Up until yesterday I'd never done the North Backbone route, having done the north ridge of Baldy a few times to get into Fish Fork or bailing off the North Face from rockfall or whatever. Once Fritz and I climbed Dawson via the Give a Dog a Bone couloir on the northeast aspect, starting and ending in Lytle Creek. I'd never been on Pine or Wright before, so there were two more places of interest I hadn't visited. Since there weren't any winter mountaineering or technical objectives in this area for me, I had no real interest in learning the terrain until more recently. Now, I don't have a car and thus must ride my bike everywhere and bring it with me so I can, oh, I dunno, get home within a week, so I'm slowly knocking out things I've always wondered about a bit but never had the impetus to attack.
Another point stuck in my mind is the routes people come up with for the current trend of 'bikepacking', basically backpacking routes on a bike. There's a route called the Baldy Bruiser, dreamt up by a guy who I respect who has done an awful lot. Now, this being my home, I feel like it deserves something strong that one must work up to and earn. The Bruiser route is quite nice, but if I'm going to make my own route of sorts I want it to be demanding and I don't want most to be able to easily complete it, or complete it first try. I like things that one must slowly learn and put great effort into, often failing for years, to maybe make it happen. Thus, I am scouting out route sections for my own project of something that will provide challenging and deep personal insight to those who take part in it, and that I feel, as a man of the San Gabriels, properly represents my home range, properly represents the deep personal challenges, pain, love, beauty, fear, and all levels of being I have felt during my time here.
Taking a bike up Baldy is a bit of a challenge. This was my third time doing so, up the Devils Backbone, and it's finally starting to become 'easy'. The ride up Baldy Road is, for me, a bit tedious and somewhat boring until you hit Baldy Village. It's exposed and hot in the summer, and not until you're quite high can you feel a good breeze and let go of the feelings dragged up here from the concrete world. Often those feelings are the heaviest thing in your rucksack. On that topic, one thing I noticed when pushing my bike up steep hills as opposed to riding on relatively flatter terrain is the old fights I get into in my head that I remember from mountaineering and climbing. Slow hard movement for what feels like forever, trading blows with a invisible opponent in my mind fueled by these negative feelings, like tendrils reaching up from the city, long and twisting all the way up the mountain and into my soul. I don't think I felt any this time, but have recently and was not entirely enthused about those feelings coming back.
I refilled at Baldy Lodge with the little water bottle thing out front, as usual, and continued on. It was quite warm and my grips were soaked with sweat. I have six water bottles on my bike but only filled two as my next water stop wasn't far, up at San Antonio Falls, where I would fill up all my bottles, hoping it would get me to my next water stop all the way at Grassy Hollow off the 2 near Blue Ridge. The ride to the notch is quite nice as the dirt road is in excellent shape, quite easy with my huge tires and still likely easy on a gravel bike. I took a break for some snacks on the patio before heading up the northern part of the ridge to DBB where I stopped under a tree to eat some Cheez-Its and chill out a bit. My joints had been hurting all day, which isn't common for me anymore, and likely a flare up of the autoimmune/heart disease I have, occasionally making me feel as if I have a very minor flu at times. I keep a cut down and folded up old army issue foam pad in the front bag of my bikes, which gives the bag a rigid shape and acts as an excellent sit pad. I unfolded it and laid down under the fir tree for half an hour.
Continuing upward, I eyeballed the burn area from the fire off 3n06 in Stockton Flats a couple weeks back, now a smear of fire retardant amongst some trees. I put my smaller water bottles on the legs of my fork to keep the front end lighter for all the times you have to lift the front end up over some rocks. The bigger bottles reside on the downtube, closer to the center of gravity. It's all about changes like this that help the big things become a bit more manageable and allow you to go further with less wasted effort. I made decent time to the Baldy Harwood saddle, then pushed up to the top where I ate a sandwich and wondered how much snow I'd have to deal with on the backbone. My buddy Matt had warned me there were some snowfields I'd likely negotiate on the way down, so this was the worry in my head I was willing to turn back for. He had run from Wright to Baldy, down to the hut, and back on Sunday, as I had told him I'd do this ride that day, but was too tired from work so I slept most of the day and missed him.
The descent down the north ridge is likely the hardest part of the backbone for me with my bike, but I've done it several times before without a bike (with a heavy ruck, though), so I was okay with that. I was able to skirt nearly all the snow by staying closer to the edge of the north face and made it down without issue. Pushing up to Dawson was slow and a fair bit of effort, reaching the summit just before 5pm. I was looking forward to beautiful trees and the feel of the San Gabriel high country and this I received. I was pleasantly surprised to see the way to Pine looked quite easy, and it was, making it to the summit quite easily. The next possible challenge in my mind was the well known skinny part of the NBB on the north ridge of Pine. I was careful and had some creative yet conservative movement taking my bike down this section without issue, and was glad there wasn't any snow, as seen in scouting photos my buddy took recently. I was pleased to reach Blue Ridge road, knowing I could actually ride the bike now instead of carrying and pushing it, though I still had to get to the top of Wright. I quickly dispatched Wright and headed west parallel to the PCT to a small draw dropping down onto the road, which is mostly downhill and quite fun all the way to the 2. There was a short climb on the way with excellent views as the sun was setting, bathing the ridge and my surroundings in various hues or orange to purple. Having only driven this road before, I figured it would be a fun and easy ride and that proved to be correct, feeling a bit like a rally stage with nice potholes and a little sand here and there to keep it interesting. I was nearly completely out of water at this point, but Mikey told me there was a spigot at Grassy Hollow, so I wasn't worried anymore.
