Escaping The Rain At Ballinger

With the Husky Ride at Stonyford postponed, Eric and I needed to find somewhere to ride. I'd had enough of the rain and started looking around for some sun on www.noaa.gov. I found it at Ballinger Canyon in the Los Padres National Forest. We headed down Thursday night and were on the trails by 11am Friday...


We had the place all to ourselves, and the trails had no tracks on them at all. I guess nobody had ridden there since before the last rains. Conditions were perfect, the weather was perfect, our campsite was perfect...just a stellar day for riding!






This section had a high pucker factor...


My turn...


The wildflowers are starting to come out...


This was the only mud we ran into, but it was nasty. My wheels just quit turning, and I had to stop and scrape some of the mud off with a stick in order to continue. Reminded me of Carnegie...



We ran into some mud further down this canyon, too, but it was different. It was sorta sandyish rocky mud that had run down the canyon in the last rain...it was huge fun, even on a trials tire!







We headed out of the canyon and up onto the ridges...



We had to climb up in order to go around this huge chasm...







This stuff seemed to go on forever...



We dropped down off the ridge into a sandy little canyon...



There were lots of pokey little cactus things...



More to come...

Well, there was a trail map posted on a board, and I took a photo of it and referred to it a few times. Eric hand-drew a map on a piece of binder paper and it was incredibly accurate for what it was. I saved it as I was quite impressed with his effort The place is pretty small, though, and we basically just rode everything we saw.

No, it wasn't intentional but it turned out alright, didn't it? I prefer my red jersies but I forgot them at home

It was pretty cool stuff, for sure! Not a whole lot of it, but good trails in good conditon with nobody on them made for a few fun days for us!

Thanks, Palmer! Yeah, the PM system works, it's just called "Starting a conversation" here. We had to postopne the ride, but I'm thinking a couple of weeks should be good enough if this warm weather sticks around a little bit.

Oh, there's more, alright I had to watch the first baseball game of the season last night, and then we had our softball opener last night, too. I'll finish this up this afternoon!

Better yet, come on out and we'll show you the goods in person!

Well, it's my knee that's planted on that lovely little bit of native flora in the photo, but that was after I sat up Those pokey things were sticking in my side mere moments before. Can you tell the bike is laying on the ground? You can see my new "bolt-on" Scott's tower and steering damper in the photo. Yeah, it's "bolt-on" alright, after you modify the tower and the IMS tank That was my birthday present from Eric The damper and a new front tire has me feeling like Mike Lafferty these days

I could've used some healing lotion after falling on the damned thing, and I'm sure I could have sewn up my boots with it!

Ok, so after falling down on the yucca plant we headed out of the sandy whoopy wash and back up to one of the ridge-top trails. What these trails lack in technicality they more than make up for in views










Mr. Happy with a snowfield in the distance...


We finished up the day with 50 miles of rockin' fun trails. We hit every mile of "motorcycle-only" trail, and used the ATV/motorcycle trails to connect them, but we did no road riding at all. Well, unless you count riding around to all the fire rings in the staging area looking for firewood We didn't bring any since we had no room with my 144 and the 2 big bikes on the trailer (more on that later.) We ended up with enough wood for a rippin' rager on Friday and another one on Saturday. Speakin' of Saturday, that's coming up next

More to come...

Yeah, you ain't kidding...

Saturday dawned much cooler than Friday. We headed out of the valley via that singletrack on the spine. Notice that the only tracks were ours from the day before...


Now, I know it doesn't look scary in the photos, but this is what it looked like to me up on the spine...(keep in mind I can barely get a toe down on my way-too-tall bike)




You can laugh at me all you want, but my riding pants were full of bricks

The trail got a little more comfortable at the top...




We dropped back down to the bottom...


And headed back down into the canyon trail...


We were wishing for knobbies down here...




At lunch we decided to hie on back to camp and take the big bikes out to the Carrizo Plain to see if the wildflower bloom had started yet...


I acquired a fear of heights many years ago falling off the Rincon Trail down at Kennedy Meadows and I haven't really been able to shake it since. I'll attempt the gnarliest stuff out there, I have no fear of failure in that regard, but if it's anything that I can actually fall off of, well, I'm a wimpering crybaby. There have been trails in Utah where I've gotten off and crawled across, Eric riding my bike for me like a He-Man savior. I didn't want to ride down the scary spine trail, and Eric said we'd go another way. Halfway back I realized he'd tricked me and we were headed for the Downhill of Doom. I'd taken a photo of the trail map but hadn't looked at it since we'd been on the bikes. He, on the other hand, copied the trail map onto a piece of binder paper and he knew exactly where we were... I made fun of his map but it was pretty damned accurate...


Anyway, I obviously survived. I told him to keep snapping away should I happen to fall off the side. It's not like he'd be able to stop me from tumbling to my early demise if he threw down the camera, and I figured he'd be able to use the photos in the ensuing murder trial :laughing



I made it to the next plateau and waited for Eric before going down the Dowhill of Doom Part II...




The high-exposure section in the right in this photo damn near gave me a heart attack...


I lived to tell the tale.
2 hours later I was on my SM610 headed for the Carrizo Plain! More on that soon...

Looks like soooooo much fun. I miss riding trails all day.

The lure of the Plain was simply too strong to ignore. We brought the big bikes, too, since we wanted to see how the legendary Carrizo wildflowers were coming along. After riding the dirtbikes at Ballinger on Friday and half of Saturday, we unloaded the big bikes and headed out to the Carrizo Plain. But first we needed some lunch...


Gee...I guess I shoulda ordered the large ice tea...


The Carrizo Plain was as beautiful as I've ever seen it. Much like Nevada, I find it easy to breathe deep out here...


The road we came in on...


The Plain doesn't need much narration, does it? It speaks for itself...























More to come...

Yep! I've always said California was an embarrassment of riches