Bikepacking Through Los Padres National Forest

My friend Jacob is the sort of optimist I can’t trust for shit. He’s the guy who believes the rain is always just about to stop, the climb is nearly over, and the small-town bike shop will carry the exact obscure part we need. A filmmaker, he focuses on the highlights — the killer descent, the drool-worthy food stop, the secret swimming hole — to the convenient exclusion of whatever death march stands in between us and that thing. His generous framing often verges on willful misrepresentation of facts, like the time he sold me on a 70-mile out-and-back by describing the route as “35 miles long.” We’ve been riding bikes and arguing with each other for more than 15 years. I know this about him.

But even now, when Jacob says he’s got a plan — in this case, the Long Traverse across Los Padres National Forest — I want to believe him. If his liability is unfounded optimism, mine is reprehensible laziness: I’m so happy when someone else volunteers to take on the tedium of logistics that I tend not to ask any questions. Plus, Jacob grew up in this part of the state, one that Bay Area kids like me associate with beach days and fish tacos. If he tells me it’s not too late in the year to cross the mountains, well, that seems plausible: It’s only SoCal.

Most importantly, Jacob is a few months away from the birth of his first child. If this trip is a dumb idea, it’s likely the last dumb idea he can have for a long time.

Aside from the two of us, our crew is Ryan and Sean, usual suspects, and Bryan, who’s never joined us for a long weekend before and after this may never do so again. As the least fit person and the only woman, I’m carrying almost none of the group gear — a form of handicapping I’ve embraced since evolving my definition of feminism from “I can do anything guys can do” in my try-hard twenties to “I can make guys do anything” in my pragmatic old age.

Even having loaded them down with food and tools, I’m anxious about keeping up with my friends. I cast about for ways to cut weight from my pack and find that all I have left to shed is extra clothing. I dump my softshell and a pair of pants. Jacob wants me to bring a wool shirt made by one of his clients so that he can shoot promo photos along the way, but it’s heavy and makes me look like a 12-year-old dressed up as a lumberjack. I refuse. “I’ll just carry it,” he tells me, magnanimous as always. “Suit yourself,” I say.

We begin the climb out of the sparse and dry Cuyama Valley. Compared to the steep, loose terrain I’d been expecting, the well-graded road is very civil — but it’s also very long, and in between the complications of car Tetris and the brunch order, we weren’t on our way until noon. Sunset finds us only a third of the distance to camp. We watch a rosy glow edge the crinkled purple ridgelines between us and the horizon and begin the game of trying not to be the first person to resort to lights.

An enormous red moon rises overhead as we reach the snow line. We’ve missed a turn somewhere and are consulting a GPX track sourced from “a local rider” who finished the whole route in a day. That someone had done this before, and so quickly, was key in convincing me to join the trip despite being so out of shape. Later, Jacob will disclose that the “local rider” is in fact 25-year-old UCI World Champion Christopher Blevins. Great.

In any case, we’re following Blevins’s track when the faint trail peters out into a chest-high wall of chaparral. In the narrow beams of our headlamps, the way back is no more obvious than the way forward. I fall behind, and the brush snags a loose strap on my panniers and sends me careening into a ditch. When I emerge from the thicket — following the faint glow of a reflector on a cattle gate below — Sean is still stuck somewhere in the bushes. “Don’t go this way,” he yells, informatively. We can’t make out the rest of what he’s saying, just the sound of breaking branches and invectives.

Some time later, I came across Ryan stopped in the middle of the road. At first, I think he’s waiting for me, but when I get closer, I realize he’s clearing mud from his drivetrain with a stick. He’s the only one of us on a full-suspension bike, and the combination of mud and gravel on this stretch of low-lying ranch road is making a mess of it. We strap his bags and wheels to my hardtail, which still rolls well enough, and he hikes the last mile to camp with his frame on his back. At the time, we hope this is an anomaly, as silly as things will get.

It’s midnight when Ryan and I make it to camp. The Garmins show 10 hours’ moving time, more than double what I normally ride in a week. Overnight, cattle amble through the valley, bellowing like big-screen dinosaurs. They sound close enough to trample me, and I’m too tired to care.

