San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Bicycle adventure: 850 miles across Northern California.
Pedaling across Northern California is the ultimate bikepacking adventure.
“IN A CAR YOU’RE ALWAYS
IN A COMPARTMENT,”
wrote Robert M. Pirsig in “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” a 1974 philosophical treatise in the guise of a cross-country motorcycle travelogue. “And because you’re used to it you don’t realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV.”
The windshield is another screen, a barrier separating us from our surroundings, Pirsig argues. To look through it is to passively consume an image of reality while remaining insulated from that reality. How else can you explain dozing off in a car zooming along the highway at 70 mph?
We’ll up Pirsig’s ante. Even riding a motorcycle, which he champions in his book, is just more passive sitting. For a more present and mindful traveling experience, you really need to hop on a bike and grind out the miles under your own power. Especially for lovers of our Golden State, bicycle travel is the way to know it, and love it, more deeply.
We recently completed a 12-day, 850-mile bike tour, from Davis north to Mount Shasta and then south down the coast to Santa Rosa. We do about one of these big rides each year, and this year we wanted to spend as much time outdoors, in the saddle, as possible. We packed everything into two panniers on the racks of our aluminum and steel road bikes, and stayed in motels rather than camping to lighten the supply load. Biking at an average pace of 10 mph, exposed to wind and weather, offered us plenty of time to think about why we would choose to travel this way.
Cars and airplanes effectively shrink the world, smoothing the friction of travel. You step into a machine, it whirs and roars for
a short period of time, and then you step out somewhere else.
But sometimes, you want to feel the vastness of the world, the joy of discovery, the sense of accomplishment that follows the experience of friction. The distance between, say, San Francisco and Santa Rosa is unremarkable by car, a quick blur once you’ve passed the Golden Gate. But by bicycle, it’s an adventure.
Bicyclists touch the world in a way other travelers don’t. All five senses give contour and texture to what might otherwise be a straight, smooth line. You gain more intimate knowledge — muscle memory of a place others know mainly by freeway off-ramps.
Pedaling over the dry hills of eastern Shasta County, the citrus, herbal and syrupy aromas of chaparral came to us as refreshing as a glass of lemonade. When your max speed is about 20 mph, you can pick out the myriad hues that make our hills golden, from the tawny stalk of a blade of grass to its iridescent, nearwhite tip. Coasting past the farms in Anderson Valley, we absorbed the rococo flamboyance of songbirds, the panicked outbursts of wild turkeys, the uncannily human sound of a sheep sneezing.
On a map, California is an embrace of mountains protecting the Central Valley. On a bike, that Central Valley — the first day of our trip — becomes a day of flat, straight pace-lining, buffeted by tailwinds as strong as the guiding hand of a parent. The Sierra foothills dangle on the horizon for a long time. Finally reaching them at Lake Oroville is like turning the page in an atlas. Feeling the climbs in your
legs when you’ve been plotting them on maps for months is a kind of synesthesia or deja vu: It’s like you’re riding inside the map.
Our first day in the mountains was the epitome of everything we love about bike touring. After a second breakfast of prime rib hash at Scooter’s Café in Oroville, the Feather River Canyon unfolded before us like a mighty gash in the earth streaked with rust-colored canyon walls, verdant conifers and slate-gray stream wending along the valley floor. When cross-country trains took this route, it was legendary for its beauty. The passenger trains are gone now, but we still heard the echo of mile-long freight trains rumbling through the canyon far below. After the heat of the Central Valley, the air in the canyon was crisp and breezy, and the friendly tailwind returned, pushing us just enough so that we could race the locomotive.
In conversations along the way, car travelers (and one overly concerned Plumas County sheriff ’s deputy) seemed amazed that we were able to ride through the canyon. “Be careful,” they said, as if motorists weren’t our greatest concern.
Indeed, bike touring looks daunting if you’ve never done it. But if you’re comfortable commuting by bike or cruising around a park, you can probably cover 10 miles in a day without issue. The trick is to start slow and short and grow from there. On our first overnight bike trip, years ago, we stopped just over the Golden Gate Bridge in Marin. It was a small start, but it got us hooked.
Reaching the coast at Arcata on the eighth day of our 850-mile trip was a milestone moment. After a week of inland heat, the cool sea breezes came as a welcome respite. It also marked the point where we were transitioned to a route we already knew from a bike trip years before. From that point on, we stitched new discoveries in with old favorites. Our radius of what’s possible by bike had expanded by one more increment.
Riding south over the next three days, the two of us wheeled in sync like factory gears, wordlessly mirroring each other’s cadences and steering adjustments. By this point we were in the rhythm of the ride, waking up early even before our alarms. When you sleep in a different town each night, being on the bike begins to feel like home.
By Day 11 the landmarks — Avenue of the Giants, the Boonville General Store, the vineyards of West Dry Creek Road in Healdsburg — grew more familiar.
At the end of “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” Pirsig’s narrator and son ride a route similar to ours, following the Mendocino coast south and cutting inland toward Santa Rosa. He celebrates their return to civilization, even as the road “grows wider and fuller now, swelling with cars and trucks and buses full of people.”
These were our home roads, but they felt strange, unfathomable. We wondered, how do we ratchet our brains back up to this pace of life? But soon enough our minds return to default, like clicking back into a trusty gear.
After adding hundreds of new miles to our personal maps of California, we were deepening the grooves of routes and routines already traced. That’s what bike touring over successive trips in a place you love can do: With each pedal revolution, you draw your own California cartography.
If you’re comfortable commuting by bike, you can probably cover 10 miles in a day without issue. The trick is to start slow and short and grow from there.