Tag: Rough Stuff

I highly recommend the Crosstown Trail, a grassroots-developed 17-mile hiking route across San Francisco that strings together existing paths through parks, urban greenways, stairs, and the bits of road needed to connect them. There’s an associated bike route that combines parts of that trail with parallel road routes where it would be impractical to ride (though even this route also includes some carry-your-bike staircases and narrow dirt paths). Just imagine, you can experience all of this within the city limits: ...

I enjoy mixing some gravel and dirt into my road rides, though I don’t have a specific “mountain” or “gravel” bike– just my all-around bike with 38mm tires. A local example I’ve enjoyed several times in the past few years is Wildcat Creek Trail, which takes you from Wildcat Canyon Park in Richmond up to Tilden Park in the Berkeley hills. It’s a good local introduction to gravel roads (and nice and wide compared to a typical multi-use trail, avoiding conflict with walkers and dogs), and I’ve brought along friends on road bikes and they’ve been able to handle it: ...

A few years back I met a friend who lives in Berlin and we spent a week biking to Copenhagen. It turns out we had compatible cycle touring styles, and said “let’s do this again some time… especially if I’m ever somewhere in Europe within a reasonable take-your-bike-on-the-train distance from Germany". Other vacation plans brought me to Slovenia, so we schemed up a week of self-supported cycling in Slovenia and a bit of Croatia, on a mix of paved and gravel roads. ...

For years I’ve daydreamed about biking from DC to Pittsburgh on mostly car-free dirt trails, on a ~330 mile winding route that combines the C&O Canal Trail (a dirt trail formerly used by mules to pull cargo barges along the C&O canal in the 1800s, a transportation method that eventually lost to the railroad, and was nearly converted to roads before being preserved as a park in the 1970s) and the Great Allegheny Passage (a combination of rail trails integrated and completed in 2013). ...

Bornholm: a large Danish island in the middle of the Black Sea, reached by ferry from Sweden, Germany, or Poland. It’s relaxing, lush, pastoral… and some might even say a little boring. I love it– there are smokehouse for fish (optionally served with an egg yolks), a few cute towns, breweries, ice cream, beaches and forests… and most notably for this blog: ~230km of interconnected cycle trails around and through the island. ...

I’ve done variants on a 30-mile vineyard and trails loop in Livermore a few times over the years. One of those years we biked past Wente and up to the South end of Arroyo Road, and could see gravel trails stretching off along Lake Del Valle– but the gravel was too steep and loose and we turned around. I’ve always wanted to go back with some wider tires and see how practical (and fun) it is to ride gravel along Del Valle, connecting Arroyo road to Mines road… ...

(retroactively writing up a quick summary, months later…) I’ve dreamed about doing some sort of week+ off-road bike tour somewhere in the world. While I enjoy solo DIY exploration and have many great memories of going somewhere and figuring it out on the fly, my gravel touring experience is limited and I’ve never even really been mountain biking (at least, farther than a few miles), so perhaps it would be easier and more fun to join an organized tour… ...

I never really got into “mountain biking”, because for years I associated it with going fast on rough terrain and dodging obstacles, while I like to ramble and mosey and stop a lot. I also like rides where I can walk out my door (or hop off a train or plane) and get on the bike without having to drive somewhere. I realize my impressions were a narrow caricature of what mountain biking can be, though, and I’ve always enjoyed the bits of off-roading that sneak into rides– the last mile of dirt getting to a camp site from the road, strange muddy paths I find myself on when trying to bypass roads, or detours through parks to avoid main roads, and even when “road biking” I generally run 32mm+ tires to give myself more comfort and flexibility for unexpected detours. ...

The Whitefish Trail, part of an 8-mile mostly singletrack route I took between the Whitefish Bike Retreat (excellent camping/hostel basecamp for local gravel and bikepacking exploration) and downtown Whitefish. I’m new to mountain biking and singletrack so I took it slow…

I think I first heard about ‘Old Caz’ (Old Cazadero Road) when reading a recap of someone’s 300km (yes, 180 mile) randonneur ride that included it. That’s… ambitious. I haven’t been biking much due to pandemic sluggishness and malaise, but I was going up to Guerneville for the weekend with friends, so I brought my bike and set out to do a much smaller loop that included the mythical Old Caz. I’ve been gradually biking on more gravel and forest roads (just with my normal bike) and enjoying it… ...