Conquering Mount Tamalpais
About thirteen years ago, I came to San Francisco for the first time to visit my friend, Sei, who was living here for a short time. Sei had the great idea that, during my visit, we should rent mountain bikes and ride up to the top of Mount Tamalpais in Marin County.
One sunny day, we duly set forth and rented two bikes from a shop near Haight Ashbury in San Francisco. After biking through a particularly hilly section of San Francisco, across the Golden Gate Bridge and through Sausalito and Mill Valley, we started up a busy highway on the lower slopes of Mount Tam. We didn't get too far before I began to think of the long distance facing us just to return our rental bikes and how each pedal up the hillside was making that situation worse, while the sun sank ever closer to the Pacific Ocean. I gave in and told Sei we should turn around. We biked back to San Francisco with a sense of a mission uncompleted, a dream unfulfilled.
I filed the trip away as one of life's lessons, but Sei was not so easily daunted. A week ago, he called me with the idea that we should make another stab at biking up Mount Tam.
So this weekend, we set forth again, although more wisely from Mill Valley. Our friend, Tom, joined us, and I borrowed his wife's bike (I left my Parkpre in Chicago). We took an old railroad grade up the hill, which wasn't too gruelling, although I was pretty winded at various points during the ride. We passed a typical Marin family at one point, and the father yelled out to me, "You better kick it into gear, man, your friends are smoking you."
At the top (or as near the top as the bike trail goes), we didn't pause too long to celebrate before we headed back down. We took a much more rocky and steep trail down the north face of the mountain, and I have to admit there were some steepish stretches where I got off the bike and walked for a while. I also got my foot caught in the clip once, took a tumble and bruised and scratched much of the left side of my body. As evidence perhaps of the neglected state of our biking equipment, we were plagued by various mechanical troubles on the way up and down -- a broken seat bracket, a broken brake and a punctured tire. But all along the way, we were treated with stunning vistas of San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Coast.
And it sure was a nice feeling to have finally conquered Mount Tam!
One sunny day, we duly set forth and rented two bikes from a shop near Haight Ashbury in San Francisco. After biking through a particularly hilly section of San Francisco, across the Golden Gate Bridge and through Sausalito and Mill Valley, we started up a busy highway on the lower slopes of Mount Tam. We didn't get too far before I began to think of the long distance facing us just to return our rental bikes and how each pedal up the hillside was making that situation worse, while the sun sank ever closer to the Pacific Ocean. I gave in and told Sei we should turn around. We biked back to San Francisco with a sense of a mission uncompleted, a dream unfulfilled.
I filed the trip away as one of life's lessons, but Sei was not so easily daunted. A week ago, he called me with the idea that we should make another stab at biking up Mount Tam.
So this weekend, we set forth again, although more wisely from Mill Valley. Our friend, Tom, joined us, and I borrowed his wife's bike (I left my Parkpre in Chicago). We took an old railroad grade up the hill, which wasn't too gruelling, although I was pretty winded at various points during the ride. We passed a typical Marin family at one point, and the father yelled out to me, "You better kick it into gear, man, your friends are smoking you."
At the top (or as near the top as the bike trail goes), we didn't pause too long to celebrate before we headed back down. We took a much more rocky and steep trail down the north face of the mountain, and I have to admit there were some steepish stretches where I got off the bike and walked for a while. I also got my foot caught in the clip once, took a tumble and bruised and scratched much of the left side of my body. As evidence perhaps of the neglected state of our biking equipment, we were plagued by various mechanical troubles on the way up and down -- a broken seat bracket, a broken brake and a punctured tire. But all along the way, we were treated with stunning vistas of San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Coast.
And it sure was a nice feeling to have finally conquered Mount Tam!
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