Category Archives: Northern California Inland

Lumpkin Road

Distance: 61 miles out and back
Elevation gain: 6610 ft

A Best of the Best descent

This is a fine ride through Sierra foothills and forests whose virtues are three:

1. Solitude—the last time I rode it, I saw two cars between the summit and Lumpkin Rd. (20 miles).

2. A 30-mile descent of extraordinary variety—the ride back from the Road 27 summit (28.5 miles) is almost entirely descending, and the road contour is never the same for long.

3. 8.5 miles of the most whee-inducing, roller-coaster stretch of road I know.

The route climbs steeply for 8.5 miles through tiny mountain communities, then traverses the deserted spine of Lumpkin Ridge, then descends for 2 miles to Little Grass Valley Lake, then returns.  The scenery is fine without being special: classic Sierra foothill scrub, then pretty madrone-and-conifer forest, with some views into the forested canyons of Fall River (the stream that supplies the water for world-famous Feather Falls) to the west and the South Fork of the Feather River to the east from Lumpkin Ridge.  the ride out is pretty much 30 miles of climbing, but after the first 8.5 miles it’s never particularly hard.  There are three sensible turn-around points along the way that reduce the work load while preserving the roller coaster, which is in the last 8 miles of the return route and the high point of the ride.

This route (like the alternatives in Adding Miles) is simple to navigate on the road (there are only two turns) but confusing on any map, so follow my directions carefully and ignore what any paper or web map is telling you.  To add to the confusion, all road signage is absent, ambiguous, or hard to see until the summit, 28.5 miles in.

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Clear Lake to Cobb

Distance: 23 miles out and back
Elevation gain: 2430 ft

This is a short, lovely, relatively easy out and back climb and descent—one of the easiest 10-mile climbs you’ll ever do.   It stairsteps with much variety of contour through pretty scenery, then gives you a sweet descent you can really attack on the return.   No bragging rights on this one, no sufferfest—just sweet riding.  To add to your bliss, at the turn-around point is a unique, charming cafe/bakery/bookstore/coffee shop.


(To see an interactive version of the map/elevation profile, click on the ride name, upper left, wait for the new map to load, then click on the “full screen” icon, upper right.)

https://ridewithgps.com/routes/37797217

IMG_7384Begin at the intersection of Hwy 175 and Highway 29, the moderately big highway paralleling the southern shore of Clear Lake.  The stretch of 29 has recently been reworked and expanded, and the base of 175 has been enlarged as well, but you’ll be back to moderate two-lane very soon.

Since our route is steepest in the first couple of miles, you might want to warm up on 29, which is flat or gently sloped in both directions, but it’s big and busy, so it can be disconcerting.

Ride 175 to the tiny mountain town of Cobb, where you turn around and ride back.  Hwy 175 is the main route from Middletown to Clear Lake, so it’s not car-free, but the traffic is light (even on weekends) and the two-lane road offers plenty of passing room.  And the payoff for riding on a “highway” is the road surface is glassy throughout.  The scenery is good, starting in vineyards and deciduous oaks (particularly colorful in the fall) and climbing to lush Coast Range conifers near the top.  The route used to be prettier, but it’s suffered the same population growth as the rest of California and there are a few too many hardscrabble homes with accompanying junkyards.  But it’s still very good.

175 is moderately steep in the first mile, but then it mellows out and you won’t work again until the hill just before Cobb.  You gain 2430 ft in 11 miles, according to Mapmyride, but in fact the climbing feels much easier than the numbers suggest.  The road contour is pleasantly varied, so you never do the same sort of riding for more than about 50 yards.

