Distance: 24-mile loop
Elevation gain: 1700 ft

This loop is a classic Bay Area cycling club ride, and it offers a number of pleasures: a lovely, rambling section of the San Francisco Bay Trail, much of it closed to cars; two small, charming Bay Area communities and proximity to a third; a train; two grand bridge crossings over the Carquinez Strait, where the Sacramento River Delta empties into San Pablo Bay; two old urban cemeteries; a nice optional climb, and swell views of the Strait from every angle.  It’s mostly moderate up and down, neither easy nor hard (the Scenic Drive leg of the ride is 14 miles, 1370 ft of gain, out and back, for instance).  There are about 4 miles of unrewarding, rundown residential slog.  There is no reason why you can’t ride the loop in either direction, though everyone seems to go counter-clockwise.

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Distance: 49 miles out and back
Elevation gain: 3200 ft (from RWGPS)

This is another of those “best in the area” rides—not a life-changing ride but one worth doing if you’re in the neighborhood.  It’s in the midst of a network of southeast Bay Area roads that cyclists ride all the time and which I find sterile and barren: Mines, San Antonio Valley, Tassajara, Highland, Altamont Pass.  All rolling grassy hills.  But in the midst of this desert is Del Puerto Canyon Road.

On a map it looks like it would be featureless like all the others, but it’s through a little canyon of considerable charm.   It winds niftily along a little creek (dry in summer), which means riparian plant life, canyon walls, lots of turns, and some shade.   It’s also predominantly next-to-flat  (the first 16 miles average 1-2%, and almost all the elevation gain is in the two miles before the summit), which the others aren’t, so it’s ideal for a day when you don’t want to work.   Where RWGPS gets that elevation gain total, I don’t know.  You can in fact control the effort precisely—the pitch goes from flat to imperceptible to moderate to steep, and you can just turn around when you’re worked as hard as you want to.

In addition, DPCR has one virtue that no other ride in Bestrides can claim: it’s 50 feet off Hwy 5, so from now on when you’re making that tedious drive from SoCal to NorCal or vice versa you can pull off midway and do a refreshing little out-and-back on the bike.

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Distance: 16.5 miles out and back
Elevation gain: 1420 ft 

(Note: The road work that had recently closed this ride is completed and the road is clear. Thanks, Drew.  jr)

The San Francisco Peninsula has a spine running down its center.  On the east side of the spine is Palo Alto, Silicon Valley, Stanford, and a crush of people.  On the west side is a lot of deep, dark woods, open rolling hillsides sloping to the ocean, and the laid-back hamlets of Half Moon Bay and Pescadero.  It’s one of my favorite areas of California, and the stretch of Hwy 1 along there (Half Moon Bay to Santa Cruz) is second only to Mendocino in my book.  There are few roads on that western slope, but what’s there is great riding.  Bestrides has two rides in the area, this one and Pescadero/Tunitas Creek Road.  P/TCR is a epic adventure; this one is a little jewel.

This is an easy, perfect little rambling climb and descent that winds sweetly through all the classic features of the region: small, hand-tended fields of row crops set off by the local black earth, unpretentious horse or dairy farms, rolling coastal hills, eucalyptus groves, and a few redwoods.  The tiny road’s contour is constantly varied and interesting, the road surface is good, and there’s nothing up there except a few homes and  the largely unknown Purissima Redwoods Open Space Preserve, so you should have the place to yourself.  It rides equally well in either direction (a bit harder clockwise).  The route is one continuous road, but it has a different name at each end—it’s Purissima Creek Rd. at the south end, Higgins Canyon Rd. at the other.  Midway through the ride you pass by the Preserve, a nice place to hike if you brought walking shoes.  It’s a bit under 100 ft of gain per mile, but I promise you it feels even easier than that.

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Distance: 36 miles out and back
Elevation gain: 4750 ft

(A Best of the Best ride)

(Note 2021: Lick Observatory is closed due to Covid, though there reportedly is a water refill source near the gate.)

