Rode for six days straight in northern California with Russ on what proved to be a really grand mountain bike tour that stretched from the Bay Area to the high Sierras and back to the coastal redwood forests. We both felt like we'd died and gone to California.

Our first stop was Santa Cruz, where we rode in three areas -- Wilder Ranch, El Corte de Madera, and the Forest of Nicene Marks. All three are easily accessible from Santa Cruz, yet each is distinctly different in personality and setting.

Wilder, which abuts the University of California at Santa Cruz campus, is an extremely well-groomed playground of considerable scope and range. You would be hard pressed to ride it all in a day, but very little of it could be called technical or difficult by Galbraith standards.

Two trails that qualified as interesting were the Enchanted Forest (which is a fairly steep NW style plunge into a deeply shaded canyon with a couple not-too-scary root and rock drops along the way) and an unnamed trail above the Old Cabin Trail (which featured a series of short, half round log bridges pitching back and forth across a narrow twisting little creek).

Russ and I put in nearly six hours at Wilder on 12/3, riding with several groups of locals and enjoying the general feeling of camaraderie that was reminiscent of Galbraith. There were some exotic bikes on display too: I saw an Ibis Bow-Ti and several exotic custom hardtails such as a Brodie. We both felt like Vikings from the north, though, since none of the riders we encountered was as strong as we were.

On 12/4, we rode next at Corte de Madera, north of Santa Cruz above La Honda. Corte offered some big redwoods (including the 1800 year old "Methuselah Tree") and a more mountainous setting. Again we were fortunate to connect with a skilled and knowledgeable local rider. Kevin Conde (a young environmental sciences graduate who is working as a Sega game rep in the Valley) served as an excellent guide for the first two-plus hours of our ride.

Nicest of all the Corte trails to my taste was a one called Resolution, which featured a very mellow singletrack climbing grade (with lots of cool swoops) climaxing in 50-60 yards of slightly technical climbing over rocks at the top. We ended the day and the ride at the high lookout just off Skyline, where we could see the Pacific gleaming in the sun far below off San Gregorio.

Next, on 12/5, we sallied south of Santa Cruz to the Forest of Nicene Marks and the Soquel Demonstration Forest above. The climb on the road to the top of Nicene Marks is easily the mellowest up on an unpaved road I have ever encountered. Smooth as a sigh, with a hardpacked sand surface, the road allowed you to work on pure climbing techniques to your hearts' content. Since there were no obstacles in the roadway at all, you could try all sorts of angles and gearings.

I ultimately came to prefer climbing up to the top of each banked curve early into it, and then spinning around the next straightaway. Even though the turn usually had a little more climbing to do to make it to the top of its arc when I finished my first move, I could usually shift down a gear and accelerate. The technique required me to ride the widest (and therefore longest) path around the turn, but it enabled me to carry speed best, and carrying your speed is definitely the name of the game in most of the California riding we encountered.

At the top, we got another killer view of the Pacific, and the entrance to the Soquel Demonstration Forest, where we actually encountered our first log rollover in the Santa Cruz area. I rode it several times. Further on, the trail offered a couple of interesting rocky descents, which we shortly had to climb as well when it turned out that we ran out of daylight on the Sulfur Creek Trail. Next time, we decided we'd go down the singletrack Tractor Trail and then climb back up out on the Sulfur Creek Trail. This was our biggest day of the trip in terms of verts, with more than 3,700 in a five plus hour day.

The rip down the Nicene Marks road was major fun, since the road is gated to prevent mechanized access and there are no horses allowed either. I bet we hit 40 mph several times. On the way down, I scared a local rider by hoping up on a log at the first lookout, riding it for a short ways, and then jumping off into a track stand to admire the view. Then a little further down we encountered another skilled local rider on a very tricked out grey Santa Cruz Superlight.

He showed us a a bunch of very cool trails on the right of the road just below the one lane bridge (I remember one was called Rusty Car). There were several steep short ups and a couple drops, including the one at the top of the singletrack where it leaves the road. My left calf had been twitching since the climb back out of Sulfur Creek, but I was able to handle just about everything our guide threw at us (the exceptions were a 4' high Evil Twin-like root/tree hopup, and a steep soft sand bank where I took the wrong line). At the end, our guide brought us out a couple blocks from the shopping center where we parked just as the sun was setting. Another great day!

