I repeated this ride about a couple of months ago, but I'm only now getting around to updating the page for the ride with the full set of photos I've taken this time around and a geo-tagged photo map (which this ride description didn't originally have).

Easily the most requested feature for this website since day one was the ability the sort the ride listings by different criteria. This had, therefore, been on my to-do list of "major improvements" to the site for the longest time. As the growing number of rides improved the geographic coverage of the site and increasing the coverage in poorly represented areas gradually became less of a priority, that left other new site features at the top of the priority list recently. And since the sort feature was foremost among these, I have been spending more thought lately on possible approaches to providing sorting capability without radically altering the (fully static) structure of the site content. Once I seriously started looking for solutions, I discovered that it could be done even more easily than I had hoped. So I dove into it this past week. The time it took me to pull it off probably still added up to about one full day, but I'm glad to announce that a sorting feature is finally available on all listing pages on the website now. I hope this makes the site even more useful to all of its viewers.

After a pause of a couple of months, here's a new ride for the website. This is one of the rides in the backlog I've accumulated over the course of that time. The pause was not due to any lack of new content generation for the site, but due to a scarcity of opportunity to put up the content that I did generate during this period, mainly because of some travel and some minor changes in my weekly routine. In fact, there are a few more updates already on the way, which should follow this one in relatively quick succession.

Briones Regional Park has such a sizable trail network that I had been meaning to represent it with more than just the short loop that has been the lone Briones ride on the website for quite some time. I've recently been able to try an additional ride there, and this new one is it. It's a longer route. Other than representing more of the trails of the park and covering more of the park's territory in a loop, it's little more than an attempt to hit a couple of trails that I thought might be particularly worthwhile. I can't claim this one to be an especially informed route suggestion at Briones, simply because I haven't ridden there enough to be able to produce such a hand-picked suggestion yet. Still, I hope that an extra option there might give the users of this site some additional inspiration for more rides at Briones.

Recently, I rode at Lagoon Valley Regional Park for the first time. This ride was one of the items on my biking to-do list that I was most curious about, since it might just be the last ride location in the Bay Area with any significant amount of bike-legal singletrack in its trail network that I hadn't yet tried. It didn't disappoint. I wouldn't mind having such a fun little trail network within easy access of my home. Unfortunately, it's not that close to where I live. So, I don't expect to be going back there regularly, but it's a very easy recommendation to make to riders living near this park.

The trails I left unsampled at Rockville had been in the back of my mind pretty much since my first ride there in 2008. It took me until yesterday to arrange to go there for a second ride. Although yesterday's ride ended up being another short ride there (only seven miles), I managed to try out most of the remaining trails at Rockville that I wanted to see. This ride reinforced my impression that this place is worthy of being one of the top ride options for advanced riders in the Bay Area. I only wish it were easier to reach for me.

You'll notice that I've labeled this newer ride as "Suggestion 1" despite the fact that there already was an existing Rockville ride on the website. This is because I think the newer ride follows a more desirable route and because I expect most people to check out the "first suggestion" for a ride location first. I'd rather have those viewers start by seeing the better ride option of the two. I retained the older ride instead of replacing it completely with the new one only because the old one includes a few trails that the new ride doesn't cover. So, the old one is retained but is now demoted to being "Suggestion 2" for Rockville. This is despite the fact that the order of multiple ride suggestions for the same park on this website is not normally based on desirability.

After last weekend's muddy fiasco at Fort Ord (see below), I went back there this weekend determined to do a proper Fort Ord ride. I'm glad I did. The weather was pure perfection. The trail conditions were also pretty good, with most trails apparently not yet back to their maximum levels of sandiness.

Since part of the reason for the ride was so that my riding buddy who'll be participating in the Sea Otter race in a couple of weeks can get some training in and re-familiarize himself with the race course, we followed this year's Sea Otter XC race course on this ride. This is different from the original Fort Ord ride I listed on this site, which was the course used up to 2010. That made this weekend's ride a variation that's worth being listed on the website as an additional ride option. The original Fort Ord ride on the site is, therefore, retitled now as "2007 Sea Otter course", because that's the year in which I had done that ride.

