Finding new places to ride where you normally don’t roam is tricky.
Being stranded is an obvious issue, but if you’ll also have to risk not knowing road conditions, water availability and trusting what is open.
I’ve driven on Highway 46 many times to cut from the Central Valley to the 101 seeing the rolling hills of San Luis Obispo County wanting to explore them for years.
My history of doing map research it’s hard to distinguish which smaller roads (yes, they all look small) are public or on private ranchlands.
The beauty of the Gravel Bike California community is if you look long enough you’ll find someone that’s ridden an area and fortunately it happened to be one of my friends Kyle that filled in the blank with positive reviews.
Shandon is the largest town in the area numbering only a thousand with other signs of like being fairly distant.
The one landmark I did know in the area was the James Dean crash site which a memorial is only informally placed likely because of the traffic issues at the spot where 46 and 41 that marked his death.
Strangely, we are in a moment in time where that issue is finally being address with a set of modern overpasses eliminating the possibility of a head on collision.
For us, we did a 43 mile counterclockwise loop starting on the quiet paved San Juan Road turning up Gillis Canyon that got even quieter.
The climb was gradual and transitioned to dirt halfway up culminating in these gorgeous sprawling views of rippling hillsides.
Descending felt like a rocket leaving us with a mile climb up Annette Road paying dividends of a nearly ten miles worth of descending after.
We perilously merged onto 46 briefly turning in front of the James Dean makeshift memorial forgetting to stop because I’ve frequented it so many times, I only assumed everyone knew about it.
The ride up Cholame Valley Rd was equally quiet and after four flat miles, we made our second sojourn onto dirt up McMillan Rd that being a two mile climb kept it steady with out anger inducing pitches under a range of California Oaks.
Once again, we got a lot of downhill return for our effort and almost too much turning into the surprisingly solitary Chapel beautiful framing the hilltop that’s open to the public, but a bit steep for biking.
Just a few flat miles back to Shandon that doesn’t have a sit down restaurant, so we headed a fifteen miles off Highway 41 to Creston to the Longbranch Saloon to finish off the day.
I was so pleasantly surprised how calm and easy this loop was that Shandon is a ride I’m proud of sharing and hoping everyone also follows this practice.