Palm Springs Bike Ride

This afternoon, I took a bike ride outside of Palm Springs. It was SO completely different than riding in Santa Cruz. The last few rides that I have taken in Santa Cruz, the temperature was in the mid-forties. Today it was in the high eighties. In Santa Cruz, we are blessed with nice-sized bike lanes, on almost all roads. In Palm Springs, many roads do not have bike lanes. On this road, there was no bike lane and there was deep sand just off of the pavement. If you get into the sand, the bike just stops! Not a good thing, if you are going 15 mph or so. In Santa Cruz, I usually ride along the coast or through coastal forests. Today I rode through the arid desert. In Santa Cruz, the view is constantly changing. On my ride today, I was riding toward or away from one mountain for most of the ride (below is a picture of the mountain). All of my rides do have one thing in common, the wind is ALWAYS blowing in the wrong direction! How can that be?


I would have liked to ride earlier in the day when it was not so hot or windy, however it just did not work out that way. It was so arid that my lips and mouth would get dry just a few minutes, after every drink from my water bottle. I was a little worried about getting de-hydrated, so I decided I would ride until I finished one of my two water bottles. Since the ride started uphill and into the wind, I was confident that the second water bottle would be enough for the return trip.

My first water bottle ran out after about 10 miles and about 1000 feet of climbing. It was never very steep and normally this would not be too hard a ride, however with the heat and the wind, it was a good workout for me. It took me about an hour to get to the halfway point. I was able to zoom back down the hill in 27 minutes and hardly touched my second water bottle.

After my post on the Disney Fonts, my friend Ginger commented about a very nice Disney-related web site. As I was exploring that web site, I came across a tool named "Gmaps Pedometer". It is set up for runners, however I used it to trace my bike route today. My route, super-imposed on Google Maps, can be found here. One of the nice features of the tool, is that you can zoom in and out, and move the map around.


At about mile 6 (see the Gmaps route), there was a hiking path that started off the side of the road. The sign above marked the beginning of the path. It wound around towards the rock formation seen below. You can also hike around it to get on top of the rock formation. It looks like it could be a fun hike. Hmm, maybe on a cooler day, it could be a fun hike!