This is a grande dame of a ride, one of the three iconic climbs in the Bay Area—Hamilton, Mt. Tam, and Diablo.  It’s quite long—18.2 miles one way, all but a mile or so significantly up.  It’s much more sustained climbing than either of the other two icons, and it’s considerably over our 100 ft/mile benchmark for climbing difficulty.  Still, it’s easier than the numbers make it look.  When they built the Lick Observatory at the summit, starting in 1876, they needed to haul massive equipment up the road by mule, so they had to make the road at a shallow enough pitch that the mules could handle it.  So it’s a constant 5-7%—not a moment of 8% in the whole 36 miles.  And there are two nice descents along the way up to rest your legs.  Nevertheless, it’s work, just because there’s so much of it. You’ll be climbing, with two brief breaks, for something like 3 hours.

The route is all through pretty East Bay oak-strewn hills, and the road contour is constantly rewarding (endless serpentining) after the first couple of miles.  The vistas of San Jose, the southern end of SF Bay, and lands to the south start out grand and get more incredible as you ascend.  The descent used to be hampered by poor pavement, but the road from the observatory to Grant Park has just (in 2021) been repaved and now it’s all flawless and world-class.  And the observatory at the top is simply fascinating. All in all, a bucket-list ride, marred only by the fact that 16 miles of essentially unaltered 6% climbing gets a little monotonous.

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Distance: 15 miles one way
Elevation gain: 1460 ft

(A Best of the Best ride)

This is one of my favorite rides, in part because it’s less well-known (and so less trafficked) than the nearby icons (Diablo, Hamilton).   It has an absurdly pleasing profile: a mellow gently rolling warm-up through picturebook hobby farms, a just-long-enough, just-steep-enough stair-step climb up through dense woods, followed by a Best-of-the-Best descent that will make the hair on the back of your neck stand up.

It’s one of a trio of East Bay rides that are similar in general contour: Palomares, Calaveras, and Morgan Territory.  They’re all about-five-mile climbs, at first gentle, then moderate, up through pretty wooded canyons along creeks.  To tell them apart: Palomares is the simplest and has the most domesticated ambiance; Calaveras is the easiest (though none is Mt. Diablo hard), has no backside descent, has the best open hillside views, is the only one of the three that has great riding contiguous to it, and is ridable only on weekends (because of car traffic); and Morgan Territory has the roughest and narrowest pavement (though not as rough since a recent resurfacing), the best isolation, and the best backside descent.   Morgan Territory’s pavement used to be poor on the north side of the summit, which didn’t bother the ascent but put a damper on coming back down that way.  Thankfully, in recent days perhaps a third or one half of the north side has been resurfaced (Spring 2023—thanks, David) makes riding the north side of MTR as an out-and-back a real possibility.  See details in Shortening the Ride below.  If you’re riding on a weekend and are just going to ride to the summit and back, do Calaveras or MTR.  If you want to climb to a summit, descend the back side, then turn around and ride back, do Palomares.  And if you’re in for a bigger adventure (or a BART ride), do Morgan Territory.

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Distance: 24.4 miles out and back
Elevation gain: 3580 ft

(A Best of the Best ride)

Mt. Diablo is another of the three iconic Bay Area climbs.  It’s less tranquil than Mt. Hamilton and less scenic than Mt. Tam, but it’s grand nonetheless.  No other ride gives you such a distinct sense of “climbing a mountain.”  It’s a long climb but never brutal until the last 100 yards.  It’s an iconic ride, and there isn’t a serious cyclist in the Bay Area who hasn’t done it, many times.  The view from the top is a tourist attraction, and for good reason—they say on a clear day a person looking north and east can see further than from any other spot on the planet except Kilimanjaro.  OK, that turns out to be a myth perpetrated by real estate developers—it’s not even the biggest view in California, Mt. Whitney’s being much larger—but you can see bits of 40 of the 58 California counties, you can see the mountains around Lake Tahoe, and you can see rock formations in Yosemite.  That’s pretty cool.

That being said, it’s not a ride I do for the scenery, though some love it.  The foliage is standard East Bay hill shrub and grass, and the vistas, while large, are mostly of East Bay urban sprawl.  There are nice wildflower blooms in season.

