by Tom Kenney from Reseda, CA Posted in MTBR
The Jacoby Creek Trail, near Arcata, CA, is a non-official trail through Simpson Paper land above the mud flats of the Eureka and Arcata bays. I think it has since been closed due to liability concerns (as will become evident in my article) and as an excuse to clear-cut the area without making a big stink.
In the morning, we went to the Golden Harvest Cafe in Arcata and had a wonderful breakfast to kick off the day. Three of us would be riding today: Mark the 'DJ', Dave the Easterner, and myself (Tom of SoCal). Mark had to be at work at KFLY Radio in Eureka at 4:00 that day, so we were already on some kind of schedule. We went back to the infamous 'Mai-Kai' appartments on the HSU campus to collect some stuff and we were off . . .
We rode up Fickle Hill, which is about 14 miles of the most beautiful, steep, grinding, unrelenting country road through farms, ranches, redwoods and meadows. We stopped near the top, at Big Rock, which is a great overlook providing views of such far-off wonders as the Marble Mountains and the Coast Ranges marching into Oregon. A little more climbing and a screaming unpaved descent led to the turnoff for the trail. This, I have since learned, had been nicknamed 'The Couch Trail' because someone had dumped an abandoned couch right at the entrance to the trail.
The first section of the trail was a neglected 4WD road through the forest. There were many ups and downs, and at the bottom of each down, there was a bog of deep, clay-rich mud. When Dave tried to ride through it, it stopped him and kept him and his bike in an upright position. This 'bog country' soon gave way to a rough descent down a very steep section with large water bars (moguls?) across the trail. This descent seemed painfully endless, and I was nearly thrown into space several times. At the bottom of this section, I had expected to see Mark, who was in front from the beginning. He wasn't there, so I waited for Dave to catch me. Soon Dave was there, so we continued, figuring Mark had gone ahead (schedule, remember?).
Now we were in the depths of the canyon, and long spanish moss was hanging from everything. The trail was not too muddy here, but large puddles were plentiful. We sped through long flat stretches in meadows, huge redwoods and some kind of hardwood (covered with moss) lining the canyon the whole way.
Go To Page: 1 2