On 12/6, we rode in Marin County  at China Camp, which is located on the Bay between Mill Valley and Petaluma, and allowed us to ride from tidewater on the San Francisco Bay into the mountains that reach their summit on Mt. Tamalpais. Because of the political hassles and restrictions on Mt. Tam (the cradle of mountain biking in the US), we were advised we'd have more fun at China Camp, and in fact the ride proved to be a ton of fun. As we found everywhere in the Bay Area, the trails were micro-groomed so that you could go into blind corners and ASSUME that the sweet line would be not just rideable, but buff. Another thing about California riding: all trenches are benign. You can ride right down them without fear of the sort of malignancies that are so often seen in the NW (big alder logs laying length-ways, etc.).

As our confidence began to increase, we began to ride the bermed up corners higher and high until... well, until I came into a corner far too fast with the steep face where the trail had been cut into the hill staring me right in the face. My instantaneous, improvised move was to throw the bike up the steep face where the trail cut through the hill, hunker down and apply power from deep in the pocket (which is of course one of the things that is always a joy on the Jekyll). To my semi-amazed pleasure, I shot through the turn at maybe twice the speed I could have gotten any other way. Whoa! Make a note! That would make a great spot for a photo. I have to hasten to add, though, that this is California's main problem. The trails as so buff that mountain bikers just FLY down them, often too fast and too close to others on the trails.

The next day, on 12/7, we rode in the high Sierras above Downieville in the headwaters of the Feather River. Here we climbed a broad fire road to the snow line and then retraced our steps. We had hoped to reach Chimney Rock, and a single track trail to loop back to our starting point, but were stopped maybe 400 verts short by snow on the trail. If we'd brought our Gore-Tex over socks with us (they were in the van), we probably gotten to the rock. Instead, we turned around and rode down a portion of the famous Downieville downhill, which runs 27 miles in its entirety. This was more like skiing than any mountain biking I've ever done, because you were constantly cutting back and forth across the fall line on a broad but defined track (like a ski run) which was pointed relentlessly downward (like a ski run) and your turns were a big part of the way you controlled you speed (like a ski run).

On 12/8, we rode at Prairie Creek State Park on the coast just south of Crescent City. In many ways, this last day of the trip was also the best. Certainly the setting was splendid, with countless huge, thousand year old redwoods all around us as we rode for six miles through the park to the begin of our trail -- and what a trail! This singletrack through the redwoods offered first really interesting new  technical riding challenge of the trip -- leaping runoff erosion channels in bedrock slabs on the fly as the trail spiraled steeply through redwoods to the ever louder roar of the Pacific.

It also took us to Fern Canyon, which is easily the most beautiful place I've ever ridden my bike into. The 100 foot deep canyon begins at the back of the beach, and snakes back into the hillside with a stream twisting in the bottom and its walls turned emerald with maiden hair fern and  moss. Russ noted that this must be the absolute ideal native habitat for the maiden hair, which is usually seem as a small peripheral hanger on. We walked our bikes across the gravel bars and then rode them to ford the stream until we reached the far end of the canyon, maybe 150 yards inland.

The last bit of our ride, and our trip, brought us down to the beach and the crashing waves of the Pacific, and then a splendid logging road climb and high speed, swoopy descent to a large herd of all male Roosevelt elk in a meadow along 101 at dusk. After this, we turned north and made it as far as Eugene, where we spent our last night on the road before arriving back in B'ham around 3 pm on 12/9, easily in time for Shanna's choir concert (which I promised I wouldn't miss).

Approximately 13,000 verts combined for the six days of riding (including our first half day at Wilder on 12/2). I am now just 5,000 verts short of my goal for the year -- 400,000 verts climbed in one calendar year.

Vert Quest chronicles "The Man Known As Mongo's" pursuit of the World Record for climbing on a mountain bike, 404,000 vertical feet, or the vertical equivalent of 13 sea-level-to-summit ascents of Mt. Everest during a 12 month period. Mongo's mountain bike climbing tricks are distilled in Mongo's Over-the-top Guide to Climbing.