Distance: 23 miles out and back
Elevation gain: 2430 ft
This is a short, relatively easy, totally joyous 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.
Begin 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 second-most popular route from Middletown to Clear Lake (after Hwy 29), 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.
Hwy 175: love that glassy road surface
Adding Miles: There is an outstanding alternative to our route. Two-thirds of the way towards Cobb you go through the tiny town of Loch Lomond, and at the town’s one and only intersection you can take Seigler Canyon Rd. back down to Hwy 29. It’s a marvelous two-lane descent, serpentining smoothly on fine pavement. The only drawback is, there is no shoulder and no room for cars to pass, so you’re almost forced to pull onto the dirt for all traffic. But it’s still grand. Not better than our route, but as good, so you’ll just have to ride up 175 twice to experience both descents.
From Cobb 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 Loch Lomond Rd. and Red Hills Rd.
Big Canyon Rd. has the advantage of dropping you off on Middletown, right by Harbin Hot Springs, so you can take in a soak. Its contour is also nice: from its north end on Siegler Canyon Rd. it climbs for a while, then drops all the way down into a large canyon, crosses the creek at the canyon bottom, then follows the creek downstream, crossing it frequently on quaint bridges. Sounds great, but the pavement is poor enough that it was a once-only for me. There is a stretch of dirt in its middle (in ways better riding than most of the pavement) and it goes through the heart of the Valley Fire burn, so the scenery is stark. Perini Rd. is much like Big Canyon: it takes off from Siegler Canyon Rd., it’s quiet and isolated, it suffers from poor road surface, and it has a substantial stretch of dirt that’s perhaps better riding than the pavement. It has the advantage of going nowhere (it leaves Seigler Canyon and returns) so there is little reason a car would be on it.
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.
A stone’s throw south from Lower Lake on Hwy 29 is Spruce Grove Rd., 9 miles of peachy, meandering road on OK surface through moderately farmland/woodsy scenery (surprisingly lush for this area—no burn damage). Since it’s a horseshoe that takes off from Hwy 29 and returns, it’s classic side road and sees little traffic. At the north end it’s all low-rent ranches for the first mile, and at the south end you find yourself in the midst of the upscale, pretentious gated community of Hidden Valley Lake, but in between it’s borderline Bestrides-worthy.
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.
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
The road surface is excellent, and made better by the fact that new shoulder strips have recently (summer 2016) been added on both sides of the road, and this new surface makes climbing practically effortless. On my last ride I met a flagman who told me they were about to repave the road “to make it really nice for you,” but I can’t imagine how it could be better. He also said they were going to be adding guardrails, which might impair the road’s sense of intimacy a tad.
In about 10 miles (about where you cross on the obvious but unsigned Rocky Top Road bridge spanning the headwaters of the lake), the creek returns to being a creek and the character of the ride changes. The scenery is rougher, drier, and rockier. The land is more open, so for the first time in the ride the road is often in full sun (if it’s sunny). To my mind, the scenery is now only good, not grand—turn around if you don’t like what you see. Now the creek is strewn with boulders that form lovely, large swimming holes you should try if it’s hot enough. The road is now also marked by miniature camp sites in most of the dirt turn-outs, which is a handy thing because water sources are scarce along this route and you may need to beg water from a camper.
At 22.2 miles you reach Yellow Bottom (or Yellowbottom), a lovely spot with a rocky beach and swimming hole on one side of the road and developed campground on the other. I turn around here. The ride back is close to effortless—just a few easy climbs to break up the long, gentle descents.
