On The Road
by: Bill Oetinger 12/1/2003
A Question of Scale
Not too long ago, a few of us were pacelining down Hwy 1 between Olema and Bolinas. I wonder if you know that stretch of road. If you do, you’ll recall the lovely scenery...all part of either the Point Reyes National Seashore or the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. You may also remember how the road dips and dives and wiggles through an endless run of slinky corners, rising and falling with the rippling, rolling contours of the landscape.
I used to live near that section of road, and I rode it--on both bicycle and motorcycle--almost every day, and I came to know the road intimately. Every curve and rise was hardwired into my memory, so that I could almost have ridden it blindfolded. Now, living in the next county, I only drive it or bike it every few months. But I still love it. Tourist traffic notwithstanding, it remains one of the nicest state highways around...a real jewel.
So anyway, we’re riding along, approaching one particular set of curves--just south of Five Brooks--that I have always regarded as being close to the perfect embodiment of what a country road should be. I mention this to my pal Rich, and then, as we pedal through the section of a half-dozen curves, I find myself feeling a little let down. The experience isn’t as exhilarating as I remember it being. It’s all happening in a sort of plodding slow motion. This bothers me for a second, and then I understand why it feels this way: I’m recalling how it was when I hammered through here on my classic, ’52 Harley. And Rich says, “Oh yeah, I know what you mean: I love to come through here on my Norton!”
You know the old adage about horses for courses? Well, this particular stretch of road happens to be ideal for a motorcycle going about 70-mph...snapping back and forth through the well banked turns, whipping up and down over the humpbacked crown of the road. It’s an exquisite little rush. The proportions of the road suit that turn of speed. But on a bicycle, at 20-mph, it’s rather tame.
If you want to explore the difference between moto magic and bike magic in roads, I have a great website for you to visit. It’s called California Motorcycle Roads, or sometimes just Pashnit.com, from its URL...http://www.pashnit.com/motoroads.htm. The site is devoted to exploring the great backroads of the Golden State...the ones a moto-tourist would love to ride. It features hundreds of great photos of those great roads...lovely, wide-angle shots. There are also links to numerous other, similar sites. It’s a great resource for cyclists as well, because both two-wheeled camps appreciate pretty much the same sorts of roads, and if you want to find out what some obscure road up in Stanislaus County looks like before you plan your bike ride there, you can probably find a dozen good photos of it at this site. Even if you’re not planning an immediate trip to one of the pictured venues, you can still waste an immense amount of time at this site, just drooling over the eye candy (assuming you get excited about pictures of cool backroads).
All of the photos are accompanied by captions singing the praises of--or in some cases, issuing warnings about--the featured roads. Tim, the one-man band behind the website, is tirelessly enthusiastic about his subject, and his energy is infectious: you can’t help getting excited about the roads too, as you browse through the images and read his cheerful copy. But it doesn’t take long to realize that Tim is more excited about some roads and less so about others. It’s clear he’s never met a backroad he doesn’t like, but the ones that crank his meter up to the redline tend to be ones like that snakey section of Hwy 1 south of Five Brooks: perfectly suited to a cafe racer at full song. And the ones that get only lukewarm praise are the ones where the corners are tighter, the sight lines are restricted, the pavement is maybe a bit ratty, and the ups and downs are more technical and constricted...where a rider on a Ducati would have to throttle back and exercise a bit of caution.
Those roads though, are exactly the sort that rate the highest praise when cyclists are comparing notes. Roads like King Ridge and Coleman Valley in Sonoma County; Peachy Canyon outside of Paso Robles; Carmel Valley Road off Cahoon summit; the dinky little road up the Salmon River Gorge, Grizzly Road on the Grizzly Century, near North Fork; Ink Grade in Pope Valley...semi-forgotten, narrow, under-engineered, possibly in disrepair...but for all that, perfectly scaled to the speed of a cyclist.
I have been thinking about the question of scale in roads and in the landscapes that play host to those roads. I have been thinking about what a crucial, yet unappreciated, factor scale plays in cycling enjoyment. When cyclists talk about their favorite roads, they mention the scenery and the lack of traffic, or they may rave about a great descent or the nice pavement. But I never hear anyone mentioning scale. I don’t think it occurs to most cyclists to consider this factor at all. And yet it’s essential to the definition of what makes one road really fun and leaves another one only so-so.
It has to do with how fast we move through our world, and let’s face it, except on downhills, most bicyclists don’t move all that quickly...maybe 12 to 22-mph for a typical cycle-tourist. Now, don’t get me wrong: I like the speed of cycling. Oh sure, I’d like to be faster...who wouldn’t? But generally, I’m content with the pace at which my bike and I roll across the countryside. The thing is though, some of that countryside can unroll before us very, very slowly at bike speed. You say 20-mph is 20-mph, regardless of where you are? I disagree, and to support my case, I offer Exhibit A: riding in Death Valley. Have you ever done this? Jeez, but it’s boring! Okay, Death Valley is admittedly an extreme example, and to be fair, it isn’t even always boring, especially if you’re fond of that particular environment. But the landscape is so vast and open and uncluttered, and the roads are so flat and straight and unvarying in their aspect, that it can really mess with your head. You can sometimes see the road ahead of you for five miles, disappearing in the distance like an illustration of the principles of perspective and vanishing points. As you pedal along, you know you’re moving forward, but nothing around you is changing. It feels as if you’re on your rollers, churning away like mad and going nowhere.
