Bicycle-Friendly Santa Rosa Wow Factor Bike Paths

The little boy knows the shape of the creek and its slope, and the kind of rocks he’s looking for. When he plays with the rock in his hand, he stares at the spot where he collected them. I can see this from my bicycle 75 feet away. The creek’s glistening waves pull my attention away. I look back at him. He bends at his side and lowers his head parallel to the pavement, delivering a wide mischievous smile as we ride past. His sister only steps behind him, reacts to her brother’s expression with curiosity about our reaction. From along the grapevine fence where we roll along on our bikes, I can already imagine the wild fennel and the wild blackberries I’ll see when I get off the Brush Creek trail and onto the Austin Creek trail. I know the shape of the turn to get on the Austin Creek trail from the street is a very sharp V that slows down every bicyclist. My husband’s leg reflects sunlight and I feel my toe clip brace my arch.

Calves burn and I feel the slow unification of my hip flexors, thigh, butt and calves boosting me as I let waves of concerns fall away.  The sound of a changing gear tucks itself into my ear like the click you feel when you know exactly what someone else means. The tire on gravel sounds like a record needle set on a vintage record player. My lungs and rib cage expand.

Cycling on creek trails in Santa Rosa makes me wonder how many people take advantage of creek trails where they live or on bicycle adventures around the world. If you visit Santa Rosa, in the heart of Sonoma County, there are amazing trails to experience with wonderful riders and walkers enjoying the outdoors. First, let me suggest that no bicyclist should be without traillink.com to figure out what trails and access points are available to avoid cars, traffic lights while experiencing these interconnected bike paths anywhere.

I know exactly what my tangerine painted bike means when I get on my bike every day, because it reminds me that the battle to feel athletic is still my Mt. Whitney. Cycling the streets of Santa Rosa might give a risk-averse bicyclist a temporary stiff jaw and a smile once you shed the trappings of riding alongside parked or moving cars, but I enjoy feeling more contact with nature. 

Live and valley oak, California buckeye and big-leaf maple lined, with some rocky-shored trails make biking in Santa Rosa very enjoyable for commuters, tourists, and the occasional peddlomaniac. (A peddlomaniac is a cross between a kleptomaniac and someone who adores peddling their bike, but instead of having an inability to fight the urge to steal, they fight urges to tackle the next irresistible biking challenge.) Even though Santa Rosa drivers do pay attention to bikers in shoulders and on well-marked bike lanes, local newspapers warn of injured bikers hit by cars. There are existing laws to prosecute drivers who turn cars into lethal weapons. But who wants a bike ride to turn into a day in court honestly? 

  
Among milk thistle and wild poppies, the breeze carries the smell of drying long grasses, interspersed with bay laurels and the oaky fragrance of decaying fallen leaves that carpet the creekside bays like nature’s own rap song.  The beat of my heart makes its way into a fifth or sixth vertebrae as my spine flexes left and right and then left again as I stand to pedal just for the sake of feeling free and carefree, momentarily.

My favorite late afternoon rides are when the sun casts long shadows through dense tree lines, along fence lines, or onto tiny ripples in the creeks. I love the impressions blackberries, grapes, wild fennel, and the occasional rider make as they break my solitude and I feel more than the wind on the inside of my knee or on my wrist. Weekly, I roll past Austin Creek, Brush Creek, Santa Rosa Creek and onto the Joe Rodota Trail. The creekside trails pepper the entire suburb and connect with nearby towns in a puzzle of creeks, riparian woods, shrubs, bridges and vineyards to minimize time on the actual open road. Most Santa Rosa trails are unequivocally laid-back, unless you head toward Hood Mountain Regional Park, Sugarloaf Ridge State Park or Fountaingrove.

The flat trails are wide with other walkers and cyclists, sometimes riding even in teams. The trails range in length from .5 miles to 3.4 miles and 17 miles. I love interconnecting them on traillink.com In order to get from one creek trail to the next, I have to get on a road or two occasionally and find the trail head tucked between houses, but that’s part of being an explorer.

