It might have been 11 years since we last did that loop (oops), so I figured we'd go for another on. That wasn't counting on the friendly open space district folks who decided to close the entire area to bikers and horses in order to avoid people having potential accidents and ending up in the hospital. Sigh, that felt heavy handed. On the plus side, the area was re-opened to bikes 6 days later.
Here's the track that shows how close we got to making the normal loop, but the detour we had to take:
(click on the garmin recording for more stats and a bigger map)
we biked by the reservoir which had finally gotten a bit of water
and then made it to Garrods Farm just to find out that the trail access was closed :(
We ended up biking all the way around Eden Road, losing all the altitude we had just painfully gained, and took another entrace to the park, that was walking only:
at least the view was nice
After over an hour going around including a steep way back up we had to walk in parts, we got back to the same point we were had, had e been allowed to cross:
and we resumed the ride to an exit that was totally open to bikers
I plotted a route to McClellan and Stevens Creek Trail
We ended up with a much longer ride than planned, but it was still nice.
We've biked up to the top of Montebello a couple of times (pretty tough bike ride), and I've also driven up multiple times, it's a fun drive in the mclaren, and only 12mn from home to the top if no one is in my way :) I had been thinking about going across to PageMill one day, but have yet to do this.
That said, I figured we'd drive up the top, hike across, so we did. Unfortunately there is no legal parking up the road, there is a "reserved" parking lot, but it's behind a locked gate to stop people like us from hiking from the top of the road :(
in the meantime, I used a perfectly good parking spot, outside of the sign saying no to park there
this cute hungry bunny was there both times we walked by
FAA repeater which I've used while flying
We eventually got to the beginner backpacker camp, which was closed for covid-19 of course. A bunch of turkeys were roaming around:
We found a bit more wildlife, the deer were pretty skittish though:
interestingly, there are more squirrels in our yard that we found there
jennifer found a nice hummingbird
Nice flowers:
The trail was pretty nice:
by the time we got to skyline/pagemill, it got more foresty
getting to the Pagemill/Montebello parking lot
We ended up getting to skyline, and crossing over to horseshoe lake:
It was then time to get back to the Montebello trail back. I didn't quite plan for the elevation change, turns out we went down about a thousand feet before going back up:
trail back up
On the way back, we found our same little bunny, it was easy to recognize due to the neutering clip in the ear:
Eventually we made it back to the parking lot that is nicely closed to the regular public:
All in all, it was a 5.5h 13.5 mile hike, a bit more than planned with the extra loop I added, but worth it:
