Eastern Sierra bicycle touring: Rock Creek to Truckee

Bike Friday New World Tourist review, part one.

Well, this bicycle tour wasn’t a total bust. Being the first ride on a new touring setup, I knew it’d be a bit of a shakedown, but, dang, there was a lot more shaking than I expected. I learned a few things, but it was at times painful — both physically and financially. Six days in a row of rain did not help my mood.

14 years ago Sage showed up in Erzurum with a Bike Friday in a suitcase and did phenomenally well on that folding bicycle riding up and down steep dirt roads.

Two things to notice: Sage is not towing the aforementioned trailer, and though she has some weight on her bicycle, it’s less than I carry because I carried both the tent and kitchen supplies (stove, pots, etc.). However, for me the big appeal of the Bike Friday was that it folds into a suitcase and you tow the suitcase behind you as a trailer for your gear.

A third thing that I notice is that Sage has a triple in front. Was that something she added later? It wasn’t an option for me building my Bike Friday.

Maybe you’ll look at the above photo and think “Bryan, there’s no way you can comfortably ride that little bike hauling so much gear in a janky suitcase trailer.” And you’d be right. And I think the same thing looking at the photo now. However, I’ve toured rather successfully multiple times with a similarly heavy load in a BOB trailer. Lesson learned: the Bike Friday suitcase trailer is definitely not the BOB trailer.

Anyway, I knew it was a test ride and planned a short eight-day trip. Asphalt like this was alright.

But on the very first day I abandoned sandy gravel roads like this one

and stayed on 395 much longer than I had planned.

The two rear wheels on this trailer obviously do not track the bicycle wheels like the BOB trailer’s wheel. What’s that mean in practice? More flat tires. We try to steer around glass and thorny bushes, but that’s much harder when the two rear tires are offset to either side. On the first day I learned that my pump cannot fit into the tiny space on those small rear trailer wheels meaning that I cannot pump them up. Ooops.

There are two solutions: a flexible extender that you can attach to the valve when needing to add air or having inner tubes with bent valves. Why aren’t Bike Friday bicycles shipped with such valves? Turns out they are… sometimes. And why don’t they warn you of this from the start? Haven’t they figured all this stuff out already?

That first night I found a decent campsite off Bald Mountain Road, and super friendly and helpful ATVers from Santa Clarita (think Drew Barrymore as the vampire) were able to pump up those small tires for me. It was a one-off fix, however. I don’t remember how I dealt with that problem for the remainder of the tour. It was, I suppose, minor compared to what was to come.

When you look at the trailer in the photo, you probably don’t immediately see “janky”, but what you don’t see is that the trailer hitch is not off-the-shelf. Bike Friday designed the connection which includes a flexible steel-threaded brake line hose. They claim it’s fully field-serviceable (complete rubbish). It yanks the trailer back and forth on every small bump.

A little foreshadowing from my notes after a single day of touring: “I don’t see how that hose can take so much abuse.”

Let me try to be positive. In the rain on 395 that afternoon, I stopped and chatted with a couple securing the tarp on their load on their way to Black Rock City. Indeed the week of my tour was Burning Man week. Quite a few playa-bound rigs passed me on 395.

The scenery’s nice out here.

Is it possible I had never been to Mono Lake before? Is there really no bridge over Lee Vining Creek?

I waited out many hours of rain at a park in Bridgeport and even ended up cooking dinner there before it finally let up and I could get to a crappy campsite. A young backpacker waiting out the same rain in the same park warned me that he had been moved on by the police trying to wild camp near Twin Lakes.

Wait, wait, I was going to be positive. The scenery, right? And the next day it didn’t start raining till I got to camp!

It wasn’t till camp on the third day that I realized I’d been riding with the saddle too high, and I had strained my Achilles tendon. Why hadn’t I noticed this earlier? I guess ’cause lots of stuff felt so different, and the push-pull of the trailer was super uncomfortable anyway. I considered abandoning the trip. In the end I decided to see how I felt in the morning on the 1000m climb up the smooth pavement of Monitor Pass — steady pedaling, no nonsense — and make it a short day.

What a great call to make it a short day. I had my tent setup before the rain, and it ended up raining for many hours that afternoon. Somehow, after a solid 11 hours of sleep the night before, I took a nap! Tired, maybe?

