Bikepacking- SF Peninsula Traverse
Better late than never? We rode this route in May 2018, so my memory of a few things may be hazy, but it was a really cool/demoralizingly hard route so I thought I’d share some things!
Map from Bikepacking.com
Last May, we decided to ride the SF Peninsula Traverse Bikepacking route. We were in California for a wedding, and it is a relatively short and therefore non-commiting ride, so it seemed like a good opportunity to try it. My family still lives in the Bay Area, where I grew up, so I was mostly familiar with the path of the route and we would be able to start and end from my mom’s house, a huge bonus. On a 1-10 scale this ride was rated a 5, so it seemed really attainable for our skills and experience. Well let’s just be upfront about it and say THIS ROUTE WAS INCREDIBLY HARD. If you decide to ride this, go in being prepared for a ton of climbing. I do not say this lightly, as earlier in the year I had come off my first bikepacking trip, a combo of two routes that packed an incredible 50k of vert into the 600 mile trip (rated 7 and 7.5 if you’re curious), and I felt like I understood what it meant for a route to have lots of climbing. Butttt 16,000’ over 100 miles turned out to be WAY HARDER!
No cars necessary! We went house to house from my mom’s with help from the train.
After reading the comments about the route and its difficulty, we decided to adhere to some edits that people had suggested. We skipped a large loop in Montara, that was rumored to be full of poison oak. If I even look at poison oak, I will break out into a terrible, weeping, rash. So that was a hard pass. We also skipped the very end of the route, which was a giant climb with apparently little reward, so we got off the route a bit early, and took a public bike path to the Los Gatos CalTrain station. We also, accidentally, skipped what was described as the best singletrack of the trip because I am terrible at routefinding. Other than that we did our best to adhere to the route!
I rode a full squish, but only because I lent my hardtail to Brian.
Logistics aside, let’s talk about the trip! We left from my mom’s house and rode to the nearest CalTrain station and loaded up our bikes. It doesn’t cost any extra to bring your bike on the train. We got off at the San Bruno station and biked to the trailhead. The first day of biking was a ton of fun. We went up and over some hills and descended down to the coast and our campsite in Half Moon Bay. Camping right by the ocean was idyllic, and made even better by the proximity of several taco shops. We went to bed before the sun had even set and were up and ready for more riding early the next morning.
Camp! There is a patch of grass specifically for bike campers
We went in search of coffee, which was decidedly harder to find in Coastal California than in Washington. There was an entire shopping center that didn’t have a single coffee place! After fueling up and picking up provisions at Safeway, we were happily biking down a beautiful coastal path. Eventually it was time to veer off towards the hills again and into the redwoods. It was somewhere around here that I missed a turn which caused us to miss some really cool single track.
I pretty much only have pictures from day 1 because my phone was severely dying the whole time
After some really tough climbing we popped out on Skyline Blvd. Fortunately it was not the weekend or else there would have been tons of yahoos racing their fancy sports cars down the road. We coasted easily to Alice’s Restaurant for a nice lunch. After lunch it was back in the saddle for climb after climb after climb. Each time there was a turn, we consulted the map and it told us to go up the steepest part of the trail. We were getting reallllllly tired but had to keep climbing, and in my case hike a biking on several occasions. We did get some fun singletrack mixed in with all the climbing, but the climbing was more memorable.
Eventually we came to the turn off for our campground at Castle Rock State Park. IT WAS AT THE BOTTOM OF A GIANT HILL. A ONE WAY GIANT HILL. Which meant that after busting our butts alllll day climbing, we had a super sad, steep, descent down into our camp, all the while thinking about how our day would start out with a huge climb back out. We ate our snacks and crawled into bed. To lighten our load for this trip, we brought one single person sleeping bag, and two silk sleeping liners. We each slept in our liners and unzipped the bag and put it over both of us like a blanket.
In the morning, we sullenly started climbing back up the hill. Fortunately, we were very near the end of the route, especially fortunate because my phone, our only version of the map of the route, was dying. We finally got a beautiful, wonderful, excellent, singletrack descent that brought smiles to our faces. Partway down we passed a woman who was running. At the bottom, Brian said “I think I went to high school with that woman.” I laughed and said, “ya right.” Because Brian grew up in Washington, and we were on a random trail in CA. But the woman ran up to us and she and Brian recognized each other immediately! She now works at Specialized in Morgan Hills. She told us how to get to the end of our route and find the bike path that would take us to the CalTrain Station. We were off!
A bit more easy pedaling took us to the getting off point of the route. We rode the nice public, paved, bike path into Los Gatos and then found our way to the train station. We wearily sat down on the train, glad to have survived. When we got off at the station near my mom’s house, we stopped in at a Trader Joe’s and got a tiramisu and frozen pizza. We rode back to my mom’s and had a proper feast and took it easy for a few days! This route was by no means easy, but it did come with some really cool riding, incredible views, and an amazing diversity of landscape!
