On the way to up to the Pacific Northwest for the Seattle Bicycle Expo, Neil and I stopped in Redding, California to get a ride in and help break up the twelve hour drive. We didn’t know much about the trails in the area before we got on the road, but we had heard that Redding had some good riding so we decided to make the stop. While driving north on Highway 5 through the Central Valley, we looked up a few specific trail options on our smartphones and decided to just pick the trail that sounded the most fun and take our chances. Little did we know that this spur-of-the-moment stop would be one of the most fun and adventurous rides either of us had been on in a while.
The skies had been threatening rain all day but right as we pulled up to the Swasey Recreation Area trailhead and started to unload our gear, a full-on downpour started. We debated just getting back on the road and skipping the ride but figured we might as well pedal through the rain since we had taken the trouble to drive all the way to the trailhead. Within the first few minutes of the ride, we realized the silty clay trails of Redding don’t see much rain and aren’t designed to drain very well. The runoff from the mountain had turned most of the trails we were riding through into pedal-deep streams.
We began climbing Mule Mountain and the rain intensified. The climb lasted for a few miles but seemed all the longer due to the torrential rain. My glasses started to fog up and it became like riding with blinders on: I couldn’t ride without the glasses because the mud would get in my eyes, and I couldn’t ride well with them because they fogged up. Regardless, we kept climbing and soon started to hear thunder claps off in the distance. We couldn’t see any lightning, but the sound of thunder was definitely ominous. At the top of the ridge, we saw a charred and smouldering log. We thought for sure that it had been hit by lightning just minutes before, since it was smoking steadily even in a full downpour. It wasn’t until we saw a sign down the trail that we realized the log was part of a controlled burn.
Both Neil and I were riding Surly Krampuses that we had recently built up, and it was the first rides either of us had logged on our new bikes. When we started down the descent of the Mule Mountain trail, we were very surprised by the amount of traction our tires had in the rain. Luckily the clay trails didn’t really get muddy, but the bikes’ three inch tires on 50mm rims also provided plenty of grip. The fun Mule Mountain descent lasted awhile, and although we had to keep our speed in check because of the rain there were still a few sections where we were able to let off the brakes and take the corners at speed.
At the bottom of the mountain we came across a few river crossings. What seemed would be trickling streams during dry conditions had turned into very fast-flowing rivers because of the sudden rain. One crossing in particular made us pause and second guess whether we would make it across safely. The water was moving quite fast and we didn’t know how deep it would be. The other rivers we encountered were about hub-deep and all passable, so we decided our best bet was just to hit this river with some speed and hope we’d make it to the other side. The plan mostly worked out, although we did have to jump off the bikes three quarters of the way through the river, lunge to the shore, and drag our bikes through the current to safety.
Our Rohloff-equipped Krampuses turned out to be the ideal bikes for these conditions. We could not think of any other bike we would have rather been riding. The massive 29er tires provided plenty of traction in the rain and rolled easily over the rocky parts of the trail. The Rohloff hubs let us concentrate on riding rather than worrying about the derailleur getting clogged with the fine, silty dirt or misshifting in the wet conditions. We were especially glad we did not have derailleur-equipped bikes during the river crossings in particular, because they could have been bent or damaged by the current or a submerged rock.
At the end of the trail, we took another smaller loop off to the side of the main trail that took us through a fun jump line. The trail was spotted with plenty of drops, tabletop jumps, and berms, and was so surprisingly fun that we swore to make another trip to Redding just to ride this trail in better conditions.
When we got back to the trailhead, we could not stop smiling. The exuberant feeling of splashing though puddles and hitting jumps in the rain took a while to fade away, and the excitement got us through the rest of our drive as we motored late into the night to Eugene, Oregon.
Check back to the Cycle Monkey Tales blog for the report from the next ride on our Northwest Trip, when we rode Capitol State Forest in Olympia, Washington.
-Phil
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