A short blog about a cool area in central California that a couple of guys just rode at...

(We'll pretend it's open for public use and we'll call the guys Bill and Lew)

After riding a couple of hours on the highway south of San Francisco in 95 degree heat, we hit dirt and let a lot of air out of our tires for traction, and Lew shows some leg...

It's an epic, eerie area with pine trees and rolling hills of naturally occurring asbestos (the reason for the closure) 

We had to carry our full capacity of gas since it would probably be 170 miles before we were able refuel, I put the ugly 8 gallon tank on my gas guzzler...

We found a spot to possibly camp and to definitely play around on the bikes...

The non-biting, super annoying flies were out in full force, every time we stopped at a potential camp spot it was ears and eyes full of them. So we kept riding until we were pretty much ready to sleep.

Lew's setup is dialed-

Good morning. Waking up in nature with a bike next to me is pretty damn good...

The bugs were still bad though, so we were quick to start riding...

Mom and her bambi-

We wanted to go see the old Gem Mine, Lew had been there so he lead the way...

We stopped at a play spot to mess around on the bikes-

Then we kept wandering and found this, an Erzbergesque mining area (not the Gem Mine). A really cool looking spot, if ripping up the earth for minerals is cool, regardless it was a spot we definitely wanted to explore...

But how to get in there? We tried some single track-

Nope.
Then Lew and I got separated, he took the high road and I took the low one-

That's me flipping him off. He did come down to help me out of the mud...

I finally gained access to where we wanted to be-

And went back to help Lew find a route through the maze, he got gnarly on the KLR...

The spot-

After a lot of fun, my gas light came on and we figured it was time to start heading back, not that getting out of this spot was easy...

On the way out I tried to be conservative with fuel consumption, but we had to jump off the road every once in a while for an amazing hill climb or decent... (I rolled into the gas station in Tres Pinos literally sputtering on fumes after 176 miles)

A great short trip. We'd like to dedicate this ride to Raymond.