Distance: 61 miles out and back
Elevation gain: 5860 ft

(A Best of the Best ride)

This is a fairly big, pretty ride through two lush valleys and over three moderate summits. The cumulative elevation gain is substantial, but except for those three ascents the climbing is pretty mellow.

East Carmel Valley Road is the name of Carmel Valley Road east of Carmel Valley Village.  You could add miles by riding the first 11.5 miles of CVR, starting at Hwy 1, but it’s all 4-lane, fast, aggressive, over-developed, trafficky shoulder riding.  Pretty unpleasant, and, while the scenery is nice, it’s nothing compared to what’s on our route.  East of the Village the valley narrows, the valley walls steepen, the traffic lessens and slows down, the people thin out, the foliage gets denser, wetter, and prettier, and the road dwindles until it’s finally a centerline-less, shoulderless back road of exceptional beauty and charm.  The road surface varies from good to poor, often poor enough to be a hamper on your riding pleasure.

Traffic is an issue here.  Traffic isn’t heavy (3 cars/mile perhaps on a Friday afternoon in spring), but local drivers are hostile and impatient.  Sightlines and passing lanes are poor and there’s no shoulder.  So timing is everything.  The last time I did the ride, on a beautiful Sunday midday in spring, I saw 1 car in 15 miles.  Traffic lightens the further east you go, and, as always, the worst time for traffic seems to be 4-5 pm.

Cachagua Road (which means “place of grass” in—you guessed it—Mapudungun) is an alternate to 12 miles of CVR which takes off from it, crosses into the parallel valley to the south, rides along the valley, then climbs and descends the tall ridge that now separates the two valleys and returns to CVR.  It’s as pretty as CVR at CVR’s best, it’s quieter, smaller, and windier, and the road surface is better, so you definitely want to take it unless you’re tired and want to get home as easily as possible.  It adds about 4 miles and one substantial climb to the route.

Calvin, in the comments below, makes the point that there are no water sources on this ride.  So you’re looking at a long day without a refill.  You may have to drop a water bottle at the Tassajara Rd. intersection or knock on some doors.  Except for the leg from the summit to Arroyo Seco, the entire route is largely in forested shadow, however.
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Distance:  34-mile loop
Elevation gain: 3560 ft 

A Best of the Best ride

(As of 5/24, Mt. Charlie is closed due to a landslide and will probably be under repair for a few years. See Lisa’s comment below.  jr)

This is a fairly big, kitchen-sink sort of ride designed to bag five of Santa Cruz’s prime cycling roads, one of which is the area’s only high-speed luge descent and one of my favorite descents anywhere. The route can easily be chopped into smaller pieces in lots of ways.   It’s all up and down, like most of Santa Cruz riding, and it has some steep moments, but those moments never last.  My computer recorded 4000 ft of gain in 34 miles, which is a lot, but you’ll wonder where the 4000 ft are coming from—it doesn’t feel that bad.  The route sports incredible variety—the road contour changes every 25-50 yards—and it’s almost all stunningly gorgeous.

Most of this route has houses but not much else, so if you want to reprovision and don’t like knocking on strangers’ doors, there are stores halfway down Summit Rd. and at the intersection of Soquel-San Jose Rd. and Laurel Glen Rd. (and of course in Scott’s Valley).

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Distance:  34-mile lollipop 
Elevation gain: 4520 ft 

A Best of the Best ride (on weekdays only)

(Note: Big Basin and much of the Santa Cruz area was devastated by forest fires in September of 2020.  The Visitor Center was destroyed.  The large trees were burned but are alive.  The understory has begun to return, so as of 9/25 the park is by no means a wasteland, but it’s a shadow of its former self.  It’s still a great ride, though not the wonderland it formerly was. The park roads are remarkably free of cars and all roads are open, including China Grade.  The noticeable burn begins on Hwy 236 c. 2.5 miles west of our starting point, becomes very noticeable around the intersection with the top of China Grade, and continues to around the Old Big Basin Rd. intersection.  Most of China Grade has burned as well—again, not a barren wasteland but not what it once was.  See photos at the end of this post.)

