Steve's Mountain Bike Page
Turlock, California

Fort Ord, Monterey

May 10, 2003

Fort Ord Memories

I've ridden at Fort Ord the past two weeks and I always seemed to be going in the opposite direction as everybody else. Last week I nearly had two collisions. So this time I decided to try riding some of my favorite routes in reverse, and also visit some areas I haven't been to in nearly three years. In August of 2000 Neil and I took one of our first bike trips from the eastern gate to the Redrock Ridge trail, which we found much too technical to ride. Neil tried one steep hill and he did his very first endo on it. Today it was déjà vu for him. We started at the east gate and made our way to Redrock Ridge via trails 30, 3 and 36. We took a few short detours here and there to dodge some serious poison oak. With numerous steep drops and descents, and bare, exposed and rutted sandstone, Redrock is highly technical. We both did a lot more than the last trip and I even did a two foot drop, my biggest ever. Neil did virtually everything but he again managed to do an endo by getting caught in a deep rut on the way down a steep hill. He landed flat on his face and it looked very bad. However, he was just a bit shaken and he only suffered a sore hand for the rest of the trip. I did happen to catch most of it on tape so it is included at the end of the video. We then proceed endlessly up trails 49 and 11 to do the Sea Otter singletrack counterclockwise. After that we proceeded down Skyline Road to do the Goat Trail (41), a long stretch of mostly downhill singletrack. We then made our way back, completing a huge loop. This was a killer ride since we seemed to go up every steep hill and trail at Fort Ord. In a five hour ride I'd be surprised if there were more than 30 minutes of good downhill. Here is the route map. The color coding on the map is as follows: red - singletrack, green - singletrack/doubletrack, yellow- dirt/gravel road. 

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