About 8 miles in you hit the one noticeable hill, 1.3 miles to an obvious summit, followed by a fast, straight 1.5-mile descent into town.  Turn around at the summit if you don’t want to do work, because the climb out of Cobb on the return is noticeable and not particularly interesting or pretty.  But riding to Cobb is worth the effort, because it allows you to visit Mountain High Coffee and Books, on your R just before you intersect with Bottle Rock Rd. in a little strip mall (easy to overlook), a delightful coffee/smoothie/bakery/sandwich/breakfast eatery/aroma therapy/book store which makes for a perfect mid-ride pit stop.  This place is one of my favorite little stores anywhere.  It sells about 100 used books, all of them hand-selected and worth reading, with a children’s book section, big easy chairs for extended browsing, and outside tables for lunch munching.

The ride back from the summit is very special.  It’s never straight, but it’s not twisty, and the pitch is just steep enough that you can get up some real speed (in places you’ll touch 30 mph) but never so steep that you have to back off and brake.  I love descents like this, where you can really charge the hill, press the pace, and pedal hard.

In 2015 the Valley Fire burned tens of thousands of acres south of Clear Lake.  The fire burned on three sides of Cobb, but the town and our stretch of Hwy 175 were largely undamaged.  There is still some signs of the fire damage in the last couple of miles before Cobb (suspiciously thin forest, lots of 10″ tree plantings on the hillsides), but most of the terrain is green again now.

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Hwy 175: love that glassy road surface

Adding Miles:  You can continue on 175 to Middletown.  It doesn’t begin to match the interest or beauty of what we’ve already ridden, but it’s pleasant enough—bigger, straighter, more open, more developed—and just past Cobb there’s a substantial descent (1700 ft in 5.5 miles, c. 7%) you want to make sure you want to climb if you’re doing an out and back.

The other riding around Clear Lake is plentiful, popular, and consistently good once you’re off the main highways.  The hills south of Clear Lake are a warren of good roads, all much like Hwy 175—pretty, a little trafficky, never flat, never severely steep.  It’s easy to make up loops.  Bottle Rock Rd., which parallels our ride just to the west, is a little bigger, straighter, and busier than 175 (or was the day I rode it), and it has a 3-mile slog of a climb—straight, unvaried of pitch, and downright monotonous—soon after leaving the lake, all reasons I didn’t include it in our route, but it’s worth riding nonetheless.  If you love straight, fast descending, ride up 175 and down Bottle Rock.  Also worth riding in the area are Seigler Canyon Rd, Loch Lomond Rd, and Red Hills Rd.  Big Canyon Rd. used to be one of my favorites, but it does have a stretch of (ridable) dirt in its middle and it now goes through the heart of the Valley Fire burn.  Now years after the fire, the scenery is not barren but also not lush.   Seigler Springs Rd. and Diener Rd. are largely dirt.

Creating loop routes in this area almost always involves riding a stretch of Hwy 29.  It can be fine or harrowing, depending on where you are.  It’s a big two-lane highway with constant gentle rollers, a lot of traffic, and an unreliable shoulder.  The scenery—vineyards, hills—is charming.

Heading north from the north end of Clear Lake is one of those effortless gems that cycling brings our way now and then, Scotts Valley Road.  It’s a near-flat, dead easy, but utterly adorable roll through an unpretentious valley of ancient pear orchards and old farm houses (the kind with unmanned produce stands in front of them).  Take the Hwy 29 exit marked Scotts Valley in Lakeport.  Park as soon as the road leaves the congested highway area, ride to the road’s dead end at Hwy 20, then ride back.  You can add 6 miles by taking Blue Lakes Rd out and back along the river a stone’s throw before the intersection with 20, and you can add interest by taking the alternate route along Hendricks Road on your L about a mile down Scotts Valley from the beginning of the ride.  Rumor had it that the Mendocino Fire damaged Scotts Valley, but I’m happy to say it’s totally intact as of 11/18.

