Day Twenty-seven
Carmel-by-the-Sea to King City, 65 miles
With the Big Sur Highway still closed, it was back over the hump to the Salinas Valley today. I spent last night with Seaberry and Chris, and for breakfast this morning, I enjoyed eggs from their chickens and bread that Chris baked with jam that Seaberry made. Pretty great.
Google Maps said “heavy traffic” on my route. Not what I expected, because my road climbs up through nowhere and comes out the other side in a place nobody wants to go to, at least this way. By car, it’s faster to go north around these mountains, and catch the 101 freeway to the Salinas Valley. On a bike, it’s up and over.
12 miles up the Carmel River valley I stop at the Village Market in Carmel Valley, on Seaberry’s suggestion that they have great sandwiches.
It’s a nice little market, busting with beer, wine and liquor. Fully half the aisles are alcohol products. I mention this to the clerk and he simply says, “this IS Carmel Valley!” Naturally, great wealth and great quantities of booze go together.
West Coast Live Oak
As the road rises inland, the coastal conifer forest of redwoods, Monterey pines and Douglas firs gives way to oak trees.
Traffic thins out east of Carmel Valley, to the point where I was passed by only one car in over an hour. I climb, climb, climb.
Flying insects find me attractive
The temperature rises and with a slight tailwind, I’m riding in still, hot air. Soon I am the center of a swarm of hundreds of buzzing bugs. On a short downhill I power ahead and they can’t keep up, but at the next rise, a new swarm finds me. This repeats at least five times, and I have to accept that I am Pig-Pen from the Peanuts comics.
A long stretch of no traffic is interrupted the familiar sound of a Harley Davidson motorcycle coming up from behind. Harleys have a distinct roar. And another and…17 in total. These are new, gleaming bikes with bright and shiny paint and lots of chrome. And lots of leather, of course. These dudes are tricked out. A typical new Harley runs $25,000+. I pass my time doing mental arithmetic. Just going with $25k each, $425,000 of motorcycles just growled by. I could bicycle forever on that amount—with my friends, too.
Right about half way through the daily mileage, 31.7 miles, to be exact, I top out at 2,380 feet above sea level.
As I stand on the pass, amid a cattle operation, behind me is the Carmel River valley and ahead is a tributary of the Salinas River. Effort-wise, this is far more than half way, because climbing is slow and descending is fast.
Over the course of the day, with ups and downs included, today’s climbing topped 4,000 feet. From the pass it’s miles and miles of fast down. On the west side of the pass the land was mostly forested with a few homes, some California-style retreat centers (super bougie), and some cows here and there. On the east side, the forest opens up to mountain grassland interspersed with copses of oaks. Descending further, it becomes wine country, vineyard after vineyard. No grapes though. Harvest is over.
I reach the Salinas Valley floor and the full force of the onshore winds from the coast up the valleys becomes apparent. It’s a big wind, and as I turn right and south, it’s behind me! For nearly 15 miles into King City, I have the best tailwind of the trip so far. I am able to sustain 20+ miles an hour for miles and miles.
Still, I’m more than a little wiped out by the climb and the heat. I roll into King City baked and dehydrated. I chomp an ice cream sandwich and gulp down a Gatorade, pretty much the healthiest recovery food to be found in your typical gas station convenience store. There was not a single gas station or any commercial establishment of any kind between Carmel Valley and King City, a stretch of 50 miles. I can’t recall a highway stretch with this much of nothing on any ride I have taken, ever. On Montana’s desolate High Line, towns are 8-12 miles apart. Even North Dakota has more going on than the road I rode today. In my research of this ride, I found basically no information about this road, except that it exists. And that’s pretty much its whole story. I loved it.
