Redwood Rain

Some days it’s a lot easier to plan getting out on the bike than it is actually doing it. There are nights I wheel my bike out from the basement and place it strategically against the kitchen table with all my gear around it. I put in my phone calendar Ride with an alarm wake-up of 6:30. And yet curiously, 6:30 comes and goes the next morning and I’m still in bed. And when I finally get up to press the button on my Mr. Coffee, there’s Matilda, still leaning happily against the kitchen table. Funny how that happens.

And then there are the rides I anticipate for days. I’m driving around Marin on Thursday and Friday between patients and I keep seeing bikers in their sleek kits and feeling envious as they ride by my car. How come I’m driving round seeing dying folks while you are powering along Lucas Valley Road towards Big Rock? Saturday night I put the bike out and at 6 on Sunday I’m up, making coffee, and getting my kit on. Sunglasses, bike gloves, sunblock, snacks, water...

Today was such a day. I put the call out Tuesday to all my riding buddies that I was planning to do the Pine Mountain/Stinson/Bolinas-Fairfax loop. It’s only about 40 miles but a lot of steep climbing. Cory was the only one who could make it, and she was going to peel off at Ridgecrest to Bolinas to see some friends. That left me doing more than half the ride alone. Ok, so. The mix of riding with a buddy and alone was perfect for me.

Cory met me near my home at 8 on Sunday and we set off up Pine Mountain. We had so much to catch up on that the ride up the two initial hills went by without us even noticing and all too soon we were at Ridgecrest where we hugged goodbye and she headed off down to Bolinas.

This was where the ride got really interesting for me. We had been riding in increasing fog up Tam, but at Ridgecrest it was the kind of fog that actively rains down on you. The road was wet and slick and as I set off along the Seven Sisters ridge, the fog was intense. It’s often described as a blanket, but this was more like a thick veil. It was blowing, and the road I knew had such stunning views down the mountain on both sides was completely socked in. After a few yards, I realized that I was in this surreal, white, blowing, enclosed world with visibility reduced to about thirty feet ahead. I started to laugh - what a metaphor for life! Only knowing what lay thirty feet ahead...it made such a farce of all the planning, the To Do lists, the stress of wondering how to pay for Jessie’s college...

I started to ride with a new, acutely heightened awareness of just the thirty feet around me. Occasionally, cars loomed out of the fog, other riders loomed, I couldn’t even make out their faces. There was nobody going my direction. On top of the mountain, I rode through the mini rain showers that redwood trees create. Redwoods gather the surrounding fog so it collects on their needles as moisture. When it’s too heavy, it falls off as rain. So you ride along dry road and then under a redwood it’s seriously raining. I stood under some of the trees and let them rain down on me. It was fragrant, fresh, and I thought about all the acid and toxic rain in the world and how clean this was. It was cold up there, but I didn’t care. On the long, fogbound stretches of road I stood up in the saddle, laughed out loud, even gave the odd whoop. I love my life! The redwoods didn’t care, they just shook off their rain showers and went on coolly converting carbon dioxide to oxygen, in spite of the moron on the bike.

The ride down to Stinson Beach was cold and exhilarating, a long downhill with many switchbacks. Close to town, the vegetation gets sort of tropical, big banana leaves, and the fog cleared enough to afford views of the lengthy stretch of Stinson. I was anticipating my hot coffee at the French guy’s stand outside the Stinson Beach Deli. He did not disappoint. My hands were almost too numb to pay him, but his coffee coursed through my entire body and thawed me out just nicely for the five miles south along Highway One, hugging the Bolinas Lagoon with a very narrow shoulder and many passing trucks before I turned with relief onto the mostly deserted Bourne Trail fire road.

It’s almost an hour climb with very little respite till you hit the Ridgecrest/Fairfax-Bolinas junction. It was extremely quiet, I only encountered three other riders, and I had to practice my habit of looking only at the twenty feet ahead of me in case I started to think of all that I still had to climb. I stopped a couple of times and looked down at the Bolinas Lagoon far below. Look how far I’ve climbed! Keep going. Like Dory in Finding Nemo, keep on swimming, just keep swimming...

Eventually, I hit the Ridgecrest junction. It was actively raining up there still, cold and blowing. The microclimates on Tam have to be experienced to be believed. I knew that by the time I hit the Alpine Lake dam, just a 10-minute ride downhill, it would be sunny and hot. 

The ride down to the dam is what’s known as a technical downhill. Basically, if you don’t brake, you’re screwed. And you have to know when to brake, and brake often. And you have to avoid braking too hard, so as not to fishtail on the slick road. And you have to hog the center of the road and force motorists to follow behind you, because trying to hug the right side to allow cars to pass is just too dangerous, too much debris, too many unknowns at such a speed. This tends to be unpopular with motorists who have never ridden the mountain on a road bike, despite the fact that bikers are generally doing 25-30mph, very little slower than any car could safely drive that road. I got yelled at today by a motorist. Try to ride on the right. Try it yourself, buddy, then yell at me.

The dam is my point of feeling like I’m getting close to home, like I’ve definitely broken the back of the ride. Despite the nearly five hours of riding behind me, I got my usual surge of energy on the road back up Pine Mountain. It’s a fairly easy uphill, and I know its every twist and turn intimately now. There’s a wonderful ease to riding a road you really know. There’s that little spritz of water from the horse trough that always makes me smile as it cools my legs before one of the bigger climbs. There’s the section of road with the one lane and the stop signs where I never have to stop because there are never any cars. There’s the last bit of hill before the gate comes into view that tells me I’m at Azalea Hill, the crest of Pine Mountain, and it’s all glorious downhill from here, with stunning views of the East Bay, till I hit Deer Park Villa at the bottom of the hill and the 2-minute coast to my house.

It’s hard to describe the euphoria of reaching my gate, clipping out, and wheeling my bike in after such a long ride. Everything in my body is saying I did it! I can barely stow my bike before getting in the shower, and the hot water just magnifies the endorphin high of the ride. Redwood rain is just wonderful, but I have to say a hot shower after a long ride beats it any day...