jaoquin miller / redwood park

Today I had plans to grab dinner with my friend Jason near Berkeley. Since I didn’t have anything planned for the afternoon, I decided to take my mountain bike for a spin in the nearby Oakland Hills. My original plan was to ride in Jaoquin Miller park, but I ended up riding mostly in the adjacent Redwood Regional Park.

It’s been a while since I’ve done a 7shots post, so I’ll combine the trip report with a photographic theme. For this post all the pictures will be diptychs (and one triptych.)

The bad thing about riding in the Oakland hills is that well– we’re in Oakland, which is kind of a high crime area. Apparently there’s been a lot of car break-ins.

It had rained pretty hard on Saturday, so I was worried that the trails would be rutted out. But the trails were so wide that the ruts weren’t a problem at all.

I didn’t realize it at first, but I ended up spending almost all of my day at Redwood Regional Park, instead of Jaoquin Miller park, which is where I had intended to ride. The trails were all well marked, but they were all wide fire roads. Whereas in Jaoquin Miller there’s supposedly some fun singletrack to ride, all of the trails at Redwood Park were multi-use trails, all of the singletrack was illegal to ride, with hefty fines for riding single track or even riding fast.

I ended up getting lost and spent a good part of the day riding on pavement. Thankfully somewhere along the way I found a map of Redwood park. Riding on pavement wasn’t bad, towards the end of the day I rode up Skyline Blvd on my way back to my car. There was a nice view of the bay from that road. I only wish i were on my road bike, which would’ve made the long climbs on the pavement easier. This seems to be a common theme when I ride trails in the bay area. I bring my mountain bike, but end up wishing I was on my road bike instead.

On Skyline Blvd there’s a science center with an observatory. Apparently there’s free viewings on Friday and Saturday evening. This sounds like a good idea for a date to me– mountain biking around the park, grabbing dinner at a nice bistro in Berkeley, then returning to go stargazing at the observatory. I found the observatory, now I just need to find a girl who keeps up on the mountain bike and a nice bistro that doesn’t mind having smelly, sweaty, mud covered guests.

The observatory was only about a half mile from where I parked, and it was still early, so I decided to try and find some more trails to ride. I found a fun little downhill section, which ended up being not so little. It was a seriously fun descent, but it left me several miles away from my car, with a long ascent to get back. This seems to be another theme when I ride– I often find myself lost, miles away from my car, with an exhaustively grueling ride back to my car. People who I’ve ridden trails with before like Geo, LKC and especially DHo know this. In fact it’s probably gotten to the point that when I say, “Hey– there’s this trail I wanna try…” I’m sure by now they understand it to mean, “We are going to get utterly lost and have an exhausting day…”

I didn’t eat anything during my ride, though I guess I consumed a fair amount of calories in the couple of bottles of Gatorade I drank. So I was utterly famished by dinner time. Jason picked a Cajun restaurant in Berkeley, which ended up being pretty awesome. I couldn’t decide between the fried chicken or the gumbo, so I ended up ordering both. And I can’t say no to beignets, so I ended up ordering that for dessert. I’m pretty sure that by the end of the meal I had regained all the calories I had burned during my ride, and then some.