All participants must register online on the VSBC website or via the wildapricot app. You do not need to be a VSBC member, but we appreciate your support if you intend to ride with us often. Please bring your own route sheet as the ride host will not have any paper copies at the start of the ride.

Ride Details:

This ride will help those of you that are training for the Mt. Diablo Challenge the following week on Oct. 2nd.

If you haven’t registered to ride the Challenge, or volunteered to support the event, please consider doing so via the VSBC website. Click here -> Mt Diablo Challenge

We will start at the Livermore Trek Store. Trek will be providing access to the store beginning at 8:30am. Water, a restroom, and perhaps a last minute pre-ride tune up, will be available. Start with two full bottles of water on the bike and some in your belly. There will be water available at Del Valle Lake, but not readily available elsewhere along the route.

The ride will include seven summits; you choose how many you want to attempt! Riders completing one summit, a few, or all seven summits will be successful.

Summits

Lake Del Valle Peak, from north side
Lake Del Valle Peak, from south side
Mines Road just to Mile 6.5
Tesla Road Summit
Cross Road Summit
Patterson Pass Summit
Flynn Road South Summit

All riders must register. Please try to do so before rolling time.

History nugget: From the summits of Patterson Pass and Flynn Road S. many windmills can be seen. The Altamont Pass region was among the earliest wind energy farms in California. Beginning in the early 1980s the first windmills appeared. Those windmills were prototypes for the modern windmills there now. Windmill developers came from around the U.S. and western Europe. Germans and some Dutch engineers were here because the technology could be developed in the Altamont Pass region more readily than in Europe due to regulatory issues. The U.S. had also dramatically altered its energy strategy making its first push into alternate energy after the OPEC energy embargo in 1979. Tax breaks brought in investment money.

Many things were learned in the 1980s and 90s. High-speed turbines supported on oil derrick-like towers gave way to today’s designs. It was unforeseen that the derrick structures would serve as perches for birds of prey. That combined with very high-rotor speeds contributed to many bird-of-prey fatalities. Today’s perch-free towers and large, slowly rotating rotators, have dramatically reduced the harm to this bird-of-prey habitat and migratory bird flyway.

Link to the ride ‘turn by turn’ instructions (Ride with GPS):

https://ridewithgps.com/routes/40588830

<br>

Data Subject Access Request (DSAR) webmaster@valleyspokesmen.org