For most of our Send It rides, I go deep into planning mode putting together a fun route for all, but for our Bakersfield ride I was ready to hand it off to Kevin of Grizzly Cycles and GBC was nicely rewarded.
Normally in the area, we’d take advantage of the hundreds of miles of fire roads across the rolling foothills, but today we ventured out towards the flatlands of the Central Valley where our path would become more linear.
While you may not be used to riding gravel on a cartesian grid, it’s far more adventurous than you’d think still needing to know when to navigate the turns.
Another key to the area is biking along the number of canals in the area that are impressive in size, but looking at the big picture still just a drop in the bucket for the amount of infrastructure needed to water all this farmland.
Riding along is a very calming experience with the flow never getting heavy and the dirt impressively smooth for the duration.
Of course, there’s two sides to this story as sometimes biking on the wrong edge can lead to a dead end causing a few miles of backtracking.
We had a large group starting out of Grizzly Cycles on the eastside of Bakersfield and were thrown into the fun immediately coming down Panorama Park with fun along the lines of a ski run.
Meandering through the floodplain of the Kern River, we then headed northwest towards the farmlands where there was no need to check for elevation.
At the halfway point, we refueled in Shafter at Tin Cup Coffee that was a spacious and welcoming establishment tied into a live theater complex for this town of quietly twenty thousand.
Our clockwise loop continued over Highway 99 where the pace picked up where surprisingly there were a lot of potential places to stop along the way.
Reentering Bakersfield you may forget that it’s one of the top 50 largest cities in the country, so getting back takes a little longer than you’d think.
Once again, Grizzly Cycles brought the stoke that’s the core of this community where it didn’t matter what type of bike you rode or how fast, ubt just that you’re part of the company.