Steve's Mountain Bike Page
Turlock, California

Annadel State Park, Santa Rosa, CA

November 11, 2003

Since today is veterans day and I am a veteran, I figured I deserved a good ride. Annadel has quickly become a favorite of mine and I wanted to explore it some more. Tym, a Biology student, expressed an interest in joining me. I told him we would do 5-6 hours and it would be mostly uphill. But the uphills were nothing I couldn't handle as long as we didn't worry about the pace. The purpose of all that uphill was so we could do three really cool downhills. Tym is primarily a downhiller and he was excited about the downhills I described to him. He met me at the park and we started up the Warren Richardson fire road, which gave us a good warm-up. Tym is considerably younger, stronger, and much more skilled than I. However, about 3/4 of the way up the fire road he discovered he really didn't bring the appropriate bike. He had a 1-9, one front ring and 9 gears in the back. Since he lacked really low gears he had trouble going uphill all day! 

We then went up the South Burma trail and headed out and then down the Lawndale trail, about 3 miles of incredible narrow, downhill singletrack though a Redwood forest. We then took the paved roads and Schultz trail up to the Marsh trail via the Ridge trail. That was all uphill for about 90 minutes. Tym had to push his bike up much of it. After about three hours he was pretty tired and cramping up. We then did the brief climb to the top of the South Burma trail and we were rewarded with some fantastic, often rocky, very long, downhill singletrack which dumped us back on the Warren Richardson fire road. 

We then took the North Burma trail, a pretty cool short twisty singletrack, to the intersection of the Live Oak trail. I tried to get Tym to take the 10 minute or so plunge down the rest of the North Burma to Channel Drive but he resisted. I had planned on cutting back to, and going down the cool, rocky singletrack of Orchard and Cobblestone back to the parking lot. I have a terrible memory, or perhaps it is just selective, blocking out unpleasant experiences. I didn't recall there was still quite a bit of uphill on the Live Oak and other trails before we got to the Orchard-Cobblestone downhill. I think Tym started to get a bit annoyed since we seemed to do quite a bit more uphill. However he is primarily a downhiller and once we flew down Orchard-Cobblestone to the parking lot I think he mostly forgot about all the uphills. 

The weather was spectacular, perhaps 65 degrees (F), and the trails were in pretty good condition. However, recent rains made it a bit slick in spots early in the day. But the trail dried out fairly quickly throughout the day. I probably overdid it a bit on the knees but hopefully they'll settle down in a few days. But all the uphill climbing was worth it for those three huge sections of downhill on some great singletrack! Here is my route map. And here is a map of the park. 

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