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Bill  On The Road

 by: Bill Oetinger  11/1/2010

Little roads, big rides

The first article I ever wrote for a cycling publication--aside from my bike club’s newsletter--was a guide to a back road ride up in the Sonoma County hills: a loop with King Ridge Road as the marquee attraction. That appeared in the March, 1994 issue of the late, lamented California Bicyclist magazine.

When that issue hit the newsstands, one of my friends complained that now the secret was out: now everyone and his brother would be flocking out to King Ridge. The road would be swamped with riders. No longer the secret preserve of a few local tarheads, it would be overrun with every wannabe poseur in the West. I remember replying that I didn't think there was much danger of that happening; that the loop was so steep and so challenging and so remote that it would deter all but the hardiest of visitors.

Anyway, it's not as if I were the first person to spill the beans about those magical, mythical roads of northwestern Sonoma County. At least a few cyclists had to be hip to this loop quite awhile back, as it was the centerpiece of Stage 3 in the Coors International Bicycle Classic in 1988, which included in its field all the best American pros, from Andy Hampsten to Davis Phinney, plus a few Euro pros as well. (When I look at the growth curve and growing pains of the current Tour of California, it's interesting to recall that we had a big stage race here before: for a few years in the late 80's, we had world-class fields competing in this stage race. In 1988, the year of the King Ridge stage, it was 15 stages long. That's almost a Grand Tour!)

Then, in its April, 1991 issue, Bicycle Guide magazine ran a massive feature on cycling in Sonoma County, including the cover photo, several articles about local bike manufacturers--Bruce Gordon, Salsa, Ibis--and, in their main story, under the header “California's Land of Dreams,” an account of doing the King Ridge loop. After Scot Nicol of Ibis had escorted him around the high-country circuit, the author--Christopher Koch--referred to the region as “heaven on earth” and “God's cycling theme park.”

Another writer in another bike mag--Bicycling, I think--at about the same time stated that this was, “without a doubt, the most beautiful road I've ever ridden.” This latter article was illustrated with a photo of West Ridgecrest Road, the equally gorgeous and much more frequently photographed road on the northern flank of Mount Tamalpais, down in Marin County. Probably the photo editor simply grabbed a stock photo of a Northern California back road and slapped it in there, figuring--no doubt correctly--that the bulk of their readers wouldn't know the difference between King Ridge and Mount Tam.

One way or another, the word has been out on the street for quite awhile that King Ridge and the rest of the roads that make up this basic loop are worth a visit for serious cyclists. Even so, in spite of all that, it has remained in the cult classic category all this time, and riders flying around its ridge-line curves have still been flying under the radar of wider awareness. If you said “King Ridge” to a cyclist in New York or Paris or Milan, your response was in most cases going to be a blank stare. Ditto, only more so, for members of the mainstream, non-bike media, even in Northern California. The name and place were obscure to the point of invisibility. Even many local cyclists got it a bit wrong, referring to it as “Kings Ridge.”

Gran Fondo 2010 StartWell…that was then. This is now. Now, in this case, refers to how things stand after two annual installments of Levi Leipheimer’s King Ridge Gran Fondo. All this trivial history is leading up to the Big Event, which transpired (for the second time) last month. This is not meant to be a report on the ride. Those were readily available immediately afterward, and if you missed those accounts, you can catch up with as much reading and photo scoping as you want at the official Gran Fondo website, where ride reports, blogs, and photo galleries abound. This is more in the nature of one of my post-stage race pieces: not real reporting, but more a case of sorting through the impressions, looking for interesting little tidbits and maybe some big-picture perspective.

After Charles Schultz and Luther Burbank, Levi Leipheimer is probably the best known of all of Santa Rosa's citizens, and as those other fellows have passed on, he is the heir apparent to the throne of favorite son these days. (He's native to Montana and spends a good deal of the racing season living in Europe, but Santa Rosa is where he and his wife, former racer Odessa Gunn, call home.) As we've noted before, he's a tireless promoter of the charms of Sonoma County as a cycling destination, for everything from racing to training to touring. He has been instrumental in bringing the Tour of California to the region, year after year, and has advised on the routes their stages take in the region. (2011 will be the first year in the Tour's history that it is not visiting Santa Rosa, but they're making up for that by having the city be the start site of the entire tour in 2012, which apparently translates into a full week of jam-packed hotels and restaurants and media exposure leading up to Stage 1.)

