lake natoma trails

Yesterday afternoon I went to a barbecue for one of my exchange student friends who was leaving Davis. She had prepared an amazing array of food and invited a whole bunch of her exchange student friends. And afterwards we went for round 2 of desserts and drinks. One thing I noticed, everytime I hang out with Korean grad students, there’s always a second round that always ends pretty late, and I always end up waking up feeling pretty crappy the morning afterwards.

In the morning I went to church with Osmond in Elk Grove. He wanted to check out a church that was more charismatic, so we went to a fairly large one called Harvest church. They had a guest speaker named Donnie Moore, who works in youth ministry, organizing camps and youth revivals around the country. The service was pretty loud, the speaker was pretty fiery, but somehow I still fell asleep during the service. Osmond said that it was a really good message, and it really spoke to him. Afterwards we had lunch at an Indian buffet.

So anyways despite having hiked and biked a good amount yesterday, by the afternoon I was feeling quite tubby. And by then my social batteries were pretty much running on empty, since I had pretty much been hanging out and meeting new people all weekend. So I decided to head out and go mountain biking on my own, to get in some exercise and also get in some alone time to recharge my batteries.

I decided to check out the trails at Lake Natoma. I had heard they were pretty good from Ray’s coworker, Todd. I didn’t know where the best place was to start, and I didn’t want to pay for parking, so I scoured for a good place to park on Google maps, ending up at the intersection of Sunset and Main.

It turns out that wasn’t a bad place to start, since there were a good amount of connecting trails nearby.

There was a good amount of singletrack, which I was missing yesterday. This is the kind of stuff I like, and the stuff that my hardtail 1×9 bike is made for, fast windy trails that aren’t too technical or rocky.

There are nice views of the lake from the trail. I’m not sure what PD stands for. Maybe ‘Pretty Decent?’ Cuz that’s what the trails have been so far.

Parts of the trail run almost right onto shore.

The trail I took runs along the cliffs above the American River Parkway. There are nice views of Folsom from there.

Because the American River Parkway runs close by, I’ve road biked dozens of times in the area. But I’ve never crossed this bridge until today. You don’t see stuff like this on the paved road bike paths.

I’ve crossed this bridge dozens of times on the road bike, but I never noticed this little lookout point until today. It’s a pretty cool spot to watch the kayakers on the lake and the bikers and runners on the bridge.

After crossing the bridge I found the trails on the eastern side of the lake. The trails out on this side were pretty flat and hard packed, so I cranked out miles pretty quickly until I got a flat. Usually it’s pretty hard to find what caused a flat, but in this case it was pretty obvious.

On this side of the lake there are picnic tables along the trail at pretty regular intervals. So I walked to one and fixed my flat while admiring the beautiful view.

So now that I’ve finally checked out the trails at Lake Natoma, I’ve more or less ridden all the major trails in the Folsom-Auburn area. I mapped out all the trails in Google maps. There’s about sixty miles between all of them, so it’s conceivable that I could ride all of them in one day.