VeloSapiens MTB Racing

Going the Distance, Going for Speed


New Year's Ride

Since the Cascade Cream Puff 100 (CCP) is a big target for several velomonkeys this year, it only makes sense to get into training early with a New Year's epic. Dan Garcia, Dan Sovereign, Steve Jakubiak and Keith Kuykendall and I (Mark Weaver) all headed up to Nevada City for a 3 hour tour (chorus: a 3 hour tour). The ride was sort of my idea. In retrospect, I maintain that all riders present should have known that my decision-making process is hopelessly flawed when it comes to taking people on rides. For some reason I just have a hard time stopping when I'm having fun.

We parked at Rock Creek road and some other road, e-mail me for directions if you gotta know. Anyway, we climbed up on half paved/half gravel road to Round Mountain, from there commencing a fun singletrack towards the South Yuba trail. Much to my ridemates' dismay, we didn't turn down the switchback descent to the river, but instead sought out another trail, the Rock Creek Flume trail. This trail is pretty much fun. It has switchbacks, twisties, and yes, rocks! It dumps out on whatever dirt road it is that goes to Purdon Crossing. The descent is all fire-roadish, except that cars can drive on it, so you can't cut the corners too tight. It goes way down to the river. From the bottom, we hopped on the south yuba trail, which winds along the river upstream. This trail is way fun, and I highly recommend it. We went all the way up to Edwards' crossing, then crossed over the river and climbed towards Malakoff diggings. After several miles of fire-road climbing (many thousands of feet) we cut off on the rim trail, which continues to climb, but less steeply. We stopped for a brief snack at the campground.

After our snack, we headed down the trail to the swinging gold-rush town of North Bloomfield. Half way down a killer twisty singletrack I stopped to watch the other guys ride an easy section. They all claim that my graceful leap over the bars was accidental, but what do they know? After I found my bike, we made it in to N.Bloomfield. It was about 40 degrees, and Dan S. still had 2 full bottles of water, but he was starting to panic about running out, so we waited while he found a place to put another 2 oz into his bottles. We had been going almost 4 hours at this point, so we elected not to continue out to the Missouri bar trail. Instead we turned back towards edwards crossing on the fire road.

After a couple miles we passed the trailhead for the Humbug Creek trail, which is closed to bikes. Naturally, we respect all trail closures, except at night, when it's raining or other times when contact with rangers and other trail users is highly unlikely. If we had gone down the Humbug Creek trail, we would have wondered why on earth it's closed, since it's pretty dang remote, and looks pretty fun to ride. There are certainly some sections in the middle that we would've had to portage, but otherwise it would've been one of the most challenging and excellent trails we had ever ridden. When we would've reached the bottom, we would've no longer been freezing, and we would've intersected the South Yuba trail, now on the north side of the South Fork of the Yuba River.

This section of the south yuba trail is highly bitchin', even though it more or less climbs for miles. There are plenty of flat twisty edge of the hillside type sections. We finally popped out on North Bloomfield road after about 5 hours of riding. From there, it's a quick descent back to the river, across at edwards crossing, and back onto the south yuba trail.

This section of the south yuba is way fun, even when tired. I let enough air out of my tires to glide over the rocks a little better and managed to clean some crazy climbs on the way back. We met a nice lady hiking who tried to have a 10 minute conversation with each of us, until she got to steve. After talking with him, she left the rest of us alone.

Last big thing on the agenda was the 3 mile granny gear (at least when you're tired) climb up the round mountain trail. About 200 yards from the top I went into full-on bonk mode. Dan G and I flopped off our bikes and lay in the dirt motionless while we waited for the others... and waited. It seems like some of them were bonking even worse than us.

Finally, everyone got to the top, elapsed time 6 hrs. Then we had a reasonably short, mostly flat spin back to the car. Final elapsed time, 6 1/2 hrs. At the car we fully scarfed my grandmas peanut clusters. I even ate some, and I hate chocolate. Then we went to Jack in the Box and ate so much we were all almost sick.

Definitely the longest ride I've ever done in January. With the CCP coming up, it's only gonna get worse.

Note: Velo Sapiens does not condone getting caught while riding on illegal trails. We recommend you don't ever do it.



Produced by Mark Weaver
Hate this page? send cranky e-mail to mweaver@mother.com. 1