Like the budding discomfort of a migraine headache or the first scratchy throat symptom of an oncoming, cold, I could feel a ride bail coming on hard today. First off, it was Sunday, which as I mentioned last week, I generally reserve for work-obsessed moping and teeth gnashing. In addition, I had slept late, the day was gray and grim, and my spirits were lower than Robert Novak's objectivity standards. I got up and puttered around the house, feeling the precious daylight ticking away, and knowing that in my weakened mental state, I was powerless to stop the no-ride slide.

Philosofes surficus	In the name of all that is holy	Core skeels, CrankenFine style

But what better things are friends for than to pick you up when you're down. At just about the exact moment that I was rationlizing and formalizing the bail, the phone rang. It was FrankenFine (who has morphed to CrankenFine and shall henceforth be referred to as such) with an invitation to ride. Cranken' was in the City visiting RRRo and was looking for some dry trails. I haven't seen much of the good doctor since he moved across the Bay, so there was no way I could pass up this opportunity. We agreed to meet in Montara for a trip over the hill to the Pacifica coastal trails, and the day was on!

After a little confusion about which Montara State Beach parking lot we were meeting in (yes, mobile phones do have their benefits), CrankenFine, RRRo, and I saddled up, crossed the Cabrillo, and started the glorious three-mile climb up Old San Pedro Mountain Road to the San Pedro summit. On the way up, we discussed Malthusian principles and the place of religion in culture, society, and politics. The ride down to the Adobe gate was fast and loose. The narrow, foliage-choked ashpalt track was wet from the recent rains and in the many sharp corners, a film of slippery, silty runoff had accumulated. This made the corners pretty treacherous at 18 to 20 MPH, and more than once I found myself in a locked-up, two-wheel mud-o-planing drift. I never went down, but I did hit many roadside bushes and I thought I was going down on several occasions. Such close calls didn't slow me down much though, not on my favorite trail.

In Pacifica, we headed out past Pacifica State Beach towards the Rockaway Beach clifftops. Both CrankenFine and RRRo are surfers, and the surf was going off today, so it was hard to keep them moving. Pacifica State Beach was throwing off perfectly curled tubes which CrankenFine estimated to be about eight feet tall. I'm not a surfer, but I have to admit, the surf was beautiful to behold today.

After another break for refreshments, we started back towards San Pedro Point, which neither CrankenFine nor RRRo had ever ridden before. They wanted to check out the secret little hippy community out at the tip of San Pedro Point (tucked behind the Three Sisters), so I figured we could climb out to the point and look down on it from there. On the way back from Rockaway Beach, we had to do a lot of scrambling on foot because I got us off the beaten path a bit. Nothing too hairy, but you don't exactly get the best traction in bike shoes, so it added a little extra excitement to scramble down gravelly 15-degree slopes that terminate in 100-foot cliffs. Later, I took a bit of a tumble on the little singletrack stitch made famous in The Shit (See February 14, 2004: The shit). No injuries or damage except for a split left handlebar grip, but lots of wet, gritty sand in all the wrong places like my chain, my brake levers, and my ass crack. Comes with the territory.

No outing with CrankenFine is ever complete without running into at least one person he knows, and today was no exception. Passing back through the Pacific State Beach parking lot, we came across Crank's friend First Woman and a couple of her crew getting into their wetsuits. We chatted briefly and continued on towards San Pedro Point, which I warned my fellow travelers was a bitch.

I wasn't kidding. San Pedro Point is a topographist's wet dream: everything out there is either straight up or straight down. It is tortured and torturous terrain, and today it hit me hard right in the chocoloate-covered old-fashioneds. We struggled out toward the westernmost point, but before we attempted the last major climb, I suggested a cost-benefit analysis of the effort it would take to make it out to there versus our remaining strength and daylight. I planned to take us back to the San Pedro summit by way of the very steep Devil's Point Head utility road, so I suggested that we leave the point of the Point for another day, and, wisely, my fellows agreed. We stopped for more refreshments, discussed sexual orientation and predeterminism, and then started on the final leg of the day's journey.

From the San Pedro Point gate, we had to ride on Highway 1 for about 300 yards. It doesn't sound like much, but this is 300 hairy, shoulderless yards loaded with high-velocity vehicles. Again, there is nothing you can do but focus on the razor's edge between the white line and the precipitous edge of the asphalt and hope that the drivers coming up behind you are paying attention. In general, I really hate to put my trust, let alone my life in someone else's hands, but when you're out on the road, what else can you do?

We made it (obviously), and then set about struggling up the utility road. This dirt road is heavily rutted and steep; I usually come down this way and go up on Old San Pedro -- the opposite of the way we did it today. At the top of the utility road, on the face of San Pedro Head, the wind was BLOW-in! It was blowing so hard that it took extra effort just to keep my bike on the little singletrack trail we took back to the San Pedro summit. With just enough energy and daylight, we were back in the Montara State Beach parking lot within a half hour. A ride well done.

The weather today was cool and mostly cloudy with intermittent patches of sun. Other than a dead battery on my cyclometer, there were no mechanicals today and CrankenFine did an excellent job of keeping the trail stops to a minimum. A great Sunday afternoon trail ride if ever I've ridden one.

Saw numerous banana slugs on the climb up San Pedro summit, but other than that, we didn't see any other non-human, non-domesticated animals.