Actually, I feel blessed
norcaloffroad said:
Fellow mountain bikers,
I recently moved to the Almaden Valley area and started riding Quicksilver Park on a regular basis.
Would anyone out there be interested in helping me start a petition to try and open the park for everyone to enjoy? Does anyone have any suggestions on how to make the Santa Clara Parks and Recreation Department open this area up to bicyclist? It works everywhere else, why not here?
Sincerely,
Norcaloffroad (norcaloffroad@aol.com)
I'm not sure what you're looking for - more entrances, singletrack, night riding,...?
When I moved to Silicon Valley, my wife saw the nice Almaden area with great schools and liked the area. I saw all the local flat paved bike paths for safe riding with my family, singletrack riding along many local creeks, and the parks like Santa Teresa, Quicksilver, and Sierra Azul that could be ridden from my garage. So I said "yeah, great schools, gotta live there!"
In the past four years, I've seen Quicksilver increase the MTB entrances from one (Hacienda) to three. I can now bike through Quicksilver to Sierra Azul to make a very nice loop over the tallest mountains, remaining mostly on dirt.
Quicksilver hasn't opened up singletrack yet, and they seem obsessed with preserving the road. They'll close the park at the slightest sign of rain. Nevertheless, I find the dirt roads have excellent views, make for a nice wooded ride, the ride up from Hacienda is a nice constant steep climb making for a great workout, and the wildlife is abundant there. I feel grateful for Quicksilver park and pleased with the progress there for MTB.
Similarly, I've found Santa Teresa to remain a great park for gnarly singletrack. They tried to tame Stile Ranch with a lot of sanitization, but the shrew of a trail came back with erosion in less than a year. And they keep opening new trails to MTB, with yet another single track off Bernal just opening a few months ago.
Sierra Azul is available to ride even during rain, making for a great winter ride and it has great views. It doesn't yet have singletrack, but there's lots of land acquired and serious talk of singletrack happening over time. Of special interest is some possible new trails going down toward Summit road and Demo.
Finally, an entire new park has opened in the area this summer - Rancho Canada del Oro. There's many miles of nice 1.5-track open to MTB that will surely evolve to some nice singletrack as nature takes it's course.
So again, what's your beef? By comparison with places like Santa Cruz and the East Bay, I feel we've been very blessed in the south San Jose area.