It costs a lot of money to host a stage of a big tour, and in these parlous economic times, with municipalities trimming their budgets left and right, there simply isn't any money in Santa Rosa's coffers to cover the cost of being a ville d'etape. So a coalition of cycling fans and business interests has taken on the task of raising funds to bankroll those tour stage starts and finishes in future years.

Enter Levi: a couple of years ago, he hatched the idea of staging a fund-raising ride here to generate revenue for the tour-hosting bank account (and for other local charities). Levi has always been a big fan of the King Ridge loop. When Astana held their winter training camp here in 2008, he had the whole team up there, from Lance to Alberto, dancing along the ridges, with a long line of cars and motos, stuffed with reporters and photographers, careening around the corners behind them. So when it came time to plan a route for Levi's fund-raising fondo, it was a no-brainer that King Ridge would be front and center on the day.

The route selected is, more or less, the same route used for that 1988 Coors Classic stage: west from downtown Santa Rosa into the Russian River valley, up Austin Creek to King Ridge and the other sweet roads that make that loop, then down Hwy 1 along the rugged Sonoma coast, up (and down) Coleman Valley, and back down to the Santa Rosa plane through the rolling hills north of Sebastopol. 105 miles and a ton of steep ups and downs. Only about half the riders do this longest route, which is the Gran Fondo. There are also Medio Fondo and Piccolo Fondo routes. The shortest route skips all the big hills, but the Medio does at least do Coleman Valley, which is a substantial piece of work. In addition to being in that old Coors stage, Coleman has twice been used in the current Tour of California.

In a recent column--Hell's Hairy Half-Dozen--I profiled both the King Ridge loop and Coleman Valley. If you're interested in getting the full flavor of this ride, you might want to revisit that piece and check out the descriptions and the elevation profiles provided. These two sections--the 37-mile King Ridge loop and the 10-mile length of Coleman Valley--are the two really big attractions on this century. There are loads of other nice miles on the day, but it's during these two segments that riders will encounter all the toughest climbs and hairiest descents.

Leipheimer says his initial goal for the ride was quite modest: a few hundred riders, maybe. But by the time the event had evolved from a low buzz of local rumor to an official event scheduled for the first weekend in October, 2009, the field limit had been set at 3500, making it the largest bike ride ever in the region. While Levi leant his name and star power and a considerable amount of time to the project, the hands-on management of the event was taken on by others. In particular, Carlos Perez, founder and Editor of Bike Monkey magazine, became point man for the daunting task of starting from scratch, on relatively short notice, to pull it all together.

Prior to the Gran Fondo, Carlos and his crew had never staged anything more ambitious than a few low-key 'cross races and a hill climb or three. So this was very much a leap into the deep end of the pool. One of the first things he did was come to the Board of the Santa Rosa Cycling Club, seeking advice about putting on a big bike ride. The SRCC has staged the Wine Country Century each year for over a quarter of a century, with a field limit these days set at 2500. It has a well-deserved reputation for great support from a well-organized crew of veteran volunteers. Nobody else in the North Bay has even a fraction of the experience in staging a big bike ride, so his coming to the club was a smart move.

I'm a little fuzzy on my recollections of the earliest discussions around the event planning, so I hope I get this about right and don't ruffle anyone's feathers. The way I remember it, the SRCC was approached about taking on at least some portion of the leadership in managing the event. The club essentially declined. The Board felt that, with the Wine Country Century, the Terrible Two, and all the other events they organize each year, they were skating perilously close to volunteer burn-out. But in the end, after meeting with Carlos, the club did get involved, to a degree. They agreed to host the most glamorous rest stop--the mid-ride lunch break at the top of King Ridge--and they ended up placing experienced workers on every other rest stop crew around the course. Although all the stops were fully staffed, most of the volunteers had never worked a bike ride before and didn't know the first thing about setting up for one. Club veterans took on leadership rolls everywhere they went and helped all the newbies figure it out. And a few of the club's most experienced leaders became heavily involved in logistics and communications for the event.