This sort of thing may make for an interesting cycling adventure now and then...something to check off on your personal Been There, Done That list. But, for me anyway, it isn’t really much fun. Could be I have a little problem here with a whimpy attention span. Could be I need a little mental toughness to get me through these vast, empty spaces. Lord knows, the hard boys and girls who do RAAM put up with riding endlessly through the flat, vacant no-places of America. And anyone who has done one of the flatter double centuries has experienced that stultifying feeling of riding and riding and riding and...nothing is happening! So yeah, it can be done. We all have done it. But it isn’t what I think of when I conjure up an image of a dream bike ride on a dream bike road.
For me, a dream road offers something new around every bend, and the bends keep coming constantly. Straight roads need not apply, except in small doses, to offer a little variety when even the bends become boring. This dream road will never be flat. It doesn’t have to be going uphill or downhill in major doses, although that is welcome too. But it should always be at least a little topsy-turvy...bumping up over ridges and dipping down into creek cuts, dodging around boulders and sentinal trees. It should drape itself comfortably over the natural contours of the land, whatever they may be...as opposed to plowing through the land on a massively engineered road cut.
The pavement doesn’t have to be crummy. In fact, I like it when it’s smooth. But it seems to be the case that many of the best roads, with all the qualities mentioned above, are the way they are simply because of neglect. Because they don’t fit some master plan for progress and development, they have been left to molder in the forgotten outback, and sometimes crummy pavement is the price we pay for having these relegated roads left to us. (It doesn’t have to be this way: Europe is dense with a tracery of tiny little lanes through the middle of nowhere, more often than not sporting superb, silky pavement. But in this neck of the woods, when a road comes up for serious repaving, it often seems a pandora’s box of collateral consequences is opened. Specs go out that require regrading, widening, big shoulders, guard rails, and all the modern flourishes that make roads safe for big, fast cars. Heaven forbid that we should have an off-camber, blind-brow, hairpin corner, with no railing on the outside! Someone might go too fast in a big car and get hurt! I’m never sure whether this governmental mandate to make everything super-safe springs from a desire to protect us from ourselves, or from a desire to cover the bureaucratic keesters in the event of a liability action.)
Sometimes I think my need for constant stimulation on the bike makes me sound like a spoiled child: never happy unless I’m being entertained and diverted. So okay, I admit it: I’m a spoiled cyclist. I live in a region that has loads of dinky, rumpled roads that come close to the definition of my ideal, with all the technical bits and twists and turns and grade changes. Never a dull moment! I’m used to it, and I get restive when I ride in places where nothing new happens for miles at a time. Case in point: when people call me up to enquire about the Terrible Two double century--most of it run on those dinky, dumpy roads--they always fret and stew that it’s going to be so hard. But I tell them, for my money, it’s not that bad...why?...because it’s never boring. There is always something new around every corner or over the top of every hill, and if it has 16,500’ of climbing, that means it also has 16,500’ of descending.
Speaking of descending...these questions of scale apply to the downhills too, even though you might be going considerably faster. In a column a couple of months ago--Inyo Face--I talked about descending out of the Eastern Sierra across the vast, featurless alluvial fans so common at the base of those mountains...cruising at 40-mph for mile after mile, with not one darn thing going on. No grade changes, no turns, no passing scenery (at least not close to the road). I joked that I wished I had a book to read to pass the time during the descent. Such would not be the case on any descent on the Terrible Two, or on one of my properly scaled roads: all sorts of turns...well banked or off-camber, fast sweepers or tight, diminishing apex hairpins, complex combo turns, and so on. Sudden shifts in grade as you drop off a ledge or bottom out in a dip or fly off the top of a hummock. Potholes and tree roots and cracks to dodge. Cattle guards to hop. In short, a real-life version of an amusement park ride. Given the choice, I will always choose a technical, busy 35-mph descent over an open, featureless 50-mph descent. It’s just more fun!
Reading about dodging tree roots and flying off ledges, you might begin to wonder if I would rather be mountain biking instead of road riding. While mountain biking has its charms, I still usually prefer being on pavement. As noted before, the buckled, patched, potholed pavement is sometimes the price we pay for using roads that are off the beaten path of progress. And dancing around those obstacles and booby traps can sometimes be entertaining...keeps you focused. But all in all, I’d rather have the asphalt smooth, thank you very much, as long as they don’t make all those other “improvements” when they lay down the nice topcoat. Grizzly Road on the wonderful Grizzly Century is a good example of a road that has all the little dipsy-doodle quirkiness of an old, natural road, but with fine pavement. And just recently, we in the North Bay have become the beneficiaries of another such marriage of silk-smooth and under-engineered: Pine Flat Road, an excellent, 12-mile long out-&-back, has recently been repaved after a big pipeline was buried in the road bed. Amazingly, when they patched things up, they did a great job on the paving without altering in any way the convoluted contours and funky flavor of this old, remote mountain road. So now we get the best of both worlds. Sometimes, against all expectations, they manage to get it right.
One other thing I’ve been forgetting to mention: roads scaled to the tempo of a bicycle are rarely attractive to motorists...car and truck type motorists anyway. Too tight and twisty...you don’t want your passengers getting carsick all over your SUV upholstery! So an added plus from my point of view is relatively light traffic.
I could ramble on pretty much indefinitely on this subject, but I guess I’ve stated my case. When you’re thinking about what makes a road bike-friendly, don’t forget to consider scale. When you’re trying to decide where to ride this weekend or where to go on your next cycle-tour, check out those photos at the motorcycle website, and head for the roads that will be fun at the speed--and energy output--of a cyclist, rather than the ones that work best at the speed of a sport bike or a fast car.
Bill can be reached at srccride@sonic.net