A night in Coe

aka, the “We’ll Sleep When We’re Dead 10K”.

A warm and very short night, the impending summer solstice, a 3/4 full moon: the stars where aligned to call this ride – time for an epic Coe night ride!

Jeff and Jim stepped up to the plate – and so we found ourselves around 10pm on the Hunting Hollow parking lot. Jeff being Jeff, I knew we would be in for a long, tough one, with some good fortune possibly a 10K, and definitely including lots of screaming singletrack downhills.

We headed to Anza-Jackson, started to make our way up and were soon subject to the all-too-familiar pain of the loose upper Anza steeps. Jim took a bit of a spill and unfortunately hit his knee against a rock; after the fun Elderberry – Rock Tower – Cattle Duster intermezzo his knee started to give him real trouble and he decided to head home along Grapevine.

Too bad, as it was a surprisingly warm and beautiful night – the entire night it was pure short sleeve weather, with no wind and a near full moon that had an amazing bloody red hue to it, its light probably filtered by the smoke clouds of the recent fire in the Santa Cruz mountains.

Jeff and I continued to Headquarters, dodging big and rather lethargic toads on Mahoney Meadows, descending into China Hole and then climbing back up. I had been screwing around with my Camelback – first I lost a valve (and some water), luckily was able to retrieve it, and then at Manzanita point I managed to lose half of its contents by not properly fixing the cover. So we made a short excursion up to HQ to refill, and managed to scare some campers out there with our headlights while we were fumbling around trying to find our way. Sorry campers!

Now it was time for some serious fun: Flat Frog and Middle Ridge, the audience’s favorites! Middle Ridge was awesome as always, with a great spooky quality to it doing it in the 3AM darkness – Jeff took a spill in one one of the loose corners, without too much damage, and all too quickly we found ourselves at Poverty Flat.

Up to that point I’d been feeling pretty decent, though being out of shape by not having done real hard rides in quite a while. But whatever energy I still had in me, Poverty ‘Flat’ was quick to drain all of it. It was particulary loose and difficult this time, and I semi-jokingly suggested to Jeff that I’d take a nap at the intersection with Jackass, and would wait for the trailworkers who’d show up in the morning and help them out a little.

We carried on, using a section of the Narrows (or Willow Ridge?) to cut off at least one of those Walls of Terror on Poverty Flat. The climb on Lost Springs trail then finished off Poverty Flat’s job and got me spent. From here on I ended up in crawl-home mode; Jeff was an animal and probably could have handled Cross Canyon without any trouble, but it wasn’t for me tonight so we took the road towards Tule Pond.

The sun was coming out this time and it was a gorgeous morning with red painted fog clouds near the horizon.

This beautiful sight and and the thrill ride down Tule Pond must have somewhat revitalized me as I didn’t blank out entirely during the climb on Serpentine – I took it real slow though but managed to enjoy watching the fog clouds rolling into the valleys below.

Middle Steer was the shot of adrenaline we needed to wake us up, a fantastic ridge-hugging descent, and Jeff was pondering how amazing life would be when you’d get to do this as your morning commute every day.

At the bottom of Middle Steer we found ourselves within minutes of the parking lot, but we weren’t quite done yet: too early to go home! I had saved my last bit of turkey advocado sandwich for what was to come: the Hike of Horrors known as Jim Donnelly. This 1200ft-of-elevation-in-1 mile affair sucked my soul, as well as my GPS’s battery (had to do some stitching at home with an older track to fix this track). But the mind works wonders, and once it was done and over with, you could only conclude that it wasn’t too bad. In particular, since we knew Spike Jones / Timm trail was next – most likely the best and most exciting way to end a Coe ride!

I washed out in one of the final loose steep switchbacks on Timm, and just managed to avoid landing in a bush of poison oak. Rolling back into the parking lot, I found myself having some muscle coordination issues, nothing that couldn’t be fixed though by Jeff’s awesome Bloody Mary with Muffins breakfast!