good afternoon youtube do a little short video from the trail this is the
beginning of the stevens canyon trail this whole area used to be the trail down below there
but in 2017 with the real heavy rains this landslide area here slid
you can actually see the old trail used to come up right along over here but it slid out on
that side straight down to the creek and then this side too this is part of the san andreas
fault right here yes anyway all this gray green rock down here is what's called serpentinite
it's a really interesting rock i'll have to make a separate video on this area but like i said
in 2017 this part of the trail washed out used to go around the back side of that bush and it
was a relatively easy climb just a nice gentle trail there was a like one little steep spot
down there but you could ride up it no problem and then this right here used to be kind of a
little side trail that the mountain bikers made and it just drops right down this
face here so when the trail washed out this one now became the trail and this thing is
really steep it probably doesn't look steep in the camera but i've checked the gradient here
and it measures between 26 and 27 degrees right past that fallen tree
gradient wise that's a 50 percent grade it's slick hard packed clay that's serpentonite clay
and it's a real touchy surface if it gets too wet it gets very slippery earlier this spring
after the rains we had this winter it was really nice and grippy and all the grit on the surface
was packed down and then this is the hill that my low gear kept popping out of gear i would start
climbing this hill and then my derailleur shift from first to second gear every time it did that
you would stop so once i re-indexed all the gears and got that working i can now ride here
and i could always get up to that really steep spot and then i was always lifting the front tire
or i would pull since you're pulling kind of hard on the handlebars if you accidentally pull
too hard like with your left hand or your right hand you're going to turn the bike and when
you do that there's very little weight on your front tire so it'll just turn real easy so it's
really hard to pedal hard and keep a straight line and you have to follow this groove up
because if you get off to the side it gets even steeper but today i made it all the way up here
and up there and just about collapsed when i got to that point so i finally made it it was more
mental so long i had the problem either with the front tire lifting or the gears dose shifting on
me and i kept waiting for that to happen and by lengthening the wheelbase on the bike i
moved the rear wheel back about 10 millimeters and that little extra wheelbase makes all the
difference on this you can keep the front tire on the ground so you can steer without getting into
too contorted to shape where you can't pedal so yeah i finally found the right combination
you've got to lower the the seat post probably about halfway down maybe 50 millimeters low
gear stay in the groove and you just have to keep powering through here you got to hold a straight
line you can't veer one way or the other and yeah i finally made it i also dropped the tire pressure
a couple of pounds so i had grip so yeah there we go that is the steepest hill on this whole
trail right here it's 50 gradient and i finally made it it probably really shows here because
you can hardly see the surface of the trail right down here it just drops out of sight and going
down this hill is not easy you're right on the verge of locking up your tires with the brakes
the reason you need the brakes is right around that corner there is a favorite spot of the
open space rangers love to set up shop right around that corner there with their radar gun
and it is nearly impossible to keep under 15 miles an hour going down that hill and they're right
there to take your picture and i've seen a couple of people get nailed right at that corners this
is one of the speed traps here and then i made it up this hill too this is kind of the second
steepest hill i think this one i measured at 42 gradient later in the spring and summer you get
a lot of gravel comes out of the soil and then you get a deep layer of gravel on that hill
and today it slipped three or four times coming up there you could hear the back tire
just starting to break loose which means you got to back off on the pedals but
you can only back off so far before you stop moving forwards there's quite a degree of
luck involved in this climb because if you're coming up and you hit one of those pieces of golf
ball-sized gravel that's buried in the soft dirt it'll throw your bike to one side or the other
and you almost can't recover you might be able to recover one of those but that recovery might take
all your strength to get back rolling again and sometimes you end up pointing sideways and going
up the side of the trail and at that point you just gotta bail out and walk the rest of the way
yeah so having the 20 45 gearing there really makes the difference because you can stay seated
keep your weight on the saddle and over the back tire and you do have to put some weight
forward to keep from lifting the front tire off the ground but you can do all of that and
just stay seated and just crank out about 70 rpm you're going about walking pace the hill
you don't want to accelerate i think that was the main problem i was having is i would try to
accelerate when the hill got steeper the trick i found is just to hold the same cadence you know
whatever cadence you start at the bottom try to finish at the same cadence you know if that's
70 rpm just stay at 70 don't speed up to 80 or 90. you're trying to accelerate uphill that
doesn't work very good so yeah definitely liking the gears they're not popping out of gear anymore
it just shifts really nice that gives me about a 12 gear inch on the low end and then i can
go up to 108 on the high end so anyway that's a bike ride today i got about a thousand feet of
climbing to go here so i better get going we'll catch you later thanks for watching
you