 

The Brush Creek is steel head habitat thanks to a few restoration projects.  It is a lush environment. The trail itself is designated as a bird watching spot, but before I ever knew that, I marveled at the songs of various birds sitting atop branches and fence lines that separate the trail from backyards. Throw a bird watching book into your pannier. Yesterday, riding the trail in the evening with the canopy of evergreen and oaks, the light through the trees glistened as I felt enveloped by the trees. Ducks sit on the water and red dragonfly fly across the path.

And local attractions, can I get there on the trails?

And what if you do want to get around on bike trails to shop and sample the local finds?

Although it’s good to be cautious on the roads, there are so many cute neighborhoods to explore from east to west.  I’ve met my husband downtown, where the world renowned Amgen Tour of California came through down 4^th Street in downtown Santa Rosa.  We parked our bikes and found front row seats at Tex Wasabi’s sushi barbecue where chef Guy Fieri expanded on the concept of sushi brilliantly.  Closer to the West part of Santa Rosa, I’ve ventured off the beaten path off Stony Point Road and occasionally eat at Mi Tierra on Sebastopol Road. If you are near the Santa Rosa Creek trail, explore the local art scene on South A Street (SOFA district) where open studio events and live performances keep Santa Rosa vibrant.  You can check out some art and then hit the trail and make it for dinner at Railroad Square exhibiting an authentic old town ambiance and antique row.  Or have breakfast first at Omelet Express and head to SOFA. Either way, you’ll love this section of town.

Enjoy a ride on the Joe Rodota & West County trail systems, which is built along the old corridor of the old Petaluma and Santa Rosa Railway. The rails carried passengers between Santa Rosa, Petaluma and Sebastopol. You can ride all the way to Forestville thru Sebastopol.

For nature lovers, you can use Traillink.com to interconnect various trails to explore Annandale Park, Spring Lake, Howarth Park, Lake Ilsanjo, and nearby state and regional parks. If you love redwoods, you can ride the West County Trail in Forestville and head out to Guerneville.  The magnificent roads you can access from these trails are endless. Still, TrailLink cautions to check if the routes that you create contain streets that aren’t suited for bicycling.

   
 Love getting in the bicycle seat? Where will it lead you…How about Santa Rosa. Come perpetuate the legend that on the feast of St. Rose, August 30, 1829, Padre Amoros beside the Brush Creek trail baptized an Indian maid from which the city took the name Santa Rosa.

Sanctuary and a garden's pot of gold

A wide hole at the entrance tightens and a gopher determines the outcome of being found. I could almost see his pecks working to push his claw-tipped front legs up toward me, except his two front incisors catch the glare of the sun before he falls behind a layer of soil. Some of the times that his head pokes up, all I can see is his incisors, so white skinny and rectangular. 

The soil covers his head as I walk toward the front gate of the Stony Point community garden and unfasten the bungee chord that fastens the silver links together in case the horseshoe gate latch needs bolstering from a heavier wind if a gardener hastily left.

In Santa Rosa, I don’t see a single person at this garden today, and rows of beds now bloom with beans, melons, tomatoes, strawberries, and onions and marigolds to repel bugs. Maybe I’ll have a chance encounter. In the mulch covered walkways that allow our beds crosswalks for two-legged and occasionally the four-legged, there are days that I arrive and there are community meetings held only steps from the landscape fabric that lines the back of the vertical garden I built from a palette. The memory of them sitting there fills my mind as I recall explaining why we have covered our beans with row covers and what the cloche is that dominates the center of the 8 foot long box of soil. Only a few months ago, the garden boxes peppering the fenced in lot hugged starters only inches high, comparable in height to stalactites, but green and photosynthesizing carbon.

Most everything planted came from seed, although the herbs in the vertical garden were starters I bought and replanted. My husband and I nurtured the seeds into starters in our window and brought them when they seemed ready to brave the conditions. They did, like hulking pirates at soil sea.

    

If only I could have seen the crime on the squash, maybe I would better understand the behavior of a 7 spotted beetle. Then again, the first day at the garden, they ate an entire squash starter. Would I have seen the holes forming, I wonder if I had watched it or would the neighbors wonder if I had entered some meditative state that needed interruption for their own ease of mind? Now, the beans and the lettuces, eggplant and broccoli all survive and grow tall seemingly bubbly in the carbonated air.

