I hate to add more rain to the parade of the east coasters who happen to read this blog on occasion but Nande and I got back from a beautiful little bike ride along the lower flanks of Nisene Marks. My buddy's wife was off with his big hound dog so it was just me, Nande and my buddy who's still recovering from ankle surgery.We've been having these gorgeous days with nice warm sun and it was perfect in the woods. There were places where the earth was still damp and wet from the night's fog and other places where we could just soak in the sun for a few moments.
The trailhead is a little sketchy as we park in private lot and drop in near some private houses. But we're respectful, quick and keep the dogs close so it hasn't been a problem yet.
But once you're in, the trail descends quickly and it feels really land-speederish like in Star Wars. The galloping hound at my heels doesn't really work for the imagery but it's alright. It is a ton of fun to burn hills with Nande sprinting alongside. And she was built for trail riding. Have I said that before? She is. She's tall and has long legs which let her float over the trail at good speed.
Unlike her usual companion, a stout black lab who I've caused to tumble off the trail because he insists on trying to run about three inches off my front wheel. And that works very poorly in tight single track.
Anyway, not too far in there's a car that got there a number of years ago. It is on its roof and the forest is swiftly dismantling it and turning it back into its elemental states. Kind of neat and a great object to sit and snap photos of for hours on end. The fact that its right near a cool little cliff above a four or five foot deep pool to toss sticks in for the dogs is just bonus.
This trail isn't especially long but you can ride multiple loops to just keep adding miles to your ride. The trail also leads into Nisene so you have to be careful of walkers and folks on horseback. We ran into one lady on horseback today who wanted to make sure Nande wasn't going to freak out around her horse. I truly didn't know what she'd do but she was, more or less, respectful. And we were able to cruise on to where we could either take another good fun descent that we'd have to pedal back up out of or we could turn around and head back.
We opted to heading back and retraced our path back towards the trucks. We didn't run into the horse again, which was nice, but we also didn't have enough time to stop and play in the water for too long. Unlike this video I took from a previous trip.
A really nice way to enjoy a beautiful Monday. Especially since my job training this morning was so quick. I'll write a short post about that later.
