Into the Hills! (Or: A Tale of Three Parks)

[shannon_a]

Tomorrow's going to be a people-full day, so today I opted to spend some time on my own. As you might guess, that meant a bike ride. I really wanted to cover some new territory, but heading out to Richmond or Concord or Fremont sounded like too much effort. So I finally settled on riding up to a hillside recreation area I'd found called the Shepherd Canyon Park.

First stop was lunch at Wendy's on Broadway, in Oakland. From there I biked up Broadway to Lake Temescal. I'd never taken this route before and was delighted to discover that I was able to make it all the way up to Temescal without walking. Still tough, but that was a real victory!

I sat around at Temescal for quite a while, reading Redemption Ark Not as joyful as all my recent trips where I was reading A Storm of Swords, but it's still an enjoyable and very intelligent very modern SF book. While reading I was shocked by the amount of bird noise I heard. I've usually been going up to Temescal around 6.30 or 7.00, when it's still very light out, but apparently the birds are early to bed. Hearing them all was a totally different experience.

From there, it was onto new territory. I'd looked at Google Maps using the terrain features, to see what the route from Temescal to Shepherd Canyon was, and it didn't look like there were any nasty hills, but Google Maps isn't very granular, so it was hard to know for sure. Anyway, it turned out to be fine. They were mostly level streets, just up in the hills, with a few short rises. Google Maps even helpfully steered me around blocks that had big, unnecessary ridges.

I was surprised as I approached the Shepherd Canyon path to discover I was in Montclair. I'd vaguely seen the name before, and I knew it was some town or something in upper Oakland, but I was shocked to discover it was so close. It's got a surprisingly big downtown area several blocks big, with major stores like CVS and Rite-Aid as well as lots of crafty stuff, including paintings sold on the street, et al. It reminded me of Carmel (or at least my memories of how Carmel was 25 years ago). I also visited a little park while in Montclair proper, which had just about every sort of major sports activity — baseball, tennis, basketball, etc. Quite impressively, they were all being used too.

(Montclair is apparently a very affluent neighborhood of Oakland. One of the things that struck me as I biked around was the demographic: slightly old and all white.)

Just above the Montclair Downtown I found the Shepherd Canyon Trail proper. It's a rails-to-trails project, where the result is a greenway that loops up through a heavily forested area. Though there's technically a park there, as far as I could tell, this one path was the only way through. And it was absolutely beautiful. Just a path, way up in the hills, looking over Montclair at first (with an occasional view of Oakland and the bay Beyond) then heading off into deeper wilderness, with trees looming over you, forming a tunnel. You can hear a major road far below and off to the side, but it's a minor distraction.

The path did see a decent amont of usage — mostly women or couples walking either 1-3 dogs or 1-2 children. They were infrequent enough, though, that I could enjoy the solitude (and unlike some of the paths I've ridden (weird trail along a sunken lake near Hilltop Mall, I'm thinking of you) it felt totally safe.

Eventually the Trail emerged from the foliage and then went another ways past houses before finally ending. Using the magic of modern technology, I downloaded a "My Altitude" program and was shocked to discover that I was now at 950 feet elevation! I've always felt like I'm bad at hills, but here I was getting pretty close to the top of the hills that separate us from Lafayette and all the rest to the east. I played for a while with the idea of biking over the hills and coming down on the far side of the Lafayette-Moraga Trail. At that point, I think it was possible and I even biked up along the Google-suggesedt road to the next switchback, which left me just a couple of switchbacks from Skyline Boulevard ... but in the end I decided that was a project for another day.

So I biked back down, enjoying the beautiful trail again, then getting back to Montclair.

From there my plan was to bike down the Oakland hillsides until I came upon a third park, where I'd spotted some trails. My main route was down Park Boulevard, which was nice enough until I hit construction which narrowed the road to two lanes and disallowed any passing. Ack! I got cars queued up behind me, pulled over and let them pass, then continued down, but it was not fun.

At a street called St. James I cut over, planning to hit the trail that I'd seen. I was somewhat surprised to see that St. James immediately went over a bridge ... and that my trail was one or two hundred feet below. Whoops! After puzzling things over, I guessed that the entrance to the park was down a ways, and thus I ended up in Dimond Park proper. There was a nice pool here and a basketball court and a playground, and again lots of people (a theme for the day). I found a really nice looking creekside trail which did not seem bike-accessible. From Google maps, it appeared to go the (very long) length of the park area. I opted out of that today, but definitely want to hike it in the future. I hear it has waterfalls.

Instead I got myself reoriented and found that the actual creekside bike trail which I'd tried to reach from St. James had an entrance just another street or two up. So I headed out of the park, down a big decline, up a big incline, swapped my gears real quick and 
DISASTER!

My chain totally derailed and afterward I also found that my rear gear shift wire had broken (the second time that's happened on the bike). This left me with only three gears, all of which were pretty high. Not great for the Oakland Hills. I made an attempt to get to the start of that trail, decided I just needed to go home, and started heading downward.

Down by 580, FURTHER DISASTER!, as my chain derailed again and this time tied itself in a knot. I walked my bike for a little bit, figured out it was about 3 miles to the closest BART station and that there was no way I wanted to walk that long, managed to get the chain untangled and thus headed off with deeply grease-stained hands. I really strained on a few uphills because of my gear situation, enjoyed seeing Lake Merritt as I skirted it, and finally got to BART.

After that the train kindly delivered me from 19th Street to Downtown Berkeley. Where I immediately went over to Missing Link. Ironically, I'd already planned to stop by Missing Link on my way home, as my back brakes were getting thin and I'd been having problems with my chain. The gear-wire problem was just icing on the cake.

So my bike is now sitting at Missing Link, waiting for new brake pads in the back, a new chain, a new rear cassette, and a new gear wire. Quite a bit to fix, but for the most part it's just necessary maintenance as the bike approaches 5000 miles. Unfortunately, this is Missing Link's busy season. So, while I'd hoped to get my bike back on Sunday after the Parade or at worst if I went out for lunch on Monday or Tuesday ... instead I won't have it until Thursday. Sigh.

Despite the disasters at the end, it was still a great ride. 17.50 miles. Discovering Montclair and the Shepherd Canyon Trail were exactly what I hoped for when I decided that I wanted to scout some new terrain today ... and finding out that I can make it 950 feet up in the hills — which is even with a lot of the parks in the hills and not too far from the top — was very exciting. Especially so because I didn't think that any of the hills from Lake Temescal to the top of the Shepherd Canyon Trail were that noticeable, yet I rose from about 400 feet to 950 feet in that time. As long as they're gradual or short, I can do them.

As I said, a great ride.