, but all in all, it was still a very good ride. Neat rocks! The whole time we were joking about the “technical” downhill that we were riding and how we were able to continue our conversation while riding it and how that made us such bad-asses. The final decent we were nearly ate our words because it was super sketchy, decent drops, rooty, downs. These hiker ladies were impressed at first. Then I saw the perfect endo rock and in an effort to avoid it, drove right into it! I said,”Oh, Shhhhhhhoot!” In the end, I didn’t endo, just bounced right over it, but when I rode up to Eric my leg was shaking with adrenaline. We agreed that there were some technical downhills afterall. HA!

Downieville was where the downhill was promised and received. On day 1, we shuttled the moto to the end and camped about 6,000 vertical feet above, near the trailhead. We started with a sick half mile paved climb to start, but after that, FUN!!!! Eric had done his research and had our entire route on GPS to prevent missing anything awesome. It was great! We did a similar plan for day 2, but that didn’t work out so well. We wanted to hit everything that we missed on day 1 and not have to do much climbing to get it. Unfortunately, some trails that were serving as short cuts, no longer existed and we spent a grueling climb going out and around to reach the other side (Whoops!). In all, day 2 had about 6,000 ascending and 10,000 vertical feet in descending. We didn’t complain too much. We had one more adventure planned in the lakes basin area, however, when we checked our messages, we each had one from my mother. She wanted us in Arcata pronto! We were going to stick to the plan and finish our riding, but decided we wouldn’t really enjoy it much knowing everyone else was together rafting the Trinity. Eric and I booked out of Downieville for a late night drive ending somewhere near Weaverville and continued on to the put-in in the morning. We were glad we did!