A LOT OF CLIMBING

That was my warning to my fellow riders for Saturday morning’s ride. We decided to hit up Chino Hills State Park (CHSP) for a good workout ride. Lance, Priscilla, Ivan & I, a more XC oriented group of riders (actually Lance is pretty versatile able to ride XC & even throw in some jumping and fast descending), met up for some fireroad climbing and at the end all of us had run out of water. Is that a sign of a good workout or what? Yeah, don’t answer that.

CHSP, as I’ve written about before, is not the best ride to get in great singletrack or wickedly fun descents. The trails I chose ended up being about 16 miles starting from the car. About 1.5 miles from car to trail for a total of 3 miles, 11ish miles of fireroad, 0.5 mile singletrack descent and 1 mile of singletrack climbing. Does that add up to 16?

The great thing about the ride is that it starts off with a brutal climb that took us a little over one hour. Thankfully it’s not all climbing, but I’d say about 85% of this 5 mile portion was climbing. This excellent workout was a great intro to the beauties of CHSP. The really cool part of this was that the four of us only stopped to regroup once! One hour of climbing and we really weren’t more than a few minutes apart from each other.

The next section was a fun 1 mile singletrack climb to the opposite ridge. I’ve always done this section as a climb and never a descent. As a climb it’s great, but I’m thinking one of these days, I’m going to turn the loop around and try this section as a descent.

After getting to South Ridge, we took the fireroad back to the entrance of the park. Although this part is all fireroad it does get some fun points due to the fact that you can ride pretty fast through here. The one nasty hill used to get me and I’d have to walk, but now I can get through it without dismounting.

After 2.5 hours of riding our ride definitely lived up to its warning: “A lot of climbing�?.