On The Road
by: Bill Oetinger 3/1/2021
A Journey to the Gold Mine
So many years. So many roads. So many rides.
Gather ‘round, children, while old Granddad spins you a yarn about one of those epic rides from back in some imagined golden age of cycling. I rummage around in my musty old sea chest of memories and pull out this tall tale of great things done well…or maybe not always all that well. But done, for sure.
This is not the longest nor hilliest nor hardest ride I’ve ever done. But a healthy ration of high hills and high heat made it a serious challenge. This is a loop out of Middletown, up in Lake County, with some big climbs in the early miles. Its main attraction is probably the run south along Morgan Valley Road and Knoxville-Berryessa Road, up and over the ridge that is home to the Homestake Gold Mine, then down the wooded canyon of Eticuera Creek to the north shore of Lake Berryessa. 85 miles and 6500’ of gain.
The ride happened back in the early ‘90s and all of the six or eight riders on board were then in their mid-40s…too old to be serious racers but still young enough to feel like hardcore hammers, up for a big adventure. It was a Santa Rosa Cycling Club Saturday ride. Middletown is an hour’s drive from Santa Rosa so not too many people showed up. I guess I must have put it on the club ride calendar. Few other members at the time would have been daft enough to list a ride that far from home and in such a remote, unknown corner of our backcountry. I think I was inspired to list this loop because of reading about it in one of Bodfish’s books on back road rambling.
It was scheduled for the same day as the Davis Double—mid-May—and it fed its little tributary of club riders into the bigger river of Davis riders as they flowed through Middletown around midmorning. I’m not sure where our start time placed us among the Davis riders. Certainly not among the earliest, fastest riders. As fast as we imagined ourselves to be, we would have been no match for them. We were somewhere in mid-pack, back among the sturdy plodders who make up much of the Davis demographic.
Just a couple of miles past Middletown, on Big Canyon Road, there used to be a white stripe painted across the old pavement indicating the halfway point of the double: 100 miles down and 100 to go. In that mix of riders, with our fresh legs versus their 100-mile legs, we were livin’ large. We took some entirely unjustified satisfaction in whizzing past rider after rider on the ascent out of Big Canyon. Then we all bombed down Siegler Canyon and on into the little town of Lower Lake, where the Davis troops turned east and we continued south out of town onto remote Morgan Valley Road, headed for the gold mine and parts unknown.
Have you ever ridden out this way? I doubt too many of you have. It’s way out there, way off the beaten path. The scenery is standard Northern California fare: oak woods and meadows, fairly rocky, with pines and redbuds here and there. What marks this out as a bit unusual is its remoteness. Aside from a few sprawling ranches, there isn’t much out here, and that includes just about zero traffic. There’s the gold mine too…more about that in a minute.
The road starts out easy enough but the first climb—a mile and a half—comes up almost immediately. After a steep plummet into a gorge, the big climbing challenge of the day arrives: 1200’ up in three and a half miles with the steepest bits up over 15%. We already had some hefty climbing in our legs—seven steady miles out of Big Canyon and that first little hump on this road. And now, around midday, 20-plus miles into the ride, it was heating up. The day would eventually turn out to be a scorcher, flirting with triple digits. The Davis Double Saturday will do that sometimes. Not always, but often enough.
Again, not the hardest climb any of us had ever done, but it did start to tell on us. We were all working hard and a couple of guys were already struggling…already wondering if maybe they were in over their heads. The entire climb is out in full sun. We were starting to feel a bit baked, and it would only get hotter.
After lumping along over a series of little summits, around mile 29 the road finally starts to tilt downhill and it will mostly—mostly!—stay downhill for the next 23 miles. A few miles into the downhill we arrived at the Homestake Gold Mine. This is not an historic artifact from the Gold Rush. Its heyday was just a few years ago. Between 1985 and 2002, a billion dollars’ worth of gold dust was extracted from big open pit mines here. Now, with the mining over, the site has become a 7000-acre natural preserve. The 300 miners who toiled here have been replaced by a small staff of ecologists working on the remediation of the site. (Mining is often a messy and sometimes nasty business, but in this case, the mine’s owners were above-average conscientious about their environmental responsibilities, and the site is in pretty good shape.) Back in the early ‘90s the mine was still going strong and it had the look of open-pit mines the world over…raw and scarred.
Up to this point, the road itself had been fairly standard: two wide lanes, guardrails, and good engineering, but beyond the busy activity of the mine, it lost its stripes, narrowed to one fat lane, and the paving deteriorated. As it drops down the canyon, the little road crosses Eticuera Creek many times, and several of those crossings are fords: in the wet season the stream flows over the road, rather than under it (see photo at left). It can be quite deep in the wetter months, almost impassible. But even if it’s only damp, the surface may be slimy, a slip-n-slide for bikes. I don’t think anyone slid out on the slime on this ride but it has happened to several riders on other days out there.
It really is a wonderful run down the canyon, funky pavement and slippery fords notwithstanding. After the hard climb, this is payback time, a rollicking, galloping dance. We recovered a little from the hot uphill and were mostly enjoying life. But things were about to become more interesting…
Somewhere down the canyon, where it was more grassy, wooded valley than gorge, we came upon a cattle drive clogging up the road from one side to the other, perhaps 200 head and many of those heads still with their horns in place. They were moving downhill, same as us, but at only about a mile per hour. What to do? We decided, without really thinking it through, to just slowly ride into and through the herd and out the other side. It worked for a while. The steers gave us some room and we rolled in amongst them….but at some point a few of them became spooked by the presence of these weird critters in their pack. They started to jump and skitter and caper about, then to pick up speed. The jitters were contangeous and soon enough the entire herd was in motion. Not a full stampede, but a lively, heaving mosh pit of beef on the move. If they were horses, I’d call it a canter. Holy shit!
