This past Sat., there was a ride and BBQ thrown by and for people who worked on the new trail at Water Dog. I went for that ride instead of our normal Sat. morning ride.
Boy, it was a lot of climbing. We started at the normal spot at the end of Carlmont, but instead of riding around to the top of the fire road, we started up the eastern slope, to the street above the park. We then rode up that street to another trailhead on the southeastern side of the park. There’s a singletrack I’d never ridden before that leads to the 13 switchbacks. We rode up those (actually not as hard as you’d think), and around until we connected to the new trail. We rode the new trail forward, and eventually ended back down at Carlmont again. We rode up the car trail (the singletrack we usually ride down) up to the point where we normally fork down, and instead took another option down, which is a pretty technical singletrack descent to the lake. At some point, we rode up culvert drop and down the CCC trail (that’s the one with the 3 steep singletrack climbs we usually do).
In any case, we rode every piece of singletrack in the park, sometimes twice, and did almost everything we usually do in the opposite direction we usually do it. There were at least 2 new singletracks I hadn’t seen before. Lots of fun, and my legs held out. Took 2-2.5 hours to do. We’ll have to get out for some exploring with these folks some time.
The BBQ after was pretty good. Turns out that the woman who I took an intermediate skills class from with Erik a few years back was there (she’s the former coach of the Stanford MTB team). Turns out she’s married to the guy who fitted me for my bike at Trail Head Cyclery (who also showed up to the BBQ). Small world.