Distance: 18-mile loop
Elevation gain: 1990 ft

I am not a big fan of cycling in the region north of Placerville. The roads look great on a map—Lotus, Greenwood, Wentworth Springs, Georgetown, Gold Hill, Marshall, Cold Springs, and the rest of them—but they’re all bigger, straighter, more built-up, and busier than the roads in the southern Gold Country, and the landscape is tamer. Don’t get me wrong—most of the roads in this area are pleasant enough, just not Bestrides-special. Thus there are only two Bestrides rides in this area, this one and Mosquito Road.

And this one has its drawbacks. The big climb is a grind, two of the five roads on the route are busy with traffic, and the big descent is too steep to be fun unless you have disc brakes. It’s also short, though I will show you one way to extend the route in Adding Miles below, and it links up easily with our Mosquito Road loop, which is a better ride.

Still, it’s in Bestrides, so it obviously has merits, namely two small, deserted roads, one sweet wooded meander, a great swimming hole, proximity to a pleasant, under-the-radar Gold Country town (Garden Valley), and an interesting preserved 49er village at the heart of California’s history as a starting/stopping place. Also, the two unpleasantly busy legs are both very short.

The numbers suggest the ride is a moderate climbing effort, just over the 100-ft-gain-per-mile benchmark, but it’s harder than that, because almost all of the 2000 ft of gain is in one 2.3-mile pitch.

You could ride this route backwards. You’d replace a 8-12% climb with a 12-16% one, and replace a 12-16% descent with an 8-12% one. Your call.

RidewithGPS map: https://ridewithgps.com/routes/37015585

Start in the tiny town of Coloma, famous for being the site of Sutter’s Mill, where gold was discovered in California. Almost the entire town is the Marshall Gold Discovery Historical Park, with a recreation of the lumber mill in which gold was found, a blacksmith shop with chatty blacksmith (note the Acme anvil, a nod to Roadrunner cartoons), several preserved 1850’s buildings, a visitor center, a museum, a old-timey theatre, and gold panning lessons. So you won’t be bored after your ride. There is ample parking at the Historical Park, but it costs $10 and there is plenty of free parking along both sides of the Main Street.

Beginning here has the advantage of ending here, but it also has the drawback of giving you almost no time to warm up before the killer climb, so I do the 10-mile Thompson Hill Rd. loop described in Adding Miles to get loose.

Ride northwest on Hwy 49 briefly, take Marshall Rd. to the R, and take the almost-immediate L onto Prospectors (no apostrophe) Rd. Prospectors is a very small road paralleling Marshall, often so close to it you’ll think the cars on Marshall are behind you, and it’s steep, 8-12% without a break for 2.3 miles. There is no reason for vehicles to be on it, so you should have it to yourself. The scenery is fairly stark—dry scrub—and the contour is fairly straight, so the rewards are mainly the isolation and the sense of accomplishment.

Prospectors runs back into Marshall. Go L for a brief, forgettable stretch and take Garden Valley Rd. to the R. You’ll pass an seductive turn-off for Mt. Murphy Road, but last I heard it was largely dirt. At the GVR intersection you’re yards from the village of Garden Valley, well worth a detour, with a nice plant nursery if you’re of a mind to do the rest of the ride with a potted plant in your jersey.

Garden Valley Rd. is delightful, pleasantly rolling without making you work through some very pretty foliage and light traffic.

GVR dead-ends at Hwy 193. Go R and suffer the steady traffic briefly until you reach Bayne Rd., which users of RidewithGPS insist on calling “Bane”—search for it that way if you want to see longer routes that incorporate it. Take it to the R.

Bayne Road is short, but it’s the stuff dreams are made on—tiny, isolated, pretty, and with an interesting contour. From east to west, it’s mostly down—at first gently, so it’s a roller-coaster through nice woods, then ferociously, 1.5 miles of nail-biting plummet that reaches 16% and is sometimes on the edge of a harrowing drop-off down to the South Fork of the American River. It’s bucket-list stuff if you have disc brakes—without them, the descent is so steep that stopping is almost impossible, and one dares not build up any head of steam. I was often doing 9 mph. Still, memorable.

One wonders what riding Bayne west to east is like. Most ridewithGPS routes go that way. It must be a pip of a climb.

At the bottom of the descent, Bayne runs along the river, and you can see some awesome swimming holes and rapids. There is no obvious way to get to the water from Bayne, but the map suggests that Serenity Lane on the north side or Johnson Ranch Road on the south might get you close.

Bayne bails out on Mt. Murphy Rd—go L, cross a historic bridge exactly as wide as an RV and no wider, and you’re back in Coloma. They have plans to replace the relic with a modern bridge without character, so do this ride soon.

Shortening the route: Since the sweetest parts of the route are Garden Valley Rd. and Bayne, you could ride both as an out-and-back, starting in either Coloma or Garden Valley, riding to the other, and returning. Of course in one direction you’re going to have to go up the Bayne wall.

Adding miles: As I said in the beginning, almost all of the roads around Coloma are too straight, big, and busy to be fun. But there is one short, very pretty little back road nearby, Thompson Hill Rd., and there’s a loop that incorporates it: from Coloma, take Lotus Rd > Thomson Hill Rd > Cold Springs Rd. Both Lotus and Cold Springs are large and busy, but the Cold Springs leg is almost entirely down, so it’s painless. Lotus, on the other hand, is a burden—a long, featureless big-road climb amidst noticeable traffic. It’s the price you pay.

At the intersection of Hwy 193 and Bayne on our route, you are just 3 miles down 193 from where 193 intersects our Mosquito Road loop, so it’s easy to do one ride that does them both as a rough figure-eight and turns two moderate rides into one big one.

Just east of our Hwy 193 leg lies a warren of small to very small roads, all worth riding: Shoo Fly Rd., Transverse Creek Rd., Bear Creek Rd., Spanish Flat Rd., Meadow Brook Rd., Balderston Rd., and the amazingly narrow Darling Ridge Rd. They’re all inter-connected—feel free to wander.