Yesterday, I got to do a road ride on 17-Mile Drive. Unfortunately, it came about as a result of another ride plan ending up in a fiasco. Originally, yesterday's plan was to ride the course of the cross-country race in the upcoming Sea Otter Classic, because my riding buddy will be participating in that race. However, I had so much trouble getting my bike through the muddy trails that we had to abort and turn back after the second mile. The mud piling up on my seatstays and front derailleur was causing my rear wheel to lock up and was resulting in repeated cases of chain suck, so much so that I couldn't see myself struggling through another 18 miles of riding under those conditions. I had thought the ride would be feasible since Fort Ord is known to be okay (actually even better than normal) for riding after rains, but I suppose you hit a limit when the rains had finished only six or seven hours before the start of your ride, and were coming on the heels of a particularly rainy week.

Nevertheless, I used this opportunity to update the sole existing Fort Ord ride on the website with additional directions for finding your way from the parking spot to the trailhead, as well as a caveat about the limits of the suitability of the trails for wet riding. I also added to the photo set a handful of images I shot around the beginning of this ride, which should especially come in handy when figuring out the way to the trailhead.

Looking for another ride option to do in the area, I wasn't willing to risk it with any other trail ride (it was only because we'd be riding at the rain-friendly Fort Ord that I was willing to ride trails so soon after rains anyway), so we did a road ride on 17-Mile Drive instead, albeit on mountain bikes. This had been a ride idea sitting in the back of my mind for the longest time. I had never come around to doing it, because it's not such a superior bike ride in its own right that it would be worth the long drive for me to get there. Having ended up there for another reason therefore became the ideal excuse for doing this ride. Plus, the weather was great for it: while very windy at the coast, it was at least sunny. Meanwhile, the scenery of this ride route is simply beyond reproach.

The photo set for this ride didn't have any images from the side loop over Borden Hatch Mill and Grabtown Gulch trails, because its photos were taken from a set I had shot for the other Whittemore Gulch ride, without this side loop. When I repeated this ride last weekend, I used the opportunity to take pictures on this side loop to complete this photo set. These new photos are now grafted onto the existing photos of the ride, shared with the other Whittemore ride, and I've also added the missing geotagged photo map of this ride along with that.

I also took this opportunity to expand the description text of the ride. This is one of the oldest rides I've listed on this website, and like some other such rides, its description was quite sparsely worded by my current standards. I've now tidied up the text of both rides at this park and added more description of the trails' characters.

Got to repeat the "Suggestion 1" ride at Skeggs this past weekend. That allowed me to shoot a complete set of photos for the ride from scratch, because that ride used to lack a geotagged photo map on this site. It now has one, in addition to a fresher and more complete photo set.

The ride route also saw a tiny change. On the way up Timberview Trail toward Manzanita Trail, the route now follows the more roundabout way of taking Crosscut Trail and reaching the junction with Manzanita from the other direction over Timberview, rather than simply following the shorter but steeper direct route straight to that junction. This adds an extra little bit of fun riding to the ride without any additional elevation gain.

This is not exactly a very interesting ride on its own, not to mention the fact that it's a road ride. It is, however, a stretch of road that is very popular with road bikers in the South Bay and a significant component of many long road rides that start in the valley and snake through various parts of the Santa Cruz Mountains. So, it couldn't hurt to have it listed on this website, especially when it's so easy to throw in by doing it as a quickie ride on a weekday morning before work.

This is a post-rain ride that I got to repeat over a week ago, on a road bike. Considering how well the ride option is known in its local area, I found it worthy of inclusion on the website so that more riders may become acquainted with it.

The ride might make more sense as a regular workout ride for locals (though it's not a very strenuous workout) than as a ride that riders from other parts of the Bay Area should come over and try once. Still, it does hold a few points of minor interest. (See the text.)

This past weekend, Robert Louis Stevenson State Park became the latest North Bay location at which I've prepared a new ride for this website. The ride itself doesn't offer much to advanced mountain bikers, however it offers almost "cartographical" vistas, especially from the summit, and if you can use your bike to get there to see them, then why not? I think that's enough for this ride option to qualify for representation on this site.

I've really gone overboard with the ride material this time when it comes to documenting the views available from the peak. Some of the photos for this ride include labeling to indicate what some of the points visible from the peak are, and there is even a secondary photo set (from an earlier visit) that includes zoomed-in and enhanced photos to better show some of the most distant geographic targets that may be spotted on a clear day. It's probably not surprising that I've felt the urge to do these, when you consider that lines of sight can reach as far as 190 miles from this peak.

