The TDLP is a bike-packing race through the back-country of the Los Padres national forest. Due to insufficient fitness, this year I rode the tour route, the shorter option: 186mi, 18.5kft gain.
As usual, this is mostly routed through unmaintained dirt roads, which aren't traversable by vehicles anymore. Our two previous rainy winters weren't kind to these roads: there's now a ton of mud, washouts, slides and rock-fall everywhere. And at the higher elevations there's still a lot of snow.
Does anybody have any idea which roads are fully abandoned, and which ones will eventually maybe get some work? Will the road around Big Pine Mountain ever be passable again? Buckhorn? Juncal? What about something like Camuesa? Is that the domain of volunteer trailbuilders now? It would be a bummer if these were to disappear, and only so much is possible without the support of the LPNF.
I'm going to start aggressively editing the OpenStreetMap data to downgrade these from "roads" to "trails", or even as "abandoned roads", so that the map reflects conditions on the ground. If anybody knows what LPNF is planning here, tell me.
From past experience, this route should have taken me 2 days, but instead it took 3.
The rig at the start:
No saddle bag at all. Backpack primarily for water. I used an old climbing chalk bag as an easily-accessible feed bag in the front. New tiny bullhorns and grips. I think this was all a good setup. The 3" tires were quite nice in these conditions, but likely did slow me down. Something smaller would probably have been better.
The tour route group at the start:
Mostly hard-tails. I think a full suspension would be even better, but a few people brought rigid bikes. That sounds crazy to me, but I guess they managed.
Alright, at the start you're on some loosely-defined trails approaching Mt Pinos from the NE. It's an OK double-track in a few places:
You meet an OK dirt road, climb to ~ 7500ft, and descend the McGill trail. This is usually a nice MTB trail, but was mostly snowed over this time. Then you're on pavement, and on some more single-track here and there, and you descend partly down Quatal Cyn rd, and then off to the side, to some motor-bike trails. It's a cool area
Eventually you rejoin the roads, get your supplies in New Cuyama, and head back out into the forest. New Cuyama is the last pavement or cell service or anything for the next 100miles. Aliso Cyn rd climbs up into the mountains. It's paved:
I was pretty gassed at this point, and took it real slow. Walked almost all of the climb up the Aliso trail to Sierra Madre rd. The sun set just as I crested at the road
Made it a bit further to painted rock, and camped there. There was a nice little waterfall coming off the rock:
In the morning:
For the next few miles the roadbed is extra rough: a herd of cows walked through here after a storm. But it is pretty
Further up you get out of the cow-walking area and into a rock-fall and tree-fall and rock-slide area.
Chokecherry spring no longer flows into its trough, but it's still flowing well
Past Big Pine mountain, more rockfall and streams where the road is supposed to be
Some semblance of earlier maintenance:
Descending towards Camuesa rd. This is the road:
Camuesa rd is still epic
You now have to dismount a lot to get around stuff. This is the road:
Next day I climbed Juncal rd. This was graded up to Jameson reservoir, but not past that
At the saddle you climb up the STEEP, but maintained Monte Arido trail
We're going behind this thing:
Following the ridgeline:
Here was a fat rattler that couldn't be bothered to move or rattle or anything
This was the 4th rattlesnake I came across. The first one, I didn't see, until he started to rattle and hiss from the right side of the road as I was riding by. I swerved to the left to avoid him only to discover that I was now riding directly towards ANOTHER rattler on the left side of the road. He started to rattle and hiss too, and I managed an ungraceful dismount, sorta jumping off, and dropping the bike at him. Everyone survived.
Anyhow, you get a glimpse of the ocean up on top
And there's a dirt road. You turn left, the road ends immediately, and you're then at the start of the Ocean View trail.
This is maintained. It's steep and undulating, and rideable only with a lot of effort. You pass around the back of White Ledge
The trail builders built a series of benches along the route
Getting them up here must have been quite a project.
Eventually the trail starts to descend
You drop down to and ride Camino Cielo rd, which is another abandoned road maintained as a single track by the trail builders. It must have taken a ton of work to clean that up. Thank you, Get It Done crew! At some point the maintainance of Camino Cielo rd ends, and the route jumps off to a series of trails that eventually end up in Ojai. Then there's some stuff around the Ventura river, and the bike path back to the finish.
Whew. This took a while. It's the first time I started with the group, and it was really nice to cross paths with the other riders. Looking forward to next year!
Sometimes, I feel I haven't anything to say, and just posting 1.44 column inches of 'like' feels disruptive. It may be a hard feature to code for this flavor of forum software, or hard to do in a way not annoying to users. Sometimes I do have something to say...sorry!
