Recon ride NORCAL

Today I spent a lot of my day working with the US Coast Guard so I decided that it would be quite late and long to drive home.  So maybe it was a perfect opportunity to start some recon of some of the northern sections of the Bay Ridge Trail.  The northern area is the part that seems to have the biggest gaps of non-dedicated or non existent trails.  It's also going to be the tail end of our ride since we decided to go counter clockwise starting near Novato, CA Marin county.

I decided to traverse from Helen Putnam County park in Petaluma on the West Entrance and go through Petaluma and up Sonoma Mountain to the easy to figure out the connector to Jack London State park.  

This was a nice ride, Helen Putnam was super dry the wheat grass was waving in the wind, golden and crispy sounding under my wheels.

  The trails were very dry clay and signs of previous water runoff left filled small rideable ruts in the clay.  The views east or west were beautiful Petaluma has some of my favorite hill country anywhere.

 As I descended into a neighborhood on the east side of the park I asked people if there were trail options into Petaluma but no one could offer an option.  The ride into Petaluma was so nice, old historic neighborhoods leading to the quaint downtown where I stopped at Bici bike shop.  Standing there I saw at least 6 young people all wearing NorCal High School MTB league shirts, reminder the first guy to do what I'm calling the Bubba Ride is the Director of the NICA High School MTB league, so it was cool to see.  These guys helped me find city trails Lynch Creek trail,

to get across town to Sonoma Mountain.  No one offered legal ideas for getting from the base of Sonoma Mountain over to Jack London park so I took some ideas and hit the road.

After Lynch Creek I reached the East side of Petaluma

, there I took Sonoma Mountain road, a road people said was a hellish climb but rideable road

.  This was NO JOKE, the climb was very scenic but I found myself zig zagging in parts

.  I did clean the whole climb though.  Once at the top the road ended quite close to the park

, separated by private property and "ideas" furnished by locals.  At that point my time had run out, if I rode longer I wouldn't get back on time to get my car out of the park lot.

All in all a great bit of recon and connection of trails, locals were great and weather was awesome!

More to come

Serge