The Big Basin area is just north of our other Santa Cruz area rides and has much in common with them: beautiful, lush woods, good road surfaces, constant variety and interest in the road contour, and lots of vertical.  But the main appeal here is the redwoods.  The Big Basin redwoods are second-growth, so they rarely overwhelm you with sheer enormity like those of the Avenue of the Giants ride (there are a few behemoths around the Visitor Center), but they’re gorgeous nonetheless, and the descending on this route is far better than on any of our other redwoods rides, except for Felton Empire/Empire Grade (there is a list of Redwoods rides on the Best of the Best page).   This route has three really nice descents (including one that is as nice as descending gets), and the climbing to earn them is all remarkably mellow except for a mile or two of China Grade—don’t let Mapmyride’s rather intimidating elevation total scare you off.  And, as an extra-special bonus, in 10/16 all of Hwy 236 was repaved, so the road surface is perfect—as good as I’ve ever seen.

This is a State Park ride, which means traffic.  Expect the road to be unpleasantly busy with cars and motorcycles on weekends, even in winter.  This is a ride you really want to do on a weekday if at all possible—hence the conditional Best of the Best rating.  On a weekend day in January I saw 80 cars on the road; on a weekday two weeks later I saw 6.  Seven AM on a weekday is even better.

After your ride, In Boulder Creek the Foster’s Freeze at the south end of town on the main street is run by the nicest man in the world.  Three more miles down Hwy 9 in Ben Lomond is the best Italian bakery outside of Italy, La Place Family Bakery.

(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/37771056

Start at the intersection of Hwy 9 and Hwy 236.  There’s a nice, wide dirt turn-out for parking on Hwy 9 just before the intersection.  Ride up Hwy 9 (which you probably just came down in your car) to Saratoga Gap, at the intersection of Hwy 9 and Skyline Boulevard.  It’s all up for six miles through pleasant woods and past a couple of nice vistas of receding ridges.  I usually avoid starting a ride with a climb, but it’s a mellow climb the entire way (1500 ft gain in 6 miles), so it’s easy to soft-pedal until you’re warm.  If you’re worried about the total elevation gain you could do the Big Basin loop first, then decide if you want to do the Hwy 9 out and back.   You could also start at Saratoga Gap and do the Hwy 9 descent first thing, if you don’t mind ending the ride with a 6-mile climb—there’s a big, formal paved parking area at Saratoga Gap if you do.  The traffic on Hwy 9 is the worst on the route, and I’d seriously consider skipping it if it’s a weekend.  

Big Basin redwoods—look at that road surface!

At Saratoga Gap turn around and return to your car—the first of our three fine descents.  Since it was mellow going up, it’s mellow going down—not a hair-raising, white-knuckle thrill ride, but a graceful, lovely slalom with big, sweeping turns that never send you to your brakes.  Literally (and I mean literally) you will never have to touch your brakes in the 6 miles unless you’re hammering and hit the infrequent corners signed “25 mph” at more than 30 mph.   Otherwise it’s a constant, easy 25-30 mph drop. 

China Grade

Just past your car, go straight at the intersection onto 236 towards Big Basin State Park (there’s a sign).  You’ll be in beautiful redwood forest and on deliciously serpentining road for the rest of the ride.  Ride to the State Park Visitor Center via a moderate climb followed by a descent (our second of three) that is one of the best descents in Bestrides.org.   At the Visitor Center there are nice bathrooms, water, a store that serves food, guided hikes, 4-5 very big redwoods, and a fee if you want to stay.  If you want to go for an easy walk and get closer to the trees, there’s a flat .7-mile loop right from the Visitor Center that goes by some of the biggest trees in the park.

The non-redwoods are gorgeous too

Leaving the Visitor Center, ride through what I think are the prettiest of the trees, then climb moderately to the summit (at the intersection of Big Basin Way, Little Basin Rd., and Old Big Basin R., curiously enough), then descend to the L turn onto China Grade.