Carlos would be the first to say that the club’s involvement with the event was crucial. But while all that is very true, the fuller truth is that Carlos and Greg Fisher and the rest of the team they put together have done an outstanding job of managing this big event. Yes, the club’s help has been key, but they have now gone way beyond that. Frankly, early on, I was pessimistic about their ability to pull it off. I was afraid the whole thing would be a vast disaster of glitches and botches. Didn't happen. The 2009 edition, with 3500 participants, went very smoothly. The 2010 edition, with the field now up to an eye-popping 6000 participants, went even better.

Helping those 6000 riders to have a good day was a team of close to 1000 workers. About 800 of them were pure volunteers. The rest were being paid in one way or another: an event staff of 15, about 40 Highway Patrol officers, paramedics in ambulances, helicopter crews, caterers, film crews and photographers documenting it all, and so on. By the standards of laid-back Sonoma County, it's a very big production. For perspective, in putting on the 2500-rider Wine Country Century, the SRCC turns out about 400 volunteers, plus a few CHPs and medics. That is considered very good for a one-day, pay-to-ride event.

So that's some of the back story. How did the event go this year? For the full story, you must look elsewhere. (Start with the Gran Fondo website.) But for a quick thumbnail, try this… First off, the weather was perfect, one of those classic Indian Summer days we do so well. You could not have have had a better day for a big ride, even if you'd ordered one out of a catalog. The cast of characters that Levi had pulled in was very impressive. A large part of the lure of an event such as this is the possibility of riding with the stars: with Levi and other pros. They were there in large numbers, from current US National Champ Ben King to past US Champ Fred Rodriguez, from young lion Taylor Phinney to old tars Scot Nicol and Gavin Chilcott. If you added together all the current pros, former pros, and semi-pros at the start, you just about had the makings of a full peloton.

Most of the participants would never get within half a block of those big names, once the massive river of riders was in motion, but if you were quick enough and made the right moves, you might have been able to mix it up with the big guns for awhile. One of my friends was glassy-eyed with bliss later, recounting how he'd been tucked in on Phinney's wheel for a couple of miles. It's priceless little moments like that one that make this event different from your average century ride, which goes some way to explaining why they can charge two to three times as much for this ride as bike clubs do for their average centuries.

In general, the event went off without a hitch. No logistical snafus of any significance. That's the big overview. It wasn't all trouble free: there were about as many crashes as you would expect amidst a throng of 6000 riders, all departing en masse. (After Levi and his celebrity cohort took off at the start, it took most of half an hour for all the assembled riders to cross the official start line, and then it was elbow-to-elbow and wall-to-wall riders for most of the early miles.) As always with bike rides, most of the crashes were minor, the cycling equivalent of fender-benders. A few were more serious, including a head injury that was helicoptered out from the King Ridge stop. (I saw that guy, and he was conscious and didn't look too bad.) There was one truly outrageous attack on riders from a madman in an SUV, which put at least one rider in the hospital. This incident has been widely reported and the police are working on tracking down the hit-&-run slimebag responsible. I'm not going to dwell on it here, except to note that the entire community is up in arms about it. The Santa Rosa paper wrote a long and loud editorial in condemnation, in addition to at least three articles about the ride the day after and several more in the days before.

That appalling incident aside, the overall impression one got around the course was extremely favorable. There had been some noise prior to the event about a backlash of resentment and resistance from locals along the route. But when it came right down to it, most of that disappeared or was countered by an overwhelming wave of positive support. Bear in mind that Levi and the organizers are pumping a hefty chunk of money back into good causes out in those remote communities in the hills: for the little schools and volunteer fire departments and the children's health programs and such. That means a lot to those folks, and frankly, it means a lot more than the disgruntled grousing of a few malcontents. Along even the narrowest mountain roads, locals were sitting in lawn chairs at the foots of their driveways, waving and cheering and ringing cow bells…and not just for Levi and the front-runners. They were out there all day long. Homemade signs saying, "Thank you, Gran Fondo!" or something similar were all around the course. I may be looking at all of this through rose-tinted cycling glasses, but my takeaway from the day is that the City of Santa Rosa, the County of Sonoma, and the entire region are--in general--hugely pleased with this event. One of the ride reports at the GF site calls it “America's Greatest Cycling Event.” That sums it up pretty well.

