Any suggestion on a good escape within a couple of hours of Orange County where you can ride for three hours without a stoplight and without eating exhaust?
Moved to SoCal from Seattle and while I don’t miss the rain I do miss the open, undeveloped spaces. I’m longing for a lonely country road.
yeah. i live there. it’s 1:30 from my house to woodbridge in irvine over the toll road, or to the #55/#5 interchange.
there are two or three places i’d steer you to for starters. drive to wrightwood and ride the san gabriel mountains. wrightwood is another 15 minutes closer to you than where i live. good options are the angeles crest highway (#2) or big pines highway (our bread and butter climb) and the loop through juniper hills (our other bread and butter ride). or consider the entire angeles crest century, written about somewhere on slowtwitch.
elsewhere on this forum right now is a question about the san jacinto road race, and i answered it with a description of the course. that road, 243 or 273 or whatever it is, from mountain center to banning, is hilly, but absolutely fabulous.
then there’s inland san diego, right around julian. a little farther for you to drive. but fabulous riding. many loops around there, lake cuyamaca, lake henshaw, etc.
if you travel all the way up highway 39 (goes from huntington beach to the mountains) that climbs up into the san gabriels, and makes some loops. i’ve never ridden it. but i bet it’s great.
thanks for the tips; are these routes relatively safe in terms of the motorists/locals? i haven’t had any bad experiences with drivers since moving down here but apparently that is the exception to the rule based on posts to this forum!
also, is it relatively obvious once you get to wrightwood where to start from? and when you reference the angels crest highway should I assume the route is an out and back?
sorry to pepper you with the questions. I’ll be the one out there on a 2002 P2K with a yellow helmet clutching a map across the aerobars…
wrightwood: it’s a one-horse town. it’s obvious where to start.
you could do an out and back on angeles crest, or you ride up 4 miles, hang a right on big pines highway, descend, and then come back, or descend and then turn left on pallet creek road, do the juniper hills loop, reascend and return. either buy a map, or just ride and get lost and have an adventure. i’ve tried both ways, i don’t have a preference.
safety: from wrightwood and down big pines highway, during the week i’ve ridden for an hour without seeing a vehicle in either direction. on the weekends there are cafe racers (ninja-type motorcycles) but they don’t bother me much.
if you look around on slowtwitch, maybe on the lifestyle section (a button on the yellow navbar up top on most of the pages), you’ll see references to good socal riding roads.
in an effort to make me feel better about the fact that I won’t have a warm dry winter training season, let me rub in the fact that the weekends have been very nice recently. I live in Redmond (suburb of seattle for anyone else reading this) and have been riding from my house. 2 weeks ago was down to enumclaw, last weekend was out to North Bend, and this weekend I’m thinking up around Monroe. The rural riding out here has to be pretty unbeatable.
now if the weather will just hold.