Wilder Ranch, California, Mountain Biking

Steve's Mountain Bike Page
Turlock, California

Wilder Ranch, California
July 5, 2008

Cohenfive wanted to ride someplace new not too far from home, and I just wanted to do some pedaling without too much technical stuff. So we went to Wilder Ranch, near Santa Cruz, California. We did a lot of fire road climbing intermixed with several trips down the very dark and gnarly Enchanted and Old Cabin trails, which wind through beautiful Redwood groves. Generally, I'm not a big fan of fire roads but it was a very nice day and we had a pretty good time. I had not been to Wilder in about 2 1/2 years and some of the climbs seemed easier than I remembered, and some of the trails seemed a bit shorter. So hopefully that means I'm getting back into shape a bit.

My technical skills have suffered lately and it was not until my second ride down that gnarly Enchanted Trail filled with big exposed Redwood roots, that I rode nearly everything. Climbing out of Old Cabin twice going south was no problem, but we both had quite a bit of trouble climbing out going north. Otherwise Cohenfive seemed pretty strong and he made every other climb, including the long, steep one out of Enchanted.

I was not thinking and I shut off the GPS unit when we returned to the parking lot. However, we added another 1.5 – 2 miles by taking the Bluff Trail out above the ocean. I did not wear the heart monitor on this, my second GPS ride, but I wish I had. Those climbs were long and all the ups and downs really added up to about 4,000 ft of climbing. For more GPS data here are links to MotionBased and mtbguru. We had no specific plan so if you play the route in the Map Player on MotionBased, you'll see us going all over the place and backtracking several times. Here is the trail map. As usual with my P&S camera, most of the photos taken in the dark forests didn't come out. Perhaps Cohenfive had better luck and he will add a few later.

Cohenfive on Enchanted