Marin Headlands

I first got serious about road bike riding when I lived in Santa Rosa. I think I took for granted what a great place that is to ride bikes. Sure a lot of the pavement isn't great, and there are plenty of yokels that think that it's fun to try and intimidate cyclists with their armored vehicles (the worse the driver, the bigger the vehicle), but still it's a great place to ride. Lots of choices for any kind of ride.

So when I moved to the city, I had a bit of an adjustment. It's a lot harder to ride here. You're choices are basically a) drive somewhere else. I've done this quite a bit, but driving is a pain and it seems stupid to drive to a place to ride a bike. b) Take BART to somewhere else, if they had lockers at the stations, this would be a lot more practical. Getting to the train in bike shoes doesn't seem like fun. c) riding over the bridge. Riding over the bridge sucks. Of all the bad weather in The City, the bridge is always twice as bad as anywhere else. Cold, wet, windy... then throw a few hundred tourists/obstacles in the way and it just isn't fun.

Enter mountain biking. The trails in the city aren't great, and they aren't connected. But I can ride to Mt Sutro in 5 minutes and have a great time and a great workout. There are also a few trails in the Presidio and a few more in GGP (but bikes aren't allowed? WTF!).

I've read about all the mtb trails in the Marin Headlands, so today was the day I decided to investigate. I rode across the bridge (death cheated yet again!) and up the Conzelman climb, after the steep part of the climb, I got to the Coastal Trail and the fun began. The first part is all downhill, mostly smooth fire roads, with a few narrow spots and a few ruts from the recent rains. Then onto the pavement to the Miwok Trail. This is a nice hard packed wide trail, lots of bikes, lots of hikers (but not so many to make it stupid- like the bridge) and some fabulous scenery. After a little ways it turns uphill and keeps on climbing for quite a while offering some really great views, so great that I had to stop my climbing just to take some pictures (yes, of course that's why I stopped. Hell No I wasn't tired). See what I mean?















Looking back at where I'd come from, and....

















Then looking ahead at where I still had to go.

It was hard, but it was fun. I set a pace that I knew I could maintain and just kept going. I crested the top and started a short downhill before meeting this.

















Now I realize pictures are hard to judge when it comes to how steep something is, but this is steep. I saw it, laughed for a minute then went another way (but rest assured, I will be back, and I will conquer this.)

The path taken turned out to be pretty amazing in itself. By far this was the most technical decent I have done ( I had to walk through a couple spots. Yes, I suck). All was good and fun until the bottom of the trail when my spoke broke. So here I am with no spokes (and not even a spoke wrench (did I mention I suck?)) so after uttering some forgetful curses I decided to release the rear brake and start riding in hopes of finding a bike shop. It turns out, I was only a couple miles from Mike's Bikes.

Mikes is awesome, they fixed me up and sent me on my way in no time. From there I just rode back the road through Sausalito to the bridge and back home. But now having experienced these trails, I know I'll be back.