There is also one special significance of this ride option: I'll treat this as the northernmost point I'll consider as being "within the Bay Area" when representing ride options on this site. That doesn't mean I'll never feature ride descriptions here that are farther from the bay than Mount St. Helena. In fact, I'm already preparing to introduce an additional "Surrounding Areas" section to the site that will cover really distant rides that couldn't reasonably be considered to be "in the Bay Area". (I should be able to make the first few such rides available in a few months' time.) But, it's just that this ride will mark the northern boundary of the existing "North Bay" area on the site and of the main list of "all Bay Area rides".

I had received a reader comment in response to the original Tilden ride on this website that some of the more fun biking trails in that park are actually in the southern half of the park. Even without that suggestion, it was obvious that this first Tilden ride listed here was completely excluding anything in this lower portion of Tilden. I've been meaning to catch an opportunity to do a ride in this portion of the park for quite some time, in order to see it for myself. This weekend, that opportunity presented itself. The product of this is now listed on the site as a second Tilden Park ride. It's not a ride that I've felt I've been missing out on for all this time, but I am glad for having tried it out. These are some fairly good trails right at the doorstep of a large number of East Bay communities.

It had been a while since my last ride at Skeggs Point. So, when we had another weekend of ideal riding weather a couple of days ago, it wasn't a bad opportunity to fix that. And, while I'm at it, I made sure that I repeated the route of one of the existing Skeggs ride descriptions on this site so that I could add photos. "Suggestion 4" was one such ride, and it's one of the better Skeggs routes represented here. So, I've now remedied this popular ride's lack of a full photo set as well as its lack of a geotagged photo map.

In addition, I did a couple of minor tweaks to the route itself. This route originally used to follow Sierra Morena Trail initially from the park entrance, before turning onto Methuselah Trail to cut through to the beginning of Manzanita. That portion helped in adding a short distance on the nice Sierra Morena Trail to the ride, but also added a fairly pointless fire road descent and ascent on Methuselah Trail. That's now out. On top of that, the route now turns left at the southern end of Manzanita to take Crosscut Trail along the way (because, why not) before it heads down to Giant Salamander. I think both of these are genuine improvements to the ride experience.

The weather last weekend provided me with the opportunity (quite an excellent one, actually) to try out a relatively recent "discovery" for the first time. Rancho Cañada del Oro is one of the newer (and smaller) parks of the South Bay. While the trails are too new and smooth to satisfy the urges of hard-core riders, they're still fun in their own way and the landscape is simply gorgeous. On top of that, near the highest elevations of the ride, you get some very wide views worthy of sitting and meditating over. This all adds up to a ride option that all local riders should try at least once. I'm definitely coming back here during the months when the grass will be green.

This is another "quickie" option. That's what allowed me to put it together for the website by doing it on a weekday morning before heading to the office, during a week that has been pretty wet, which made me look for easy road ride options. It's still a pretty well-known loop option for its area; known enough to be represented in at least a couple of unrelated printed guides. Perhaps more importantly, it's situated where there are several options available for extending your ride, whether you're doing this on a mountain bike or road bike. So, I've been meaning to have this route added to the site for quite some time now. And here it is.

This one is actually a pretty simple route (and another road ride) but it's such a well-known biking option in the Peninsula that not having it represented on this site would constitute a shortcoming. For that reason, I threw this one in as a quickie last Wednesday morning before going to work. I couldn't do the entire route that I meant to (all the way to the Crystal Springs Golf Course) due to a temporary road closure, but the ride still succeeded in amazing me with the almost spiritual vistas presented by the reservoir lakes in the near-dawn hours when I rode there. (Check out the photos.)

I had learned about the existence of this park in the first half of 2010. Between catching a spot in the required orientation session, remembering to book it, and picking a date that would work for my usual riding buddies, it took me this long to be able to try out a ride there. I did the ride yesterday.

I can see why most riders recommend Willow Creek. While it's not exactly a mind-blowing ride location, in an area that's not exactly known for the choicest trail networks for mountain biking, this is a "mighty fine" ride option. Those of you who are not from the immediate area are very likely to return home satisfied after a ride at Willow Creek, if you can stomach the driving distance to get there.

I feel pretty good about including this ride on the website. I hope it'll help make this place more popular among the mountain bikers of our region.

I've been wanting to ride Oat Hill Mine Road for quite some time now. It's therefore a bit sad that, when I finally came around to it, I not only made the novice mistake of not checking trail closure information in advance and ended up doing the ride on the last weekend of the annual closure of the portion of the trail that's beyond the junction with Palisades Trail, but I also attempted the ride with not enough time left to get even to that junction. As a result, the ride route I've been meaning to make available on this site ended up being much shorter than a normal Oat Hill Mine Road ride.

