Wilder Ranch

Wilder Ranch State Park, just north of Santa Cruz along highway 1, is a great place to ride, for beginners as well as advanced riders. That’s one of the cool things of Wilder: you can do really mellow but still entertaining loops on fireroads, taking your young kids along, or you can choose a route that gets you to bomb down some wicked singletrack – the choice is yours. You’ll get gorgeous views on the ocean and the coastal mountains either way.

For those advanced riders who are still sceptical, let me say that Wilder is a bit like a mountain biker’s ‘nouvelle cuisine’ dinner: you get extremely tasty bits in small portions, with longer and less inspiring intermezzo’s in between.

The loop below connects some of the tastier bits; in the beginning though there’s some fireroad climbing which is rather bland, in particular since the park officials recently must have decided it was necessary to mutilate, err grade some trails (September ‘06); their idea of trail work apparently consists of dumping truckloads of loose gravel all over the place.

Anyway, fortunately the singletrack remains unscathed – Old Cabin trail is the first gem. I always love the feeling of diving straight into the forest, coming from the windy and open meadowlands before it. The climb out poses a fun challenge with some roots and ruts to conquer.

More climbing on wide fireroads finally brings you to the Eucalyptus grove, an ideal picnic/break spot. At this point, you can choose to venture further north, along the Chinquapin trail and connect to the campus of UC Santa Cruz. On this ride though, we’re heading south and descending along Eucalyptus trail, normally a very rutted and entertaining double track, but unfortunately it turned out to have been graded as well – it ended up being drifting practice through loose gravel.

But I was already thinking of the Enchanted Loop trail, the second highlight of the day. The first part, right after entering the wonderland of the Enchanted Forest, is a root and rut infested chute that screams for your attention; taking your shades off is recommended as you won’t be the first one to get endo-launched into it because of being blinded and surprized. Many turns, drops and bumps later, while you’re climbing out, you realize that this was so much fun and so short – luckily you have the option of doing more loops!

When you’re done doing Enchanted loops, pick up the thread again and follow Wilder Ridge Loop trail. If Old Cabin was the appetizer, Enchanted Forest the main course, then you will now love your dessert: Zane Gray and the lower section of Wilder Ridge, my very favorite portions of Wilder.

When you’re descending Zane Gray, you have this awesome wide-angle view of the ocean 180 degrees in front of you (at least, when the fog has cleared); keep your visual cortex focused on some rock step combos just below you though.

The lower part of Wilder is a marvelous, curvy piece of prime singletrack, with numerous up-and-down, whoop-de-doo sections. Perfect for a singlespeed.

Oh yeah: don’t forget to step off your bike and walk near the ranch at the trailhead to keep the good folks there happy.