Golden Gate State Park Trail Review Ride Report, Part 1
One of the mistakes I’ve made in the past as a newly self employed individual was working through holidays. Life is too short to work on holidays, and I find that it makes me cranky anyway. So for the 4th of July our crew of 29ers headed out to Golden Gate Canyon State Park to check out the trails.
The night before I did my homework and read some online reviews of the trails. For mountain biking there are basically two loops. We parked at Kriley Pond and rode the western loop, which is best ridden counterclockwise. It consists of Blue Grouse to Mule Deer to Raccoon to Elk and back down Blue Grouse. According to the maps this loop is around 10 miles. The eastern loop is the Mountain Lion loop, and is a more advanced trail. Unfortunately the trails that connect the two loops are reportedly not too mountain bike friendly. So our plan was to ride the first loop, then assess whether we wanted to go for the second loop.
Blue Grouse is a very nice switchback climb with a few rocky technical sections. The Mule Deer trail varies between super technical rocky single track, loose rocky fire road, and loamy pine forest. It offered some challenging climbing on the single speed, but shouldn’t be all that difficult on geared bike. It is mostly all uphill, with one fast rocky road descent in the middle. Mule Deer tops out at one of the main park roads where it meets the Raccoon Trail. We took the longer stretch of Raccoon which provided us with a super fun twisty and fast descent. Raccoon then follows a smooth and wide track that climbs back up to the road. The final descent was on Elk. Elk starts out super fast through the woods. Watch out for the hard right hander before the bridge! I barely braked in time to make the corner, while both Rob and Ryan blasted straight off the trail. Unfortunately Ryan taco-ed his rear wheel, and had to hike to the road and wait to be picked up. He missed out on a beautuful singletrack descent through open fields and wildflowers that reminded me a bit of Crested Butte. This part of the descent was fast and smooth and not very technical. There is a small amount of climbing left before the final quick descent back to the car on Blue Grouse.
So overall this is a great ride and is highly recommended. I would estimate that it is about 70% singletrack. The longish drive to get there and the $5 park fee will probably keep it from becoming a regular ride, but it is definitely worth checking out. The best part of this ride was the lack of crowds, even on a holiday. We were on the trail for over two hours and we didn’t see a single other mountain biker! There were probably 6 or 7 groups of hikers. Luckily we had Ryan’s mechanical to use as an excuse not to ride the longer (13 miles) and more technical Mountain Lion Loop. I’ll be checking that one out for sure very soon!
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here’s the address to the blog about your bike
http://www.rumblestrip.org/2007/06/21/best-cruiser-ever