I decided to skip Ebbetts Pass — it’s supposed to be pretty and is likely easy pavement riding — because of the 4WD connector to Lower Blue Lake. Looking at the map I figured I could stay on pavement and make it a fairly casual ride to Truckee, my intended destination.

I even took a rest day (the first day without rain!) at Luther Pass Campground where I enjoyed watching a chipmunk take all the yummy bits off a pine cone. The store in Markleeville doesn’t open till 10, and the one (on the map) in Sorensens doesn’t exist. Still I had enough food that I didn’t have to resort to eating pine cones. In addition to chipmunks were red tailed hawks, red headed woodpeckers, and blue jays. And a bear box too.

The Tahoe Rim Trail passes near the campground and then goes through Bryan Meadow and passes Keith’s Dome on the way to Lake Aloha in Desolation Wilderness. Indeed with a car there are good day-hike opportunities from that campground.

I made a detour to Fallen Leaf Lake and then another detour to a bicycle mechanic in South Lake Tahoe. That flexible steel-threaded brake line hose failed on the 5th day of riding. A skilled mechanic with proper tools could not separate the metal fitting from the ruined hose (field-serviceable? ha!). He used a new one. He apologized for sending me away with the same lousy setup, but it’s what he could do at short notice and knew it would hold till Truckee. Thank you, South Shore Bikes, for a quick fix on Friday of a three-day weekend (Labor Day).

I had been warned of two problems for the next stretch of my ride: the traffic around Emerald Bay would make for horrible riding and there are more bear-human interactions around Lake Tahoe than anywhere else in the US. The former isn’t true at all. Traffic moves quite slowly around Emerald Bay, the climbs are short, and the descents are fast. In fact the riding is worse a bit farther north where the road is still narrow but also quite straight.

What to do about the bears? I found a place to wild camp, but I wasn’t keen on the idea with no rope to hang my food. I asked at a campground, and they wanted $78 for the night! I pushed on to Sugar Pine Point Campground at the eponymous state park and guess what? — Friday night, three-day weekend — they have hiker biker sites, with bear boxes of course!

Next day was a lot of bicycle path along Lake Tahoe and then along the Truckee River. You do have to get on the highway at Olympic Valley (formerly Squaw Valley), but from there it’s slightly downhill heading north to Truckee. The kind young employees at Sugar Pine Point Campground had told me I could expect the same thing (hiker biker site with bear box) at Donner Memorial State Park Campground near Truckee.

At the onsite museum I learned a little about the Washoe (the local Native Americans) and the Donner Party. Certainly they made some mistakes but not as egregious as I had previously thought. I celebrated the end of my trip with a locally brewed Donner Party Porter.

In the morning at the Truckee bus/train station it took 90 minutes to go from bicycle tourist to bus passenger. I chatted with a man from Guadalajara who was waiting for the same bus.

For some reason when I bought this ticket I booked an itinerary with a change of buses in Oakland rather than Sacramento which would have been faster. Maybe for timing convenience of the second change in Los Angeles? What this meant is it took 27 hours from the Truckee campground to my parents’ house. On the positive side I had four hours in Oakland where Ann picked me up and took me to dinner at her Mom’s house — super, thank you.

Another fun thing on the bus trip was sitting with the Mexican man as we were waiting during a break in Sacramento. We were joined by a Peruvian woman and a Colombian man. The Colombian was returning from his first Burning Man and absolutely loved it. He was excited to talk to someone who had been and understood the feeling. 🙂

The next morning in Irvine it took an hour to go from bus passenger to bicycle tourist.

Conclusion: well, I’ll certainly be better prepared for the next tour. The biggest lesson is don’t pull a heavy load in the trailer. Indeed Bike Friday sells foldable front and rear racks. They did not make it clear to me — even after describing the kind of riding that I like to do — how important those are. Since then I bought the racks and tried them out on my second folding bike test tour, one that nearly ended in disaster. But that’s another story.

Additionally, I should point out that I wouldn’t have even bothered doing this tour with my normal bicycle. I couldn’t have got it into the car with Megan on our drive to Rock Creek where I started riding, and on the other end, I would have needed to find a bicycle box in Truckee and either ship the bike or lug it onto those three buses (for a fee, I’m sure).