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The next morning, we admire rock art left by the camp’s first occupants. In the time-warp of my imagination, I see the Chumash watching us from the top of the outcropping as we limped in last night, bemused by our inability to read the land. But with coffee and dry clothes, the mud and cold all seem like yesterday’s problem, a bad dream rapidly evaporating in the sun.

Of course, the issue is nothing so ephemeral as a nightmare — it’s geology. Within minutes of leaving camp, the road bogs down in mud an order of magnitude worse than what we encountered yesterday. Ankle-deep, cow-pocked, and utterly unrideable, its consistency seems to defy science, simultaneously as slippery as ice underfoot and peanut-butter thick once gummed up in a drivetrain.

Jacob and Sean are on titanium bikepacking rigs they bought specifically for trips like this. I’m on a cross-country hardtail I bought specifically because it was on sale. In the past few drought years, I’ve encountered mud so rarely that I never really thought about tire clearance; now I discover that, like Ryan’s Yeti, my little Scott Scale will not roll. For the two of us, then Bryan, and eventually Sean and Jacob, too, the only way forward is to carry the bikes, bags and all.

With a resolute stare and a manly grunt, Ryan squat-lifts his bike onto his shoulders. I try to copy him, but my knees scream in protest and the bike feels as if it’s bolted to the ground. I resort to shuffling forward with it in front of me, one hand on a fork leg, the other on the chainstay, with the nose of the saddle cantilevered between my shoulder blades and the corner of the rack jammed under my hip. In this fashion, I can waddle forward 20 or 30 steps at a time through the slop before stopping to rest.

In one hour, we’ve covered less than a mile.

I call a stop. “All right, seriously — we need to think about whether this makes sense.” We’re gathered around the map, less because it has any answers than to avoid looking each other in the eyes.

“We have no idea how long this mud is going to continue, and we’ve got at least 20 miles to go just today. I cannot carry a bike that far. That’s not just me bitching; I mean it’s physically impossible. Unless we get to the spring, we don’t have enough water to be out here. So maybe at least Ryan and I need to turn back.”

The guys have listened to this little speech in silence. It’s a dynamic I’ve observed before: The culture subliminally instructs us, should we find ourselves in a situation where something sensible but disappointing needs to happen, to wait for a woman to insist on this thing so that men can later say they only did it on her account. I generally don’t even mind this. I’ll be a killjoy if it keeps everyone alive.

The thing about unfounded optimism, though, is that it’s a little bit contagious.

“I guess … let’s go a bit farther and see what happens.”

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We get lucky. Some particular of the prevailing soil type changes as we cross from one ridgeline to the next; the ground firms up and we’re able to pedal again. We reach a seasonal spring, the route’s sole source of running water, just as the sun slips behind the trees. It’s a sickly green trickle, and its slow progress through our filter does not inspire confidence. I’m trying to help gravity along by standing with the bag over my shoulders, but I only manage to spill the contents down the neck of my shirt. Wet, tired, and annoyed, I decide to leave this task to the men — again, my flavor of feminism — and start the next climb before I get any colder.

Icy patches thicken to snow fields as the twilight deepens into early winter night. I figure I’ll walk just fast enough to keep warm until the rest of the group catches me — but an hour goes by and they don’t. As I’m wondering what’s keeping them, my headlamp sweeps over a large set of bear tracks, and then, more worryingly, two smaller sets alongside.

So let me get this straight, my anxiety eye-rolls at me. You’re wandering around the woods by yourself, in the dark, following a mama bear with cubs through the snow. Do I have that right?

They’re just black bears, I answer myself. Backcountry bears. They’d be more afraid of me than I am of them. And anyway, it’s late. They’re probably somewhere cozy and asleep.

“Cozy and asleep”? Where the hell do you think you are, the Hundred Acre Wood?

I look back over my shoulder, searching for the reassuring bob of my friends’ headlamps in the night. Still nothing but unmitigated darkness. I feel I may as well be in outer space. I call halfheartedly into the void: “Heyyyyyyy, bear.”