However, I'm not going to let that stop me from adding the ride to the website. I think it will still be worthwhile to provide the location, parking, and the GPS track of at least the beginning of the full ride, not to mention an admittedly partial photo set to show what can be expected.

I loved the ride, by the way. The climb is manageable enough to be a juicy challenge, and the descent is a pure blast! This one is definitely not to be missed.

This weekend was like an early instance of the warm and sunny fall days in San Francisco. Using that opportunity and the excuse that the "Golden Gate to Sausalito" ride on this site did not have a full photo set, I repeated this ride. All of these additional photos (over 100) are now available on the ride page.

This weekend I repeated the "Braille Trail" ride described on this site. It was my first ride at Demo since I started this website and, therefore, also my first opportunity to add the long-overdue missing photos of the Demo Forest rides. So, that's what I did. Not only did I add a full set of photos to that particular ride, but I also added slideshows to the other two Demo rides on the site made up of subsets of these photos representing their portions that overlap with this ride.

I also took this opportunity to expand the ride description of all three rides. (Quite a bit of the language is common across all three anyway; since a good amount of the routes are also in common.) The route of the Braille Trail ride is also renewed; its old version used to start further up Hihn's Mill Road from a spot where the road used to be closed due to a slide. The new route starts from the parking lot in the park, representing what's arguably a more "normal" Demo ride.

Recently, I noticed that there is one flaw in the GPS tracks that are downloadable from this site. This was something that would affect users who download a GPS track from this site and upload it into a Garmin unit in order to view it on its screen. Its effect could range from an annoying additional step that is required to make the track useful (for tech-savvy users), to complete unusability of the track for this purpose (for the less-geekily-inclined among you). I've now updated all the GPS tracks available on the site with fixed versions that should not be subject to this problem. If you're not concerned with this scenario, that's all you'd need to know. Those who might have been affected by the issue or who have enough technical curiosity to want to know what the problem was may read on for the details.

The story starts with the way Garmin GPS units treat the tracks they "save". Your unit may have recorded, say, 1300 trackpoints in its track log during a ride, but it would simplify this track to something like 500 track points when you save it as a named track in the unit's memory. For those who'd want to obtain a saved copy of the original unsimplified track, the trick is to download all the tracks from the GPS. This would download all the named tracks that were saved, plus a track (or a few) named "ACTIVE LOG". That last one would have the original unsimplified 1300-point track log contents in the example above. I've been extracting and using this unsimplified track from my Garmin unit to make it downloadable from this site, so that the ride route could be represented with the highest detail level possible.

The minor problem started from the fact that I didn't rename this "ACTIVE LOG" track in the GPX files that I make available on the site. The issue is that, when you upload a track by that name back onto a Garmin unit, the device makes the track part of the current contents of the in-progress track log, rather than treat it as a saved track. This could be a problem in that (1) you wouldn't see the track in your saved track list on the unit, making it look like the upload may have failed; (2) if you were to clear your track log before starting your ride in order to record your own ride's track, you'd be clearing all the track points of the uploaded track as well; and (3) the Garmin models I've experienced so far show the active track log as a faintly dotted breadcrumb trail rather than the solid line of a saved track, making it harder to distinguish on the screen. The way to work around this is to edit the GPX file you've downloaded to make the name of the track in the file something else, before uploading it into your Garmin. While this could be easily done by any old text editor, it may not be obvious to all users, and it's still a hassle even for those who may understand what's going on and know what to do.

So, this problem is no more. I went through all the tracks available on the website and renamed the track defined in them. From now on, all of these tracks (and those of all future rides) should show up directly as a saved track on all Garmin models.

There aren't too many good beginner mountain bike rides in our area. A lot of them are either too urban, too tame, or have at least one or two climbs that are too difficult. This one is an honest-to-goodness mountain bike ride (other than being purely on fire roads and having no climbs) out in the middle of a wilderness, while still being suitable for most beginners. Therefore, this was a ride I've been meaning to add it to this website since day one. I just didn't have a good GPS track or any photos for it. Thankfully, it's a quick enough ride that I could get it in before work on a weekday morning (if I could muster the will to wake up hours before sunrise). So, that is just what I did today (finally) and the ride is now part of this website; description, GPS track, photos, geotagged map, and all...