This gives a whole new meaning to pack riding. We were jostled and knocked about and I worried about a horn in the spokes. But we all eventually elbowed our way through to the front and emerged, shaken but unharmed. And there at the front of the herd was the cowpoke in charge, looking exactly right for the part: the chaps, the boots, the spurs, the sweat-stained stetson, even the scrappy little cow dog. We all said something like, “Sorry about that!” He never said a word. Just sat his horse and gave us this flinty-eyed stare, as if to say, “What a bunch of dipshits!”
A little way along after that excitement, we decided to take a break along the creek. We were hot and tired and still only halfway round our loop. We found a pretty little spot where we could sit in the shade on the bank of the creek and soak our feet in a little pool. One fellow took off his helmet and set it down on the sand next to him. When we were ready to roll again, he put his helmet back on, only to discover it was swarming with angry ants, and then the ants were in his hair and down his neck into his jersey. It took a lot of frantic slapping and hopping about and disrobing to finally clear up that little hot mess…and a lot of laughter from the rest of us.
Right about then, one of the guys who was—now, for sure, in over his head—developed the mother of all quad cramps. He quite literally toppled over and landed hard on the side of the road, rolling around and screaming like his leg was being taken off with a rusty saw. Purest agony. If you’ve ever cramped badly on a bike ride, you can appreciate how bad it can be. (I have…just one time. It was a show-stopper.) We were half sympathetic and half worried about how the hell we could get this guy out of here, still in the proverbial middle of nowhere.
By now the day was really hot and we all began to understand we’d miscalculated the severity of this loop. None of us had enough water, not to mention any energy-mineral magic to go in the water we did have. None of us had brought enough food. We weren’t bonking yet but we could see it lying in wait for us, just a few miles up the hot, hilly road. We were in trouble.
Luckily, we did find water along the north shore of Lake Berryessa around mile 50: a faucet at a little trailer park. First civilization we’d seen in miles. We were down to our last sips at that point. That saved us—or at least revived us—and allowed us to soldier on, up and over the climb from the lake and down into beautiful Pope Valley. Our hopes were now pinned to the food and water that would be available at the Pope Valley store at around mile 65. We got there, dragging our tail feathers but still moving…but wait…what? This was the first time we discovered something now known to most local cyclists: that store was run by Seventh Day Adventists and was closed on Saturdays. (At least it was then; that may no longer be the case.)
I remember sitting there on the front porch of the closed store, exhausted and starving, looking at the last two inches of my last Power Bar, somewhat fuzzed with pocket lint, and contemplating the 20 remaining miles still to be ridden up along Butts Canyon through the hot afternoon. The guy with the cramp—who had recovered enough to ride this far—and one other guy said they were done. Couldn’t ride another mile. We’d have to slog on and drive back and pick them up. It was a pretty grim little group there, considering our prospects.
And just then, a VW bus pulled up to the store porch. A man and a woman got out, took one look at us, and slid open the side door on the van. These were two volunteers from the Davis Double rest stop in Middletown, now driving home, and the entire interior of the van was packed with leftover rest stop chow…bunches of bananas, flats of strawberries, crates of melons, sandwich fixings, cookies, jugs of ice water and lemonade. It was a cornucopia of plenty…manna from heaven. We were dumbstruck, gob-smacked. Christmas in May. It didn’t take us long to fall on that feast and stuff ourselves silly, then stuff our pockets as well. I don’t recall that we ever got the names of these two angels but I will never forget them.
I also don’t recall a thing about those final 20 miles, over the two substantial climbs and north along the flats back to Middletown. It was hot. That we know. Did we have a headwind or a tailwind? That detail has swirled down the drain of lost factoids. We were tired but not nearly as whacked as we would have been without that providential visit from the Davis volunteers.
Some of us did drive back and retrieve our two wounded warriors. One of them I’ve never seen since, although I know he lives only a mile from me. The other is still active in the club and now one of my oldest friends. I ran into him just last week on a ride out around Tomales.
I’m not sure why I felt the urge to trot out this old story. I had another topic in mind for this month but it will keep until April. I guess I was just reflecting on all the rides we do and have done, stretching back down the decades. And every road, every ride, brings back memories of past adventures, past sensations…mostly pleasant and some incandescent with joy and fulfillment. Also some bad days and ugly, painful, awkward moments. But as was the case with this particular ride, the bad moments are often redeemed by some wonderful miracle, like the Davis angels. Not always but often enough to keep us coming back for more.
I hope my story-telling was deft enough to keep you entertained. Perhaps it may have primed the pump of your own memories; caused you to recall some epic ride that had all sorts of ups and downs and quirks and fun embroidered into it. If you roll that bike down the road often enough and keep your heart and mind open to what’s around the next bend, you’re going to lay in a vast supply of such memories. Here’s hoping most of your cycling memories will be more positive than otherwise.
Bill can be reached at srccride@sonic.net