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The boys find me at last — evidently, wrestling with water filters was an even worse task than I imagined when I abandoned them with it. We roll into a trail camp miles short of where we aimed to be and still not a moment too soon. Sean, consummate backcountry chef, starts prepping pasta, while Bryan, man of action, lights a fire. I’m mourning the extra layers I jettisoned and wearing the lumberjack shirt Jacob brought me as a sort of kilt, a styling decision that will not make it into anyone’s product photos. Sean, by contrast, is bustling about in flip-flops, having lugged a quart of heavy cream into the woods to bulk up the cheese sauce. These guys are fucking unbelievable, I think, for the thousandth time.

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In the morning, the epic view we envisioned as we went to sleep is shrouded in clouds. Melting snow for drinking water is taking even longer than filtering from the scummy spring. I’ve given up on trying to keep some dry clothing in reserve and am wearing everything in my possession; even so, my hands are so numb it takes 45 minutes and the depths of my willpower to re-pack my bike. I’m trying to force-feed myself oatmeal and can’t get it down.

“Guys,” I announce gravely, “I’m too cold. I have to start moving or I think I’m going to die.” They shrug. To be fair, they’ve heard me say this as often at 50 degrees Fahrenheit as at 25, and so far, I’ve lived every time.

The snow forces a long, trudging hike-a-bike, but the fluffy powder is such an improvement over yesterday’s hellacious mud that I hardly mind. The difference between the reality of the forest blanketed in white and my mental picture of “riding bikes in Santa Barbara” is so extreme — and so predictable, had I bothered to look at Jacob’s route beforehand — I laugh out loud every time I think about it.

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We drop over the saddle at Big Pine and begin a westward descent, fishtailing on patches of ice. Within minutes, the thick clouds part to reveal the California grail: ocean and snow together in one view.

The sudden speed and the sight of the Pacific beaming blue on the horizon feel euphoric. My heart is singing, and because I forced everyone to listen to her new album on the drive over, it’s very specifically singing Taylor Swift:

Everything you lose is a step you take

So make the friendship bracelets

Take the moment and taste it

You’ve got no reason to be afraid,

You’re on your own, kid

That last part is true if I really think about it — which, given even the cheesiest pop lyric, I inevitably do. As I pick my way around boulder-strewn switchbacks, my braver, faster friends are somewhere far ahead. I take solo trips more and more often, sometimes by choice, but often out of necessity. We’re getting older. These guys don’t always want to wait for me or carry my share of the gear, and with wives and now kids on the way, they don’t always have time.

Sometimes this strikes me as bleak, but that’s not how I feel flying down this mountain, watching sunbeams slant across the sea. On a bike, it always seems as if my friends are in some way with me. Even I can be optimistic about that.

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Postscript:

Taylor Swift can’t mitigate the fact that we still have a long way to go, despite trimming the route down to make up for yesterday’s debacle in the mud. On the grind up to Lone Pine, I’m warily eyeing any patch of dirt that seems even slightly wet, leaning over to look at my wheel and make sure nothing sticks.

We reach front-country campgrounds and pavement just after sunset. I’m dismayed to find that pushing or carrying bikes for so much of the past few days has been a secret equalizer; now that we’re on the road, the guys are upping the pace. I start to protest and to decide to save my breath.

We descend into Santa Barbara in darkness on the narrow shoulder of San Marcos Pass, a fraught and fractious few minutes I hate more than anything the forest ever threw at us. After that, there remains an interminable warren of surface streets that Jacob knows by heart but to me feels like riding in circles. I’m trying to keep it together but eventually snap.

“I’m stopping. I need to eat something.”

“Are you sure?” Jacob asks. “We’re like, 10 minutes from the house.”

“Heard that one before,” I snarl at him.

“Okay!” he chirps back. “No problem. Snack break, let’s do it.”

I think he’s going to be a great dad.

See a video of the group’s adventures at youtube.com/watch?v=ZlSrtvRQfhc.