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From Elk Mt. Road looking back toward Clear Lake

At the northwest corner of the lake is the town of Upper Lake, and from there you can do the Elk Mountain Rd. ride, the exact opposite of the Scotts Valley ride.  This one is a rough and rugged ride for a day when you want to work.  Ride away from the lake down Upper Lake’s Main St., jog R on Second St. and turn immediately L on Middle Creek Rd, which turns in less than a mile into Elk Mountain.  Ride Elk Mountain until it turns to dirt 17 miles out, then return.   For the first 9 miles you’ll roll sweetly through pretty oaks along the edge of an ever-narrowing valley.  As soon as the valley ends, the road turns up, and you’ll do a demanding 8% pitch for the next 5.5 miles over rough pavement with some splendid switchbacks and grand vistas of the country you’ve just ridden through.  At 14.5 miles you summit and roll up and down, mostly down, to the end of the pavement.

The returning descent from the summit would be a Best of the Best descent if the pavement were smooth, which it isn’t.  It’s generally poor, and in places it’s downright nasty.  Bring your 40 mm tires and prepare to do a lot of braking and feel a lot of jarring.

Elk Mountain Road leads to Pillsbury Lake and to a hugely popular off-road vehicle playground, so there are a surprising number of people up there.   I did it at 11 am-1 pm on a beautiful fall Saturday and saw two cars on the ride in—one of whom stopped, asked me if I needed anything, and offered me water.  But all those people have to drive up and down that road sometime, so at some hours it must be heavily trafficked, and it’s not a pleasant road to meet traffic on.  Plan your ride accordingly.

All that makes Elk Mountain sounds pretty dreadful.  It isn’t.  If you like a hard climb, don’t mind rough pavement, and can find a ride time that avoids the traffic, it’s the only ride in the Clear Lake area with a sense of epic grandeur.

A popular ride is to circumnavigate the lake.  I can’t see the appeal.  Highway 29, on the south side, is scenically pleasant but is all shoulder riding, Highway 20 along the north shore goes through a series of small, congested, bike-unfriendly towns that are hectic even in a car, and the connecting roads on the west and east sides are the epitome of big/flat/straight/trafficky.

Fire damage near Cobb, since repaired

Highway 32 Canyons

Distance:  51-mile out and back
Elevation gain: 4920 ft 

(Update: as of 8/18, this ride has undergone some improvements and some diminishments.  On the up side, the entire descent and ascent through Chico Creek Canyon has been repaved and is glass.  On the down side, much of the leg along Deer Creek has been thinned for fire control.  It’s not ugly like clear-cutting, but much of the maple understory, which provided the light show, is gone.)

This ride has major pros and cons.  Pros: smooth, blissfully meandering two-lane road in and out of two pristine NorCal creek canyons, the highlight being 12 miles (one way) along Deer Creek, as pretty a little babbling stream as there is.  The cons: traffic, all of it in a hurry, some of it consisting of loaded logging trucks or heavy equipment haulers (because this is a working corridor), and only a small dirt shoulder or no shoulder at all.   This is the only ride I’ve ever done anywhere where I had to pull off the road onto dirt to let traffic pass.  Don’t do this ride if you aren’t willing to put up with that.  To minimize the problem, I wouldn’t do this ride during high-traffic periods: late Saturday morning through Sunday evening.

This route has no amenities or perks—no quaint inns, amazing rock formations, or giant redwoods—other than Deer Creek Falls (see below).

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Indian Valley

Distance: 68 miles out and back
Elevation gain: 2064

Update 2021: Greenville was destroyed by fire in the summer of 2021. The fire stopped at the eastern edge of town and left the first 22 miles of this ride pristine (thanks, Robert).  The 10-mile climb to Antelope Lake is presently (9/24) being repaved and is what appears to be good dirt (see details below.)

There are more awe-inspiring rides, but there is no prettier ride in California than this one.  It’s a short form of the Indian Valley Century.   It goes along the lip of two flat, postcard-perfect valleys framed by mountains (with snowy peaks, if you time it right), and you’re just a bit up off the valley floor, so you get all the scenery without the flat—the road gently bobs and weaves and rises and drops and thus provides you with a delightfully varied road contour.  Then the outward leg ends with a ten-mile climb that’s entirely doable and parallels a tumbling, rocky creek.  I’ve cut off two loops from the century route I don’t need, but I’ll tell you they’re there and what you’re missing.   All the significant climbing is in the last 10 miles out, so if you skip it the ride is easy.

