Steve's Mountain Bike Page
Turlock, California

Boggs Mountain Demonstration Forest, Cobb, CA

November 23, 2003

A week or so ago I heard from Colette (AKA Impy), who wanted me to join a big group ride. However, I hesitate to do big group rides because I'm slower than most and I'm not especially social. She therefore suggested a low key ride at Boggs Mountain Demonstration Forest with Tim (AKA UncleMTB), who lives nearby.  Tim had previously corresponded with me about riding together sometime, and both he and Colette seemed fairly low key, so I agreed. Although both of them were much better riders than I, they were indeed very patient and they didn't seem bothered by my slower pace.

Boggs is a fairly large and very beautiful, primitive State Forest just outside Cobb, California. The area was experiencing record cold temperatures and Tim warned us that it had been getting well below freezing recently. So I came prepared for the worst. However, even though it was at or a little below freezing, it felt surprisingly pleasant most of the day. Probably because there was a lot of climbing, which kept us warm, and the sun felt quite warm. I only wore a fleece pullover over my long sleeved cycling jersey and I didn't even need full fingered gloves. However, the frozen mud and occasional frozen puddle made for some interesting riding.

Rather than list the route details I've indicated them via yellow arrows on the route map. The route consisted of some fantastic, often very narrow singletrack, with many short steep ups and downs, occasionally connected by short stretches of fire road. After a few miles of mostly uphill forest roads we hit some great bumpy downhill singletrack. I heard a "chink" and out of the corner of my eye I saw something shiny so I stopped. It was my keys. To my horror, when I looked at my under the seat bag I discovered the zipper had broken and my wallet was missing! Needless to say, I was quite crestfallen. I did my best to hide it but Colette must have sensed my discomfort because she did her best to reassure me that we'd find the wallet if we just backtracked uphill. After what seemed like several miles of slow walking and biking back up from where we came, I really began to worry. However, when all seemed lost we happened upon two hiker acquaintances of Tim's who had found the wallet! After thanking them as much as I could we then proceeded to have a great ride.

Tim gave us a fairly comprehensive tour of much of the singletrack in the park and he also took us on some brand new trails and a few really cool "unofficial" trails. The latter were often extremely narrow, sometimes barely wider than our handlebars, densely vegetated, quite beautiful, and often challenging. Although I certainly did my share of walking, most people would find most of the park trails not too terribly technical. We occasionally got some really nice extended sections of downhill, and we really flew down them every chance we got. I've included the best downhill's in the video. Unfortunately, Tim was quite a bit faster than Colette and I so he barely showed up in any of the video. After about five hours we started feeling those climbs and we all got a bit cool on the fast downhill's so we were quite content to fly down that last hill to the parking lot. Colette and Tim were a pleasure to ride with and I hope to ride with them again. I highly recommend you ride Boggs if you have the chance. Here is the route map.

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