Does it still count as bikepacking if you stayed in a yurt and left all your gear in camp for a loop ride? Bike people do too much gatekeeping, so I’ll allow it.
Nancy and I are training for Climate Ride C&O Canal (support me at the link below!), so we’ve been riding together a bunch. She wasn’t up for the first part of this adventure but wanted to enjoy some wine country riding in the days leading up to her birthday. Our favorite winery, Casa Nuestra, is no longer operating (the owner, Gene, has retired and still lives on the property), but, our friend Stephanie, who used to run the tasting room there, is now doing tastings at Tedeschi Family Winery, which has some of the vibe of the old Casa Nuestra (and not the corporate vibe of most Napa wineries these days).
Tedeschi is in north Calistoga near Old Faithful, so we grabbed the Vine Trail into downtown, picked up some picnic snacks, and had a lovely session tasting and talking about old times. Stephanie’s great; she’s also a winemaker and is super-knowledgable about everything going on in the industry. (We’ve hosted a winemaker’s dinner’s for her label, Trotter 1/16 Winery).
We bought as much wine as we could carry and planned to pick it up on our way back.
Being in north Calistoga, I couldn’t think of a better idea than to go ride Franz Valley again.
Nancy did great, huffing a little on the couple of steep sections but making the whole climb.
It was now Friday afternoon, so when we hit Petrified Forest it was gridlocked with tourist traffic. That actually made for nicer riding, as our only challenge was to sneak past stopped cars who hadn’t left enough room. Crossing 128, we popped into residential streets, found a bike/ped bridge over the Napa River, grabbed our wine, and cruised the Vine Trail back to Bothe-Napa.
Conclusion
The Geysers loop would be an epic day ride out of Cloverdale or Geyserville.
In the future, I’ll do more research on campsites advertised as “hike-in”. Skunk Creek would be a great boat-in campsite, but the hike wouldn’t be fun and it was stupid on a bike.
Traipsing through grasslands, I spent a lot of time picking burrs and foxtails out of my shoes and socks. Next time I’d bring the Columbia pants with the zip-off legs.
At the wild camp, I shoulda used my towel as a blanket to cover the grass, to create a more comfortable space outside the tent.
A nice characteristic of the extended Bay Area: For nine months of the year you can probably count on the weather, which allowed me to cut a couple pounds of gear from the last trip and tighten up my luggage. That was helpful given how much I wound up hauling the bike up and down steep hills. Less stuff to carry is better.
It’s hard to research property ownership claims on dirt roads. Sometimes Google Street View can help you find signs, but they’re not always visible where the Google car could get to. RWGPS heatmaps are probably good enough to infer which roads bikes are allowed to use.
Next bikepack I may go out of my way to find a swimming hole. The stream was definitely the high point of the trip, at least until wine tasting with Nancy.
Combining our Bay Area transit options with the flexibility of bikepacking creates an amazing number of possibilities for short trips in beautiful places like this. There will be more.
