I didn’t even get the best part of day 1’s adventurous, partially-dirt motorcycle ride on the GoPro, as I thought it would just be a kind of potholed beat up farm road leading to the main destinations of the day, Mattole Beach and the King’s Peak Conservation Area. The GoPros weren’t mounted yet, I’d have to stop the group to do so, and we only got moving for a long day around 0930, so I wanted to keep us moving. My loss! After consulting with my mechanically talented Bay Area friend who was riding sweep for me, Carter, we picked just a road on the map to get us off highway 101 on the way to Mattole Beach, and it turned out to look like an absolute fairy tale. We rode epic flowy two track on meadowed mountain peaks above the clouds- it felt like Scotland! And that’s not even one of the popular trails people write about when they tour the Lost Coast.
I also, tragically, missed GoPro-ing the insane view on some very steep switchbacks leading down from the farm land to where Mattole Beach is, but luckily Carter keeps his phone on his bars and got a good shot of the group heading down. Lessons learned for the next tour! Mattole Beach is the northern end of the Lost Coast hiking trail, which I would also like to do some day. The upper portion of the Lost Coast hiking trail goes 24.4 miles from Mattole Beach to Black Sands beach, where you hike along the beach a lot, somewhere that no roads access because it is “lost”- CALTRANS deemed the area too difficult to construct paved roads in. The lower portion of the Lost Coast hiking trail continues another 28 miles to Usal beach- another destination on this tour. There is a campground at Mattole Beach, although I imagine most days right on the shore here would be foggy and windy, and I don’t love having a wet tent or trying to cook in rain or heavy wind. We did some relaxing on the driftwood at Mattole Beach which was perfectly shaped to lay back!
After Mattole Beach, we took a VERY windy paved road inland to a small market in Honeydew that has the only gas around. Most of us were on BMW GS’s, so we could have accomplished each day’s ride on a tank of gas, but we did have a KTM 500 EXC-F dual sport with us with a much more limited range. Even the paved roads in these mountains are so windy that 150-200 miles can be a full 10-12 hour day, because you are limited to around 20 mph in some of those turns.
From Honeydew we embarked on the dirt road that zigzags along the ridge of the King’s Peak range. The northern part involves some hellaciously steep switchbacks with loose stuff in the 180 degree turns, which I didn’t enjoy, but the southern part is great riding and has some dispersed camping along the way.
From King’s Peak it was time to wind our way back to the campground, where I would cook for the group. We got back late thanks to our late start and slow speed on these very tight roads. Tomorrow would be the famous Usal road!