Chew's Ridge

5,006 feet

18 March 2006

I drove about 30 miles to a local dirt road into the Ventana wilderness to do some hill training on my mountain bike.  I got there at about 7 and started riding up.  Even though it was only a dirt road it was really beautiful, with fern-covered hillsides and brilliant green moss covering the biggest trees (later I came on a sign forbidding the cutting of Christmas trees).  Everything was wet from a month of rain but the road was less muddy and more wet-dirty.  After about an hour of steady (very slow) climbing I started to pass bits of snow and ice under logs and bushes.  Gradually it increased until the whole road was covered in snow and I was riding in wheel tracks from a 4-wheel-drive something from a few days before.  The tread marks had refrozen so I was able to get traction (more or less) and keep on the bike.  Finally the snow on either side of the tracks got so deep that I kept hitting it with my pedals and falling off, and my cleats/pedals iced up and froze so I took to pushing.  At this point my feet were frozen because I was only wearing extremely breathable mesh mountain bike shoes and they had filled with snow, but I was still sweating from the effort.  After about 15 minutes of jog-pushing I came up out of the clouds into the sun and arrived at the turn-off for the summit where any tracks stopped completely, so I abandoned my bike and jogged up the rest of the way (5/8 of a mile, according to a weird sign), post-holing to my knees in the snow to the summit (only 5006 feet).  It only took two hours to get up but it was certainly more interesting than my usual Saturday morning bike ride.  The snow at the top was pristine except for deer, rabbit and other animal tracks, and it had snowed last night so all the trees were white.
It took me 20 minutes to get down, during which I lost all feeling in my hands, feet and face from wind chill.  A truck had followed me up and they had left a trench of churned up, slushy snow.  It was like riding in a bumper-car lane or something where you can't steer you only bounce back and forth between the outsides of the trench.