The China Grade turn is signed but hard to see.  Watch for it going sharply L (about 7 o’clock) after you’ve ridden through a couple of unmissable descending hairpins (the first marked only by a “20 MPH” sign for warning) and the road goes almost flat for the first time in the ride.  China Grade is short, scenically primeval, in places dauntingly steep (the only hard climbing on the ride), and cursed with impressively horrible road surface, but it isn’t long, and it’s blissfully tranquil, which you’ll be craving if you’ve been fighting the weekend traffic.  Stop several times to drink in the solitude.  The pitch may make you stop anyway.  Adding Miles shows you how to skip it if you’re saving your legs.

Big redwoods by the Visitor Center

When China Grade T’s into 236, turn R and ride back to your car.  First you do a short climb, a short descent, a climb, then the third of our descents, and it’s an absolute rip-snorter, over too soon.  On a weekend assume you will meet cars.

The loop is rideable in the other direction.  It means you’ll come down China Grade, which is a pain, and the 2-mile descent from the Little Basin Rd./Old Big Basin Rd. intersection to the Visitor Center isn’t nearly as good as the descent from our side, though still excellent.

Shortening the route: Skip the Hwy 9 out-and-back.  Even shorter: start at the Big Basin Visitor Center and ride the loop.

Looking south toward Santa Cruz: only the Hwy 9 leg has vistas

Adding miles:  If you stay on 236 past the China Grade turn-off, in a few easy miles you’ll end up in the pleasant small town of Boulder Creek, where you can reprovision, then loop back to your car via Hwy 9. This lets you avoid the steep pitches of China Grade.  Hwy 9 has a much gentler pitch than China Grade and is an absolutely smashing stretch of road, but it’s much busier and without shoulder (though 3/4 of the traffic turns off Hwy 9 at Bear Creek Rd).

If you love the descent into the Big Basin Visitor Center (and you will), there’s a loop you can add to our route that will let you do it a second time.  From the Visitor Center, ride into the main parking lot and take the unmissable road on your R, splendidly called North Escape Road.  It meanders through more gorgeous redwoods along pavement that is often shabby or worse for 3 miles and returns to Hwy 236 at the top of the descent back to the Visitor Center.  The isolation is priceless once you pass the “additional parking” lot. The road is more or less flat for 2 miles, then 8-10% for the last mile (500 ft gain).  Ignore all maps (and there are many) that show NER as dead-ending or turning to dirt—it does neither.  It is, however, gated off, which should not deter you.

An alternate route that skips China Grade but preserves our last, splendid descent is, from our starting point, go west to the visitor center, ride North Escape Road back to 236, and go L on 236 and return to your car.

From Boulder Creek you can easily connect to all the other great Santa Cruz riding (see the Monterey Bay section of the Rides by Region for a list of the good roads in the area).

Distance: 21 miles out and back
Elevation gain: 2700 ft

A few words about riding around Hollister generally:

First, Hollister’s image is hot, dusty, dead flat agricultural fields and a culture stuck in 1955.  Some of that is true.  Hollister is hot and dry in the summer, and cold and dead in the winter, so I would try hard to schedule my riding for late spring (April) after some rain, when the grass is green and the area is momentarily a gorgeous, lush garden.  The town of Hollister and the surrounding agricultural valleys (Santa Ana Valley and San Juan Valley) are flat, but they’re surrounded by small, rolling hills rich with meandering roads offering ideal riding contour.  The three Bestrides rides from the area all have substantial climbing.  As to the culture, Hollister is not especially hip, but it’s a pleasant, easy-going town, and San Juan Bautista is a small Old California treasure with a grand Spanish mission and adjacent historical State Park well worth an afternoon.

Second, the road surfaces in San Benito County all vary from poor to awful.  You just have to live with it (or ride somewhere else).  The one exception is our Fremont Peak ride, where the surface is OK.

Lone Tree Road is a straight climb and descent out-and-back out of an agricultural valley up a draw into the surrounding hills surrounding.  It’s only the third or fourth best ride in the Hollister area, after San Juan Canyon Road and San Juan Grade and perhaps Cienega Rd (see Adding Miles below).  The climb is challenging and harder than the total elevation gain suggests, since the first 3 miles are flat—more like, 3000 ft gain in 7 miles.  Expect a fair amount of 8-12% stuff. 