My own involvement with the 2010 Gran Fondo was in an extremely minor bit part. I was just a worker bee at the big King Ridge lunch stop, but I did manage to ride the course too, or a good chunk of it. So I ended up with the twin viewpoints of life in a rest stop and life on the road. I rode out to the stop ahead of the mass of riders, in fact just at first light on that lovely morning. I worked most of the day at the stop, which allowed me to see all the riders come in, from the racers on back. I got to chat with a few of the racers with whom I'm acquainted, and then with an endless string of other cycling friends back down the field.

After my tour of duty, I got back on my bike and continued around the course, completing the King Ridge loop and then the Coleman Valley section before bailing (all the steep, dramatic stuff). I think I left the KR stop around 1:45. In the early afternoon, there was still a steady stream of riders on the road, but the overall demographic was a long way from the likes of Levi and Fast Freddie and Ben King. A lot of people sign up for the event because of the glamor and excitement around it, lured by the prospect of being on the same ride with the famous racers and celebrities and at least catching sight of them in a rest stop or at the start or finish. Many of them are very average riders and for some, it's their first century-length ride. This is NOT an entry-level century. In fact, because of the brutally steep climbs and the wickedly treacherous descents, it's just about as challenging as any century around. So, later in the day, I was seeing a whole lot of riders who were in way over their heads.

These days, in my geezerish dotage, I am usually closer to the back than to the front on our typical, advanced-level club rides. But somewhere toward the back of the long file of riders on the KR Gran Fondo, I was feeling like an alpha wolf, passing riders steadily, every mile of the way. Some of them at least looked fit and trim, and they had bikes and kit that bespoke a seriousness of purpose. But boy were they suffering. Some were even walking up the hills or just standing over their bikes, gathering their reserves. My sense is that this is mostly down to the steepness of our hills, both the ups and the downs. The climbs beat folks silly and the descents terrified them. Not everyone, but a lot of people. Late in the day, they were filling large buses with folks who had to pack it in.

There were riders here from 45 states and several foreign countries. It would be inaccurate to say that none of those visitors has hills like this where they live. But it would not be a stretch to assert that for some, for many, these hills are unlike anything they see in their own backyards. I suppose it's what we're famous for here…our gnarly chutes and ladders. It's what makes the Terrible Two so terrible, and it's why the pro teams come here to train at the start of the year: doing these walls every day will prep you up nicely for the battles to come.

Finally: what about the money? In another of my recent columns--Good Neighbors--I crunched the numbers on how an event like the SRCC Wine Country Century pumps money into the local economy. Whatever I said there about the WCC is true many times over for the much bigger, much more ambitious Gran Fondo…the Grand Fundo, whose whole reason for being is to funnel funds into local accounts, for cycling-related causes and for other good causes throughout the community. Well more than half the field came from out of state. The vast majority were from out of the local region. All of those folks were filling up the local hotels and restaurants, and spending money in all the other ways outlined in that prior column. The funds immediately generated by the event will bankroll the return of the Tour of California to this region in the years ahead, and that event pumps at least as much revenue into the economy as well.

The overall revenue stream for all bike events now staging out of Sonoma County is enormous. Right off-hand, I can't think of any other sporting event or tourist event or cultural event in this region that is such a robust engine for pumping funds into this economy. Okay, maybe the NASCAR and Indy Car races at Infineon Raceway, but not much else. With all that in mind, I think both the local bike community and the larger community are finally understanding--together--that cyclists are not some trivial, irritating subset of untermensch anymore. Yes, there are still the complainers and the foaming ranters on this issue, and, unfortunately, there are still a few psycho sickos who will vent their anger at bikes in road rage bullying. But most people now accept that not only are cyclists here to stay, they acknowledge that cyclists, in large groups and small, are a net positive. Whereas bike riders used to be out on the ragged fringe, now it's the bike haters who live out there on the edge, out of touch with mainstream views. We may not be able to lay credit for that paradigm shift entirely at the doorstep of the Gran Fondo, but it has certainly been a big factor in changing people's perspectives around here.

And as for the secret of King Ridge and its consort roads…the ones nobody ever heard of…? Finally, 22 years after the Coors Classic and 16 years after my little touring guide--from the days of Davis Phinney to the days of his son Taylor Phinney--I think we can finally say with some assurance that folks know where the road is.

Bill can be reached at srccride@sonic.net



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