We spent our April Fool's Day by going to Jacumba Hot Springs for a family bike ride along the Carrizo Gorge rail line. I had read about this bike ride on a popular mountain biking website called Mountain Bike Bill. He reviewed the trail as easy, with its gentle average 2% grade, and beautiful, for its many obscenely gorgeous desert views. For a while, years ago, they had "officially" closed off the trail that parallels the train tracks and officials were writing fat tickets for trespassers on the land. But then I read they stopped doing that and went back to what the rail line company did for years, which was the warn people that they were trespassing, but not actively stop them. When I Google searched "Carrizo Gorge" and the words "hiking", "mountain biking" or "riding", I found hundreds of pages, blogs, videos and online forums of people discussing their day trips here. So I wasn't scared to venture out there, but I definitely wanted to go as a whole family, for safety's sake mostly.
With the amount of pictures I took, it's easier to do a massive picture drop than to individually post and say something about each picture...but...I feel that some of the pictures deserve a mini-story or at least a short description, so bear with me! I'm not likely to forget this bike ride any time soon, but the likelihood of forgetting some of the smaller details of the day is higher.
We parked in the dirt parking lot across the street from the 2 gas stations off the Jacumba exit on I-8. From there, we took the "dead end" dirt road trail heading west. Here's our first 3 pictures on the dirt road:
We stayed on the dirt road until we were 100 yards from the gated entrance to the DeAnza Springs Resort, which is a clothing-optional resort, a.k.a. "nudist resort". A trail veered off to the left and we rode through a clearing and there it was! The rail line!
At this point, there is no way to get lost on the trail. Just follow the tracks and enjoy the desert scenery. We were super excited to see our first set of abandoned train cars about a mile into the trail:
Some of the graffiti was goofy, some was cool. We explored these train cars for about 30 minutes. We walked inside of them but I didn't take any pictures of the inside. I made a video of the inside but I haven't uploaded that yet, so I'll update this blog post when I do.
Here's a side view of the first bridge (of many!) we had to cross on this ride:
Before leaving the abandoned train cars, we stopped to take a family selfie in front of a highly graffiti'ed area:
Here's a view of the 2nd and 3rd bridges we had to cross:
That 3rd bridge looks small, doesn't it? But it was bigger than it looked. Here's another picture of it with Rob & Eliza visible off to the right of the bridge. Puts it into perspective, huh?
The views continued to get prettier and more amazing:
Finally! We made it to the first tunnel! I was too excited to take a picture of the entrance, so I took a selfie after exiting the tunnel and crossing another bridge.
At this point, the trail became less hard-packed dirt and more construction-grade gravel that was near impossible to ride through. It was not fun to walk across either, and even more so for Rob who isn't just walking his bike, but Eliza in the Weehoo, who happened to fall asleep! It became such a bear to walk through that we talked about turning around and abandoning our ride. I didn't like that idea, but I understood how Rob felt. It's just harder to pull a 45 pound 4-year-old in a 25 pound Weehoo through unrideable terrain like that. Here's a picture of Rob walking through this spot:
We set our sights on this next set of abandoned train cars and proposed that if the trail didn't become rideable again after passing this, we'd turn around and head back to the car:
Thankfully the trail improved and we continued on! We rode through many more tunnels and crossed many more bridges. I won't post all of the pictures, so here's just a few:
We hadn't seen anybody since starting our ride at the gas station in Jacumba, so we were pleasantly surprised to see 2 middle aged men riding towards us. They were friendly and had ridden out here many times before. We asked them how much further the famous Goat Canyon trestle was. "2 or 3 miles?" they said. We groaned quietly to ourselves because even though the ride was "easy", it felt way harder. Before parting ways, I asked them to take our picture. Eliza, like always, did not look up enough for the picture, but that's okay.
In the next tunnel, which was really long (maybe a half mile?), we stopped to take a picture. Rob snapped this one with his phone and I thought it looked pretty cool:
We finally made it to the Goat Canyon trestle! It is the world's largest and tallest curved wooden trestle. Read about it here. Or Google it and read the many other articles about it.
I made 2 videos of the Goat Canyon crossing.
See this picture below? It looks like a tunnel to nowhere, right? Wrong. The Goat Canyon trestle is just a few hundred yards off to the west of this. The trestle was built in 1932 because an earlier earthquake in the area destroyed the tunnel pictured here. Trains had to travel some way over this, and since they didn't want to bore through the mountain again, they decided to build the trestle. Amazing that only 1 of the tunnels was affected during that earthquake and not more because there are so many tunnels. I think I counted 11 tunnels from the start of the ride to Goat Canyon!
Here we are posing in one of those "head in a hole" signs that someone lovingly made with spray paint and no artistic ability whatsoever!
A few more cute pictures of Eliza and 1 picture of the Goat Canyon trestle from the other side:
We walked across Goat Canyon trestle which was a fun way to experience it, too. You'd think riding across would be scarier but honestly, walking across gave me the willies. I held Eliza's hand and she walked the whole way across saying cute things like this:
"Wow, we're up really high!"
"Dogs couldn't walk up here. Their paws would fall through (the holes)."
"Mommy, watch out for that hole there."
We did a silly face family selfie after walking over the bridge. It was Eliza's idea. She's all into making silly faces lately.
On the ride back to the car, we didn't stop as much, but I took a few more videos. Here's one that shows us riding through a short tunnel. You can see how important it was to have a good light!
Here's a longer video of just me following Rob and Eliza on the trail. The quality of these riding videos aren't great since I'm just using my phone tucked inside of a Bikase handy andy case that I put on my Camelbak shoulder strap. I really want to buy a GoPro someday! I bet the quality would be a thousand times better!
Picture dump time! This was a very nice ride and I'd do it again in a heartbeat.
One last video of us riding on the fire road towards our car. You can see I-8 in the background.
And here's our Strava summary of the ride.
