A half-mile into the ride.
We drove down to Nevada City to get out of the snow for a short bike ride. There are a lot of rides around Highway 20 and Nevada City—it’s old mining country, with plenty of flumes, trails and old roads.
It’s also the Sierra foothills, which are like Appalachia, only steeper and drier. The road from Nevada City to the South Yuba campground is crazy, the kind where you can look out the passenger window and see switchbacks straight below you.
The South Yuba River runs through a canyon so steep that there are sections that never see the sun this time of year. It produces some dramatic temperature differences—up to 30 or 40 degrees in a half-mile stretch of trail.
The trail resembles the Tahoe Flume Trail in that much of it runs along a steep drop-off. You can’t let your mind wander or admire the scenery because you’ll wind up several hundred feet down a canyon.
After three miles, you get your first good look at the South Yuba River.
Crossing Humbug Creek.
Just past Humbug, looking for Gollem.
The trail starts about a thousand feet above the river and descends to river level about four miles in (so you’re going downhill upstream and uphill downstream).
At four miles you cross Humbug Creek. Its source is a mile upstream where it exits a 7800’ tunnel dug by miners in the 1870s, an example of how nuts the miners were in those days.
The trail is washed out at this point and we had to walk our bikes for a quarter-mile. The vegetation for most of the ride is typically California semi-arid, but when you get down to the river you suddenly feel like an extra on the set of "Lord of the Rings."
Also, despite the trail paralleling the river, there’s a lot of up and down, especially a lot of up going back.
The trail winds along the river for about twenty miles, with occasional side trails climbing out of the canyon. We only rode five and half miles in and had a nice lunch in the sun. It was so nice to do a ride where we weren’t racing back to get in before dark.
LINKS:
The scenery is wet and lush along the river, and a lot drier everywhere else.
Our lunch spot, five and a half miles in.
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