The ride has three drawbacks.   1) The road surface is poor (see above)—an irritant on the ride up, a serious impediment to joy on the descent.  The surface deteriorates as you ascend, so you could turn around if and when it gets unpleasant.  2) The scenery is all the same and a bit vanilla—grassy, rounded hills.  “Lone Tree Road” is a pretty accurate name.  I can imagine some people loving this landscape, but for me it’s just OK.  The scenery on our other two area rides (San Juan Canyon Road and San Juan Grade) is much better, assuming you prefer oak canopy to grassland.  Since there is next to no cover, I wouldn’t do this ride on a hot, sunny afternoon.  3) There is no summit, pass, or other “top of the world” culmination providing you with the grand vista—the road hits a gate before you summit and you turn around.

All that not withstanding, it’s still a good ride and worth doing.

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 Distance: 22 miles out and back
Elevation gain: 2750 ft

This is a drop-dead gorgeous out-and-back climber that starts out with a few miles of easy, rolling climbing among rural houses, and continues to get steeper, narrower, more isolated, more densely wooded, and prettier as it goes.   The woods are different from those of rides like Felton Empire and Big Basin—instead of mostly redwoods, you get a lot of bigleaf maples, so there’s a lot more light coming through, and at times it looks like the forest is on fire.  The entire ride is along Zayante Creek (or tributaries), with frequent creek crossings, which means quaint little bridges and fun little descents and ascents before and after.  All in all, arguably the prettiest ride in the Santa Cruz area. There are two stretches that are hard work, but the rest is mellow and so varied in pitch as to keep you fresh and perky.

The road surface used to deteriorate as you go, to a point where descending the way you went up was unpleasant, but it’s all been resurfaced and is now good surface (see Nibbles’s comment below).  Also, it’s far enough east that it escaped the terrible damage from the recent fires.

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Distance: 18-mile lollipop
Elevation gain: 900 ft

This ride is a lot like the Golden Gate Bridge loop—a complete chestnut, over-hyped and tourist-ridden.  Plus it’s all about money (you ride by Pebble Beach Golf Course, for god’s sake)—but, all that notwithstanding, it’s a delightful bike ride.  Every time I do it, I wish I could live there so I could do it every day.  You ride by waves smashing into coastal rocks, through lanes of coastal cypresses, do a nice little climb, roll through nearly unpopulated Monterey pine forest, then do a fun, fast descent, all on the best road surface money can buy.   The forty-million-dollar houses used to amaze me when I started riding here, but now they look just like the McMansions in the upscale conclaves of my little home town and every other population center of California.

This isn’t just a scenic tourist stroll—the riding is outstanding.  The road contour on the south side is a delightful rollercoaster—up and down and back and forth—and the inland half of the loop is better—glassy smooth meandering, intermixed with effortless descending.  You’ll do some work—my computer recorded 1300 ft vert.   The traffic can be a bit noisome, granted, and if you can do the ride before 10 AM so much the better.  Of course you’d like to do the ride at sunset, but that’s when everyone else wants to be there too—the last time I did it at sunset, one parking area had four gigantic motor coaches disgorging tourists.

This is California coastal riding, so wind is likely and the weather can feel surprisingly cold given the temperature—dress prudently.

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Distance: 21-mile lollipop
Elevation: 2680 ft

(Note 3/21: This route and the surrounding area were seriously damaged by fire during the terrible summer of 2020.  See W. G. Scott’s comment below for details.  jr)

This strenuous little 20-miler climbs up from Hwy 1 and the ocean, then loops around to take in two classic back roads, all through picture-book Santa Cruz redwood forest.  Bonny (sometimes spelled Bonnie) Doon itself is pretty famous because whenever the Tour of California came down the coast from San Francisco to Santa Cruz it was the climb where the winning move was made.   I stood on the side of the road and watched Levi Leipheimer stick it to Mick Rogers and Dave Zabriskie on this climb one year on his way to the overall victory.

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Distance: 19 miles out and back
Elevation gain: 2760 ft