Bridge, BART, and Mountain

Bill Bushnell — October 31, 1992

Three of us started in Palo Alto (Brent, Jules, and me). We rode through sleepy East Palo Alto at 7:20 (Normally, this isn’t a safe route with all the random shootings, etc., but things were quiet enough at this hour.) and out across the Dumbarton Bridge. Brent flatted on the east side of the bridge, so we stopped and lost about 15-20 minutes fixing his flat. We continued quickly across the salt flats against a weak headwind into Newark. Jules was full of energy, and as he was leading, he kept pulling away from us. I was barely able to hold onto the rear, and Brent was dropped several times. About a half-hour later we arrived at the Union City BART, and after we managed to get the ticket-dispensing machine not to vomit out our crumpled dollar bills, we rushed up the elevator to the platform just before the San Francisco-bound train arrived.

The ride to San Francisco was uneventful. Brent patched the tube he flatted on earlier, and as we traveled through Oakland, the train filled up. If you have an Avocet bike computer, remove it from the mount while taking your bike on BART, especially if you place your bike in front of the sideways seats in the center-side of the car near the doors. It seems that the magnetic fields generated by the train motors can be detected by the coil pickup of the computer. I accumulated 10 miles of distance on my computer and my average speed went up to 22.6 with a max of 102.0 mph!

We exited at the Embarcadero station and took the elevators to the street. Frank was there to meet us, and he was slightly peeved that the times I had given him were read off an old train schedule.

We continued straight up Market Street. Traffic was light (for San Francisco), but there were still buses and cars and trolley tracks to watch for. When we got to 17^th street, we started up some steep hills to get to Twin Peaks. Twin Peaks is not very high, about 900 feet above sea level, but the view from the top is magnificent. If you’ve been to San Francisco, you may have seen the big three-legged red and white antenna tower (Sutro Tower) on Mt. Sutro. Twin Peaks is the slightly higher peak a quarter mile to the southest of Mt. Sutro, very near the geographical center of the City.

We stopped at the top, enjoyed the view, and BS’ed about the coming election. The time was 10:15a, but not too early for hordes of tourists in large, double-decker buses. After I took a couple of pictures, we started down the southwest side of the peak to Portola Ave.

We continued down Portola Street all the way to Junipero Serra Blvd and then continued briefly onto I-280 (legal for a short stretch) before exiting at John Daly Blvd. near the Daly City BART station. We continued our way through Daly City, and found our way to Guadalupe Canyon Parkway. We rode up the long hill (~500 feet) to the San Bruno Mountain Park entrance. I arrived first, and a minute later Jules arrived. After five minutes Frank and Brent came into view, but they missed the park entranced. I tried yelling and waving frantically, but they must have been having an interesting conversation because they continued past the park entrance and down the other side of the mountain! There wasn’t much we could do but follow them down to the bottom on the other side at Brisbane. We found them waiting at the bottom of the hill. Embarrassment was written on their faces; they knew they had gone too far.

So, back we rode, up the other side of the hill. After stopping briefly again at the park entrance, we started up Radio Rd. to the radio towers atop San Bruno Mountain. After eating lunch and more election BS, we started down. The sky was becoming increasingly cloudy. Parts of the City to the north were obscured by rain. Uh oh. Maybe we’re going to get wet this ride.

Fortunately, rain was not to happen for us. By the time we returned to Daly City, the clouds had cleared and the temperature had warmed. We rode back to the BART station, and Frank left us. Frank lives in Berkeley, and he didn’t want to ride all the way down to Palo Alto and then across to Union City at the end of the day.

Now there were three of us. We rode west on John Daly Blvd. down and then up the long hill to Skyline Blvd. At Skyline Blvd we began our long southward journey. We rode on Skyline stopping only for lights and for me to write down the major road intersections in my book. When Skyline reaches I-280, bicycles are not permitted to continue, even though we’d only be on the shoulder and wouldn’t have to cross any lanes of traffic. We had to backtrack a little ways and take the foot/bike path. The path is nice except for all the people walking two and three abreast and the dogs pulling this way and that on their leashes. The path ends at Larkspur Ave. 1.5 miles later. We returned to Skyline Blvd, now paralleling I-280. At Hillcrest Ave. we stopped at the Chevron station to top off our water bottles and to allow Brent time to change his tire which had gone flat again. (!) From here we can either take the 5-mile Sawyer Camp Trail with its 15 mph speed limit (5 mph at the beginning and end), or we can take I-280 for 0.8 miles and return to Skyline Blvd. We chose the latter.

We continued on Skyline to Hayne Rd., crossed under I-280 (to the west side of the freeway) and continued south to CA-92 and Canada Rd. From here the route is much more familiar, and we had fun burning off the excess calories still left in our legs by sprinting south on Canada Rd. We reached Palo Alto at 16:30, with enough time to spare before dark.

Ride stats:

distance: 76.0 miles

climbing: 4690 feet

total time: 9:21 (over 4 hours of resting and socializing (!))

riding time: 5:14

average speed: 14.5 mph

maximum speed: 39.5 mph

index: 95

irp: 10

mirp: 18

An article on indexing can be found here.

©2004, Bill Bushnell

Please do not publish or distribute for profit without permission.