Executive Summary and Recommendations
This is a 24 hour overnight bike trip, starting and ending in East San Francisco Bay, to Black Mountain Backpack Camp on the peninsula.
I took Capital Corridor to Santa Clara on day one (San Jose Diridon would actually be better). There’s not that many trains, so check the schedule (carefully! unlike me) beforehand.
Day one was very unremarkable, through the South Bay suburbs and then up a big road climb to the campsite on Montebello Road. Don’t trust Google if it says you can go through Rancho San Antonio, since that includes three miles of pedestrian-only trails.
Day two was a return over the Dumbarton Bridge to Fremont BART. This was a much more fun day, with some very exciting mountain biking, long descent down Alpine Road, passing through Stanford University and through the wildlife preserves on either side of the Dumbarton Bridge. Fremont has done a very nice job signing the almost the entire way from the bottom of the Dumbarton Bridge to Fremont part.
This is mostly a road trip, but day two has some moderately serious mountain biking. I did it on a touring bike with 35mm tires and moderate mountain biking skills. If you’re not prepared to go over trails that have some ruts roots and rocks on them, then you may want to find another way down it does not go on the Alpine trail.
Although I didn’t plan it this way, what I did – Amtrak->Montebello (uphill)->Black Mountain->Alpine (downhill)->Dumbarton/BART – probably makes the most sense rather than the reverse. More road uphill, more dirt downhill.
When you’re leaving the campsite, keep your warm clothes handy, because you will need them for the descent on Alpine Road.
The trip: day 1
This was a weekend when my wife, our two kids, and her parents went away for a few days. That gave me a break from family life, and an opportunity to be able to go bikepacking by myself. I live in Oakland, California, and had been to a lot of the best-known campgrounds near me on other bike overnights. A friend recently mentioned that the Black Mountain Backpack Camp in the mid-Peninsula regional open space was a very nice spot – it only had four campsites, with four campers per site, so it would never be particularly crowded. Like most camping sites in the Bay Area, it tends to book up; but I used the fact that I don’t work on Fridays to book a Friday night.
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