I rarely talk about driving routes to rides, but this one merits a word.  As of 9/24, the two main routes to Greenville—up Hwy 32 through Chester and up Hwy 70 through the Feather River Canyon—are problematic.  Hwy 32 is essentially closed while they deal with repairs from the Park Fire.  Cars are allowed through at 3 designated times each day.  Consult the CA road conditions website.  Hwy 70, while a beautifully scenic drive, is undergoing a lot of construction, resulting in numerous one-way stretches and traffic hold-ups.  When I drove it I counted 7 time-consuming stops, the longest being c. 15 min.  None of these construction projects looked anywhere near completion.  Plan your travel time accordingly.

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Wooden Valley/Pleasants Valley

Distance: 81-mile loop with a spur
Elevation gain: 3370 ft

The Mix Canyon leg of this ride is covered thoroughly in words and pictures at toughascent.com.

See reader comments below on the serious fire damage done to this route in recent years.

This loop goes through the best riding in the area between the Wine Country and Davis.  It’s got two great climbs, two scenic farming valleys, and a few boring miles through the outskirts of Fairfield to get from one valley to the other.   There is no great wow factor (except the Mix Canyon descent), but, with the exception of the Fairfield miles, it’s all very pretty and pleasant.

You want to think about when you do this ride.  On summer afternoons, it’s hot.  On weekends, the traffic around Berryessa is obnoxious.  On Monday and Tuesday everything in Manka’s Corner is shut down, so you will have one and only one opportunity for resupplying water and food: the shopping center at the corner of Waterman and Hilborn in Fairfield.

If you aren’t up for a big day, it’s easy to take about half of the hard out: just skip both of the climbing detours.

There is a bike shop in Winters, closed Monday and Tuesday.

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Table Mountain

Distance:  26-mile loop
Elevation gain: 1410 ft

Note: This route was untouched by the Camp Fire of 2018.

This loop consists of roads covered by the Wildflower Century, my hometown cycling club’s annual spring ride, and since 4000 cyclists do it every year there’s a good chance you’ve been over these roads.  But this loop goes backwards to the Wildflower direction, and it’s a wholly different, and better, ride.   It’s got a lot of points of interest besides the riding—a famous dam, century-old olive orchards, a state-of-the-art sustainable farm, a covered bridge, nationally renowned wildflowers in season, a Gold Rush cemetery, and two old Gold Rush towns complete with historical plaques and one-room museums.

You have a serious choice about which direction to ride in.  I’ve mapped it clockwise.  But there are benefits to riding the loop in the other direction.  Counter-clockwise reverses the climbing/descending, so instead of a short, sweet climb up to Cherokee and a long, rough, rollicking descent down to Oroville, you get a long, gradual ascent up from Oroville and a short, super-sweet, glassy-smooth descent down to Hwy 70. In fact, I don’t do this ride as mapped any more, in either direction—see Alternate routes below for my current favored route.

Weather matters on this ride.  Chico-area winds are predominantly from the north, and if a north wind is snorting, that first leg of the loop can be horrific.  I’ve done it in a death-march paceline at 10 mph.   If it’s like that on your day, ride the loop in whichever direction has the wind at your back on the Table Mountain Blvd. leg.  Also, on a normal summer afternoon the temperature on the first half of the ride can be well over 100 degrees, so ride early.

Do not do this ride on a weekend day during wildflower season—the roads are absolutely unsafe for cyclists (see more below).