The ride is approachable from the north, via North Gate Rd., or the south, via South Gate Rd., and they’re both supposed to be good routes—the north route being steeper and shadier—but the south route is the preferred one and it’s the only one I’ve ever done, both ascending and descending.  The first half of the descent (from the summit to the Ranger Station) is as good as anything you’ll ever do—if you manage the traffic.

Mt. Diablo, as much as any ride in Bestrides, is affected by traffic.  Diablo is a magnet for tourists, hikers, mountain bikers, and rock climbers—and their cars.  On summer weekends, the place is a zoo.  If you were ever going to get up early and be on the bike by 7 am (or call in sick and ride on a weekday), this is the time.  In the early morning it’s like the road is closed to cars…and in fact it may well be, since there’s a gate across the road that’s typically closed at night (the park “opens” at 8 am). Riding this ride with no or very few cars triples the pleasure, and changes the descent from good to grand.   Despite the crush, the hill is very bike-friendly—there are signs at most blind curves reading “Do not pass bikes on blind curves,” for instance.

There is also the weather to consider.  The summit can be foggy, windy, and cold even when the weather at the base is benign.  The last time I rode Diablo, it was sunny, still, and 67 degrees at the bottom and 47 degrees, with a blasting wind and freezing white-out fog, at the top.   I took more clothes than I thought I’d need, and still froze.    This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t ride in such conditions—cold and fog keep the car tourists and hikers away, so on that 47-degree day I never saw a car in my lane during the entire descent.

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 Distance: 12 miles one way
Elevation gain: 1700 ft

Sierra Road, a name that brings shivers to Bay Area riders, was made famous in 2012 when Chris Horner flew up its 18% pitches (OK, RWGPS says it tops out at 14%, but my legs say different) to lock up the win in the Tour of California.  He rode those pitches at around 13 mph.  I had ridden up the same slopes earlier that morning to watch the stage finish—at 4 mph or less.    This is one of the toughest climbs in our list, a true feather in your cap, one of two climbs in Bestrides where I’ve been known to stop to recover (the other being Welch Creek Road, in the Adding Miles section of the Calaveras ride).

Sierra Rd. itself actually isn’t all that wonderful a ride.  It’s too steep to be fun, and the landscape is mostly barren grassy hills and vistas of San Jose bloat.  But it’s a marvelous challenge, and the descent on the backside, Felter Road, is superb.  For those more interested in scenery and riding pleasure than bragging rights, a better ride is Felter alone as an out and back, which I discuss at the end.

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Distance: 30 miles out and back
Elevation gain: 1470 ft

This ride is one of a trio of East Bay rides that are similar in general contour: Calaveras, Palomares Road, and Morgan Territory Road.  They’re all about-five-mile climbs, at first gentle, then moderate, up through pretty wooded canyons along creeks.  To tell them apart: Palomares is the simplest and has the most domesticated ambiance; Calaveras is the easiest (though none is Mt. Diablo hard), has no backside descent, has the best open hillside views, is the only one of the three that has great riding contiguous to it, and is ridable only on weekends (because of car traffic); and Morgan Territory has the roughest and narrowest pavement, the best isolation, and the best backside descent.   Morgan Territory’s pavement is poor on the north side of the summit, which doesn’t bother the ascent but puts a damper on coming back down that way.  If you’re riding on a weekend and are just going to ride to the summit and back, do Calaveras.  If you want to climb to a summit, descend the back side, then turn around and ride back, do Palomares.  And if you’re in for a bigger adventure (or a BART ride), do Morgan Territory.

Calaveras Road is, most of the time, unridable.  Calaveras Road is now an alternative route for traffic on the South Bay freeways during commuter hours, so you can expect to meet literally hundreds of cars on a small, twisty road then.  In addition, during working hours an aggregate plant fills the first 3 miles of the ride with huge, noisy, dusty gravel trucks.  Therefore, this is perhaps the only ride in Bestrides.org where I tell you, unless you want to ride it before 7 AM, ride this road only on weekends.   On Saturday and Sunday, the road is transformed into a recreational bike path.  You’ll see upwards of 80 bikes, many of them hybrids or other strollers.  One rider said to me of Calaveras, “On the weekends we own it!”  You’ll meet 20-25 cars, but for 4/5 of the route either the road is very wide for a two-lane or you can see them coming from afar or both.