The visitor center was closed and their water fountain was disabled, so I cruised around until I found the spigot just to the north a short distance. I was beginning to feel the effects of slight dehydration, having rationed my remaining water, so when I twisted the knob (hehehe) on the spigot and water rushed out I was excited and parked the bike to fill four bottles up. The water was white, sometimes brown, and tasted real strange. I figured it was still safe to drink so I had some while eating my remaining sandwich, took some pills for my headache, and slammed the Red Bull I brought the whole way to give me a lil extra oomph for the slow climb up the 2. That worked wonders and I made fast and easy progress to the top of route 39. Five minutes or so into my descent down the super mega ultra dangerous place you should never go on the closed part of 39 I got a large cut in my rear tire, shooting tubeless sealant all over. I put the puncture at the 6 o clock position to see if it would seal, but it was too large, so I rotated it to 12 o clock to save the remaining sealant and fired several plugs into the hole. It ended up taking two large and one small Dynaplug bullets. These are a wonderful bit of kit and if you run tubeless tires (which you most likely should) you should use these with some of the old school bacon strips as a backup. After putting the third plug in I tried putting air in to see if it would seal, and it did. I disconnected the hose, removed the valve core (all the air then escapes), and put 2 ounces of sealant into the tire through the valve using the small Stan's bottle I carry with me everywhere. Pumped the huge tire back up to probably 23psi, which took probably 200 pumps of my Lezyne high volume micro whatever pump (another solid bit of kit) which I could barely feel cause I was still ripped as fuck off the Red Bull, put the puncture at 6 o clock to get the sealant all worked in there, and gave it a test. It held, so I put everything away and continued my descent carefully. I looked for whatever punctured my tire but couldn't find anything obvious, so it was probably just a particularly sharp rock.
I continued down 39 to the spring on the side of the road, where I dumped all the gross water and refilled with that lovely spring water, and chugged a bottle, feeling great. During the descent I rode through quickly transitioning bands of cold and warm air, cold around water sources and warm along outside ridges. As it became apparent the tire would be fine I sped up and coasted down around 40mph or so. The fun long descent mostly ends once you hit West Fork, and the rest of 39 is mostly downhill with some short climbs until you hit Morris Dam and drop into the city. I got me a bigass meal at In n Out and headed home.
It was warm in the morning, not quite hot but hot enough to sweat a fair bit on the climb up Baldy Road, pleasant in the high country, and then warm again off the 2. I encountered very strong headwinds on the 2 around 7-8,000ft with temps in the 70's. One of the gullies off Throop or Burnham has a truly massive avalanche debris pile with many feet of snow still right off the road. The road itself is in fine shape and I assume the damaged portion is closer to Wilson.
I would like to make some changes to my bicycle for the next outings. I am still brainstorming the right sling setup to help carry the bike over my shoulder using retired climbing slings and my big coil of Dyneema cordage. One end will likely be tied to the headtube at the front of the bike, and the other at the seat tube gusset. The sling would be stored on the gusset and locked down when not in use by a velcro strap or something that's easy and fast enough that you don't forgo using the sling due to it being a pain in the ass to deal with. Currently I just pick the bike up by grabbing the downtube just ahead of the crank, but that obviously gets tiresome within 30 seconds and is thus impractical. A sling, likely with a shoulder pad of about 2" width, would make this much easier and would free up my arms for balance and so on.
The pedals are always in the way, sometimes painfully or dangerously so when doing tricky sections. The best possible solution I see now is to get MKS EZY pedals, which are part of a clever system where the pedal can be quickly removed and reattached by pulling back on a collar attached to the crank arm. This would also allow you to use different pedals using the same system, so you could have flat pedals for all styles of footwear, or put SPD pedals on if you're doing something more dynamic. As so much of this trip involved not riding the bicycle, taking them off would make a huge improvement when carrying the bike or pushing through narrow sections of the trial bound by Buckthorn and Manzanita. It would also make carrying the bike on a pack frame nice, as the pedal wouldn't dig into you, and you don't need to bring a pedal wrench with you, not to mention not having to play the pedal removal game on tricky terrain... I take pedals off all day long as a mechanic and I'm not going to do that out there.
In total I rode 100 miles on the dot and gained 13,915ft over about 19 hours. A shame I didn't jump up and down enough on that Red Bull rampage to get it up to 14,000ft. Maybe next time.
Times:
Home 0545
Manker 1025
Notch 1145
End of break above notch 1220
Start of DBB 1255
Top of Register Ridge 1350
Summit 1455
Leave summit 1515
Baldy Dawson Col 1605
Dawson summit 1655
Pine Dawson Col 1715
Pine summit 1740
Blue Ridge Rd 1900
Wright summit 1915
ACH 2010
Vincent Gap 2040
Top of 39 2150
Home 0100
