KEEPING THE FAITH
“That’s poison ivy,” says my guide. “Don’t touch it, or else in three days you’ll know about it.” Three days? What kind of weird plant is that?
Of course, there’s all sorts of stuff that’ll make you itchy here at home, but the poison ivy in question – a beautifully beguiling mix of orange and red bush – lurks uncomfortably close to the side of these Californian trails.
The trails in question are a true mix of mountain biking’s most fun tests; janky rock chutes, winding, flowing runs on hardpack, softy, blown-out loam skirting long drops and powder-dry wide-open terrain, all winding through countryside that switches between completely desert-sky exposed to Alice-in-Wonderland spooky to the silent, soft and simply awe-inspiring cathedral of California’s magnificent redwood forests.
The Trione-Annadel State Park, about an hour north of San Francisco, was on the fringes of the 2017 Californian wildfires that destroyed a shocking 7500 homes in the north of the state… and some areas hadn’t escaped,