Calaveras Road (“skulls road” in Spanish) is an absolutely delightful ride (hence the 80 bikes).  It’s scenic as hell (half oak-canopied creek canyon climb, half open, grassy hillside with big vistas).  It’s remarkably easy for a climb—1400 ft of vert in 14 miles—and it has the best, most interesting road contour in the East Bay—better than Mt. Diablo, Mt. Hamilton, or Palomares.   In addition, the road surface for the first half of the ride is glass (they redid it 2017-2018) and the second half is excellent chipseal.  As if that weren’t enough, the route touches two excellent, challenging add-ons: Felter Rd. and Welch Creek Rd.—see Adding Miles for details on both.

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Distance: 20 miles out and back
Elevation gain: 1770 ft

This ride is one of a trio of East Bay rides that are similar in general contour: Palomares, Calaveras Road, and Morgan Territory Road.  They’re all about-five-mile climbs, at first gentle, then moderate, up through pretty wooded canyons along creeks.  To tell them apart: Palomares is the simplest and has the most domesticated ambiance; Calaveras is the easiest (though none is Mt. Diablo hard), has no backside descent, has the best open hillside views, is the only one of the three that has great riding contiguous to it, and is ridable only on weekends (because of car traffic); and Morgan Territory has the roughest and narrowest pavement, the best isolation, and the best backside descent.   Morgan Territory’s pavement is poor on the north side of the summit, which doesn’t bother the ascent but puts a damper on coming back down that way.  If you’re riding on a weekend and are just going to ride to the summit and back, do Calaveras.  If you want to climb to a summit, descend the back side, then turn around and ride back, do Palomares.  And if you’re in for a bigger adventure (or a BART ride), do Morgan Territory.

Two words of warning: 1. Palomares is by far the shortest of the three, and the most domesticated, but it’s also the steepest—the mile that precedes the summit on the north side is 9-13%—MTR and Calaveras never see such a pitch.    2) it probably has the most climbing miles, because you climb the hill twice, once from each side.  I racked 2250 ft of gain in 19.5 miles.

Palomares is as simple as a ride can get: start at the beginning of Palomares Rd. near Hwy 580 and ride to its end, then turn around and ride back.  It’s a perfect little ride: you do a little flat stuff to warm up, then climb gently, then climb a bit more steeply to a summit, then descend down through an exciting curvy series of esses to the end, all of it through pretty hobby farms and wooded creek canyons.  Then you get to do it all in reverse.  Piece of cake.

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Distance: c. 44 miles 
Elevation gain: 4510 ft

(A Best of the Best ride)

There’s a line of hills and ridges that make up the spine of the East Bay from Tilden Park in Berkeley to Fremont.  Along that line is a series of four nearly-contiguous rides, all outstanding: this ride, Palomares Road, Calaveras Road, and Sierra Road.  The Best of the Bay Century (see the regional introduction) strings them all together, with filler.  As always, I’m going to give you just the good stuff, working north to south.

This ride is really four different roads.  The first, Grizzly Peak Blvd., is one of the few rides on our list that’s city riding on purpose (i.e. not as filler).  In the beginning it’s densely populated residential, and the traffic is dangerous.  It’s not relaxing.  But there’s a magic to the Berkeley Hills that leads hundreds of cyclists to brave the dangers every day, and every time I go to the East Bay I can’t wait to jump on my bike and get up there.  The views of the Bay are unbelievable.    The second road, Skyline Blvd., is less built up, and the views are even better.  The third road, Redwood Rd. is the antithesis of Grizzly Peak Blvd.—a sublime, solitary, and thoroughly unexpected ride through the bowels of a primaeval forest (hence the name).  You’ll expect to see Ents.  And finally the fourth road, Claremont Ave., is a Best-of-the-Best, breath-taking plummet which also figures in our Tunnel Road/Claremont Ave. Loop.

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