Morgan Territory Mountain Biking, February 12, 2006

The weather in the San Francisco area has been gorgeous for the last few days (dry, blue skies and 70+ degrees in early February!). Yesterday, as I've chronicled at the Zhid, I went to my gun club in the bucolic pastures outside of Livermore to shoot the Garand and Sig 7mm magnum. On the way there, I noticed how green the area is and how it's been a while since I rode at Morgan Territory, which is between my house and Livermore, up in the hills. So I decided to beg the Zhid wife to join me for an early morning mountain bike trip and she was kind enough to agree to it.

And with that, at 8 a.m. today, we were off for Morgan Territory. As loyal readers may recall, I was at Morgan Territory at the end of last summer and displayed the pictures on this site, beginning here (though if you want to see all of the pictures, you'll have to just scroll down from here, as I posted those pictures at a time when I didn't know how to put more than one picture in a post). Actually, blogger still doesn't seem to allow more than a half dozen or so pictures per post, so I had to break up this ride's pictures into this part I and the following part II.

Anyway, it was a beautiful day and the riding was great. The harsh winter rains this year turned the trails into a very nasty mess, made worse by all the cows that graze in Morgan Territory and turn the muddy trails into nearly unrideable terrain. Oh, and they leave massive cow patties all over the place. But I really like cows and was very pleased to see so many of them on the side of, and at times on, the trail today. They were very pleasant and didn't do much more than moo at us (except for a group with calves that I came upon around a blind corner, which snorted and scrambled with great comedic effect).

So without much more commentary, here are the pictures. Remember to click on each to see a larger version.









If you look in the distance, that's Mount Diablo.




There's one of the cow pies...



And there's the source of the cow pies.










Continued in Part II...

Morgan Territory Pt II

These cows were pretty vocal







That's the Zhid Wife pedaling fast past a large group of cows, which included a bull that was none too pleased with the intrusion.


This is a bad picture of some calves that were, if I have to say, cute.


As we continued on, the cows began to appear ON the trail. Zhid Wife wanted to turn around but I told her that if you punch a cow in the nose, they run away...though I made that up on the spot, she seemed to be calmed by it. I then proceeded to sing "Freebird", at the top of my lungs, and clapped my hands, hoping to annoy the cows so much that they'd move off the trail. It worked.





I thought this was very cool looking...this trail is usually just dirt and the sight of it covered in green was interesting.


The Zhid Wife navigating around the cow patties.




We stopped next to this family of cows (must have been lesbians, as there was no bull around) and just watched them for about 15 minutes. It was an unusual zen like thing...there was no noice other than the sound of the cows ripping the grass off and chewing it and they didn't even seem to notice us, even though we were no more than 10 feet from them.




The end of the ride with the bikes in the back of the Zhid truck. There was a LOT of mud on the trails and, as a result, stuck all over the bikes.






And this is a view on the road back down from Morgan Territory, looking out over the Livermore valley towards Danville. It's a gorgeous area, shockingly free of development (and I will note, a REPUBLICAN area, so the fact that it's one of the least spoiled environments in the Bay Area proves, again, that the Democrats are no friends of the environment...compare this view to one of Oakland, where there's no open space left, and it becomes obvious).