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Concow Road

Distance: 18 miles out and back
Elevation gain: 2660 ft

(A Best of the Best ride)

6/20 update: the Concow area has burned twice in recent years.  There are two areas of noticeable burn on the ride—the first couple of miles after the Concow/Nelson Bar intersection, and the turn-around where the road turns to gravel.  Between, the woods are intact and still lovely.  And of course the road contour is unaffected.  Still a great ride.  JR

This little gem is one of the sweetest 18-mile rides you’ll ever do, and the best ride in the Chico/Oroville area.  It’s a delightful roller-coaster back-country climb on glassy road surfaces through pretty foothills farms and woodland to a spot where the road turns to dirt.  The road contour is constantly varied, up and down and back and forth, with no two climbs or curves the same, and it’s good riding in both directions.  It’s also a workout—you’ll log almost 3000 ft of gain in less than 20 miles, with a few short pitches of 11-12%, but none of the climbs lasts long.  It’s smoother and faster than the average back road, and you can touch 40 mph a time or two.

Traffic should be next to nothing.

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Oroville to Forbestown

Distance: 31 miles out and back
Elevation gain: 2760 ft

This is a nice, pretty climb from the edge of the Sacramento Valley up through the foothills and into the cedar forests of the western Sierra with a classic mountain store as a destination and a sweet potable spring along the way.   It’s pretty much all up, but with lots of variety in the scenery and the riding conditions so it’s never a slog. Continue reading

Paradise to Butte Meadows

Distance: 54 miles out and back
Elevation gain: 5960 ft

(A Best of the Best ride)

Update 11/18: The Camp Fire raced through Paradise and parts of Magalia in the days following 11/8/18.  Paradise was destroyed.  The first couple of miles of this route are scorched by the fire.  The rest of the route is undamaged.  JR

This ride actually starts in Magalia, the small community just up the hill from Paradise, CA, but who doesn’t want to ride in Paradise?  The route strings together four distinct rides, three of them treats, and the other…well it gets you from one of the treats to the next.  The four rides are, in order: a classic rolling stair-stepper, a short fast descent followed by a long straight slow upwards slog (the non-treat), a perfect serpentining climb through NorCal pine-and-cedar forest, and a rolling ramble across the top of the world on a spanking new (as of 2013) state-of-the-art mountain road.

This is a demanding ride with a lot of elevation gain.  If you want less, see Shortening the Route below.

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Chester Back Roads

(Note 9/21: The Dixie Fire in the summer of 2021 devastated the area north of Chester.  Expect near-total vegetation loss on these rides. See photos at the end of this post. All other photos are pre-burn.  JR)

There are three similar roads that run due north from Chester.  They’re all short—in each case after 6-13 miles the road turns to gravel.  They’re all fairly easy steady ups, featuring mellow climbing through what once was forest and is now bare ground and black tree trunks. 

One’s immediate reaction to fire damage is to assume that the ride is ruined.  Not so.  I actually find riding through burns to be rewarding in unexpected ways.  For one thing, you can see the lay of the land more clearly.  For another, you can see the road contour more clearly as it stretches before you.  Look at the two photos at the end of this post to see what I mean. For a third, the fire tends to shut down all commercial activity in the area, so the road tends to be deserted.  

Even before the burn, these were “best in the area” rides—not great, but worth doing if you’re at Lake Almanor and want to ride.   I can’t say which is the best, so I’ll list their differences and let you decide:

Warner Valley Road is the longest, widest, busiest (or it was before the fire), and easiest, and it has by far the best road surface—pure glass until a few frost heaves in the last 2 miles.

Juniper Lake Road is the steepest and curviest (and thus my favorite).  The road surface is far from perfect but not problematic with fat tires.

Road 10 (that’s its only name) is the narrowest, it has the longest, most extended descent, and it’s by far the most isolated.  Do this one if you like narrow roads and solitude.

WVR and JLR touch, so combining them into one ride is a natural.  Combining either with Road 10 would require riding an easy 5 miles (one way) through some beautiful, interesting north Lake Almanor shoreline.

Warner Valley Road

Distance: 26 miles out and back
Elevation gain: 1100 ft

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