Golden Hour on Russian Ridge

Even by Bay Area standards, Russian Ridge Open Space District is surpassingly beautiful. The views and vantages, already striking, acquire a mythic, timeless quality as the sun heads west: The succession of forested and grassy ridges become silhouettes offset by translucent haze gathering in the vales between, the Pacific Ocean a silver-gold expanse beyond.

This is mellow cross-country riding: The fire roads are well-behaved, and climb along the bare shoulders of the ridge, with occasional, very pleasant singletrack connectors. Technically, it’s not challenging — no chunk, no gnar, no serious rock gardens, no black diamonds nor even hard blues.

But Russian Ridge gets you some proper climbing, and just happens to be embedded in a landscape that crosses over into enchantment.

There’s also some more extensive, flowy singletrack and doubletrack that takes you down through shaded oak-forest interiors — Ancient Oaks Trail being the chief exemplar. We took it clockwise right from the eastern end of Ridge Trail. (Doing it counterclockwise risks an absurdly steep and dull fire road climb).

Ancient Oaks and its connecting trails are not technical terrain, but you pass through lovely tree tunnels, and a cooling, creek-formed hollow that in spring is probably a gushing, rushing, rain-fed paradise.

While this time of year — right at the start of November — the creeks are mostly quiet trickles, the trails and forest floor are littered with fallen leaves and acorns: subtle evidence of autumn in a region where the passage of the seasons appears more like a slow progression of moods, rather than the temperature extremes of your usual, headlong plunge from summer to fall to winter.

Acorns, of course, were a staple food for the Indigenous communities that lived in the region for thousands of years before the Europeans arrived, and there’s some interpretive signage in the Mindego parking area that gives a little glimpse of how those historic, intersecting, and still profoundly present communities lived on the land.

To regain the grassy heights of the primary, east-west Ridge Trail, follow Charquin Trail up from Ancient Oaks. If you plan it right, the climbs throughout this ride range from mellow to steep, but tend to be shorter, for the most part never really sustained. Though I am feeling yesterday’s ride as I write this, and got an excellent workout, it’s perfectly reasonable to make this a two-lap ride, if you’ve got the breath and legs for it.

(Don’t let this give the impression that you’re not going to work. We got more than 2,200 feet of climbing on this ride, and my colleague, on his first trail ride all year, walked his bike a fair amount. It’s just that if you’re used to climbing, you’re still going to have plenty of juice by the end.)

After climbing up out of the oak forests, at the western end of Ridge Trail, you’ll come to a marker that sends you north around a hilltop and a decent stretch of rolling woodland singletrack, with some mild technical treats — ruts, rocks, roots. A spot of fun! The trail crosses back before long, around the far side of the hilltop and down into to a winding set of more rocky, rutted singletrack switchbacks, all of it easement through a succession of privately held lands. Nothing serious here, but nice to have a bit o’ savory after all the sweetness up on the ridge.

At this point the Ridge Trail and rocky switchbacks end at Rapley Ranch Road, a proper, working dirt road, with the trailhead just a few hundred yards down from Skyline Boulevard. We could have turned around and ridden back over the ridge, but instead followed Skyline a couple miles north — an unpleasant experience that saw us buzzed by weekenders taking the curves at speed in sports cars and motorcycles. Can’t say I blame ‘em — if I owned a 911 I’d open things up on Skyline whenever I could — but it still was noisy AF and marred by the stank of exhaust.

Our reward was to finally cross Skyline and go west down Crazy Pete’s Road into Coal Creek Open Space Preserve, which took us away from the asphalt and into the forested gullies and ravines of the Santa Cruz Mountains.

This is still live oak country, with none of the redwoods you’ll find in abundance elsewhere in the area. We followed Crazy Pete’s to Alpine Road (actually a trail, and apparently the remnant of the area’s old Spanish dirt track), and then up Meadow Trail to re-cross Skyline and get back on Ridge Trail east to the parking lot.

This whole stretch through Coal Creek OSD is where we saw the more interesting technical features. I’d peg ‘em as ranging from hard green to mild blue in terms of complexity, and never quite as much of it as I’d like — but they were more nice dashes of salt amidst the sugar. These include some bouncy, rooty downhills, and some peppery, washed-out stretches of ruts and exposed rock that were super fun to climb up through at speed, however brief their duration.

There’s also a gorgeous old bridge passing by an enormous, house-sized chunk of bedrock jutting out from the slope past what I assume is Coal Creek. Pictures don’t quite capture its beauty, of course, but it’s a bracing aesthetic interruption of the landscape, bracketed on its southern side by a jumbly wall of rock cloven by the creek, which is clotted with leaves and a big fallen branch, and trickles down into a shaded pool below. Trying to imagine the rushing, splashing cascade during rainy season.

There is apparently some more singletrack in Russian Ridge along Hawk Ridge Trail, with a bit of a rock garden and some fairly serious exposure, but we didn’t check that out this time around.

Our final stretch, riding east along Ridge Trail from Skyline, took us through the golden hour. The low angle of the sun, the moon climbing up over the crest against the still-blue sky, and the gathering ocean haze made it all fucking luminous. We are blesséd creatures of earth and air and light, and lucky to have preserved this land, and live so fully in its embrace.

It’s a half-hour drive from downtown Mountain View to get to Russian Ridge — a winding and quite climby bit of asphalt full of roadies laboring up in their spandex, astride their skinny-tire steeds. It’s serious work, and I admire their achievement and incredible fitness, but, with all the vehicular traffic passing by, the car exhaust they must be breathing, it reminds me that rarely do I see road cyclists actually smiling and visibly having a good time.

I’ll take the dirt kiss any day.

RIDE STATS:

• 12.82 miles

• 2,238’ of climbing

• 2hrs 17m riding time (but we took like four hours to get around to it)

• Water: 24 oz. bottle, with extra just in case; not a super sweaty ride, but in hot weather, and with any plans to extend, bring a full hydro pack and some electrolyte tabs.

• Food: Plum, banana, dried figs, roasted pumpkin seeds; again, not a lot, but I had a big breakfast of two eggs, toast and cut fruit w/ grape nuts and nonfat greek yoghurt w/ almond milk. If we had extended beyond 12 miles, a PBJ on rye or wheat + more fruit would’ve been required.

BONUS PIX