I rarely see the neighbors in the beige homes to the right of the garden. Occasionally, I see a black cat that hides by the olive tool shed or the picnic table that lunges over the fence as soon as I spot her. Now I see the school across the street bustling with kids and I wonder if they are learning how to grow their own food being so close to a community garden or do they just get disciplined or scared into all the pressures of growing up that they will someday face.  Cars dot the road outside of the community garden parking lot, but only on the school side. I don’t see a bike rack.

When it rains here, I picture that the gravel rekindles its thoughts of what it was like lying once beside a stream and the garden leaves must shimmer and slouch a bit.  When it’s sunny, the gravel must feel raw like elbows in a crowd to any obscurely brown gopher.

The garden is my sanctuary even when others tend their gardens and we chat momentarily to share new tips and tricks in the struggle of sharing food with insects – but how much? I added coffee to the soil and that works. I’ve used Sluggo. I’ve surrounded the beets, the tomatoes, the lettuces varieties—spicy mixed, arugula, and romaine—the broccoli, the eggplant, the ever-growing cilantro, and the sage, with onions.  Does cilantro usually grow so robustly? The onions fall out of the soil, tilted and look luscious. One onion flower grows thickly and boldly into the mulch covered walkway where an occasional weed verbosely stakes a claim in living color. Some gardens contain marigolds in every corner of their 8 feet box and I vow to try that one of these days.

As I water the soil, I witness worms, tiny-legged unknown creatures, sowbugs, slugs, and under a cloudless vehement sky, I feel what it must feel like when the soil opens up just a little more by the time I return to make room for a little wider of a vegetable stem.

The cloche that arched over the center of the plot for 6 weeks is now dismantled and where it once gleamed white and PVC held it firmly in place stand tall stems supporting leaves that make you wish you could crawl under them for shade when the heat penetrates and I’ve forgotten my hat. I learned how to build the cloche from an Irish farmer on youtube. The community that built the garden boxes here a few years ago I sometimes see in person and other times I have enjoyed the photos of their building the community garden with open minds and hearts and showing how a little effort can go a long way.

The battle ensuing before me is between the eggplant and the broccoli as both form enormous leaves, but I have never know such a color of purple as the one on eggplant flowers.

My one and only cantaloupe thrives under a row cover, while the others couldn't survive their predators.

A lady bug lands on the leaf of the giant broccoli that is still not producing as a beautiful predator and I wonder how far it can see down below to witness its buggy preys. 

I move the hose and let it soak the soil under the green peppers and marjoram. As I walk toward the vertical garden, I see how much the chamomile has grown.  Already I have popped the heads off so many to help them dry and soon I will pop some more of these heads.

One gardener from Egypt once told me that a friend of his in Marin buries a fish head into the soil and that this has definitely made his vegetables so delectable. I wonder at the practice, but I will try to read up on it, still afraid of attracting a lot of unwanted organic activity that will give the lady bugs upset stomachs.

In a corner of one of the wider beds at the garden sit tools used in repairing a burst waterline. Right about when I heard about the waterline breaking, I thought do I know how I might fix a waterline and I breathed in deeply with uncertainty at another of life’s technical repair things I’d like to learn. I’ve recently joined the local tool library and built the cloche with my husband’s help and built the vertical garden with the help of youtube. Surely, even now, although I am not on the team to fix the waterline, I would learn quickly, the diy’er in pursuit of more hands-on. If I can install insulation at a friend’s house recently, then I can’t get lost fixing a waterline someday.  

I recoil the hose and I stand back from the garden box to see where I will start dolling up the plants. I start to tug old leaves from under the string beans and see that the bottom branch of the tomato plant has dead leaves that should be picked off also. I grab them and I realize how mesmerizing gardening is for me. It’s benefits far outnumber the savings I incur from buying lettuce as a packet of seeds brings so many helpings if well cared for. I routinely only have a single thing on my mind, that these seeds have sprung into 4 foot tall plants. I am reminded of the quote by Robert Louis Stevenson, “Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.” It was just like the author of Treasure Island to tell me where the gold is right in the place that provides me refuge to make a fun garden decoration out of repurposed tape and plastic forks.