This story was passed along to me by Ritte’s resident semi-famous notorious badass, Steve. It was written by his friend Aaron Baker, who lives and rides in Santa Barbara. Aaron receives this weekends Badass Award for ignoring all signs of danger and pedaling forward with no regard for his own life and limb.
“Well, I’m always one for a little adventure, and I love bad weather on a bike, so I’ve been reading the weather reports with anticipation. A 50 year storm, cold, windy, rainy. Perfect riding weather I thought.
So, up at 6:00 to get an early start. Early start blown by waking children and sleeping mother. instead, I rolled out closer to nine after logging two hours in my bibs making eggs and waffles. As I rolled out, everything was perfect. It was torrential and windy and I felt good. I planned on doing painted cave over la cumbre then down Gib. This is the course of the tt in 3 weeks, and I figured I’d get a taste for it in the rain and also see if I could work on my pacing on Painted Cave so I don’t blow up in the last 2 miles during the tt.
I felt good across the “flats” to old San Marcos. Cruised OSM while keeping the hr in check. Rain never stopped, but wind wasn’t so bad. I got a little excited at the bottom of painted cave when I saw the snow plow doing a u-turn. SNOW!? Oh yeah baby! I hit the start button on painted cave, but tried to keep a governor on the effort. Loved the wind and the rain, especially on the exposed corners. I was almost fully unzipped and plenty hot. Hat in the back pocket and snug as a bug in a rug.
Heading over the top was everything I was looking for in a winter stormride. The winds were absolutely howling. I kept looking around for the jet that was trying to take off and realizing that it was the wind screaming through the trees. When I first turned onto Cielo, my bike was leaning at 15 or 20 degrees just to go straight. It was crazy. Horizontal rain that actually hurt when it hit. I kept checking to make sure it wasn’t hail. It wasn’t. Just bullets.
The idea of working out a pace for the top went right out the window, as I realized this would really be a survival ride. With gusts in excess of 70 mph, essentially rendering me blind for large portions of the rids, it was all I could do to just keep it on the road. When I had the benefit of a little shelter, and could hear myself think, I realized that I was actually feeling pretty good, and whenever the wind switched to tail, I’d give it a bit of wattage just to feel the legs a bit and keep them from freezing.
The worst part was right at the bottom of the big downhill before the last push to the summit. The wind was at full force and I had to unclip to help balance and make sure I didn’t just get blown right off the road. I could see nothing. I developed a strategy of looking away from the wind and trying to twist my eyes forward so that I could at least get a sense of where the road was heading. I actually found myself pedaling, hard, downhill at one point. Once I got across that saddle, I got a little shelter and realized that my legs had plenty in the tank. At this point, I had put my hat on and was really starting to feel the wind chill through my layers. I realized I had to get the ride done so put more pace on to get the last two miles of climb over with. It was awesome.
On the way from la cumbre towards the top of Gib, I was actually screaming as I rode up the slight incline. The road there is rough, not quite cobbled, but when you have a 70 mph headwind that’s blowing little dagger shaped drops of water into your face, you don’t care. It hurt, and not my legs.
I figured the worst part would be trying to descend that first mile of Gib blind. The road doesn’t deserve the name. It’s more a conglomerate of potholes in varying states of (dis)repair. I was seriously concerned about crashing, and the wind was really bad. I had put on sunglasses (though it was nearly dark) and still was getting daggers in my eyes. I needed ski goggles.
It wasn’t until I’d made it about a mile down that I realized I was a true idiot and had made a terrible mistake. As I was navigating through a relatively entertaining mine field of baby head sized sharp rocks on the road, I heard a crash from 40-50 feet up and saw a boulder smashing down the hillside on a collision course. No Fucking Way. People do NOT get killed by boulders while road riding! I grabbed what brake I had in the wet and swerved and the missile passed less than 5 feet in front of me. For a moment I felt relief until it slammed the guardrail and seemed like it was going to come right back and hit me from the other side. Fortunately, it was too heavy and stopped before hitting me. But after the adrenalin wore off, I looked around and realized that I was truly fucked. I had seven more miles to go and cliffs one one or both sides for a considerable portion of it. I was freaked. It got worse.
It was like I had entered some alternate reality hell. You have to understand, I could barely see, the wind was screaming so that I might as well have been riding on the runway at LAX, the rain really hurt and made navigating extremely difficult, I was freezing now, and my brakes were giving up the battle. I rode that whole fucking hill with the brake levers pegged to the bars and there is no way I could have pulled off a second last minute maneuver.
The descent was like running a river. Seriously, there were rapids and everything. You couldn’t actually see many of the obstacles, just the spray of the water rushing over them. Except of course for the boulders, which were a constant reminder of what could happen if I was unlucky. I came around one corner and there was a black wall of mud, maybe 8-10 inches high and 20-30 feet wide across the road. The hillside had let go and from the look of it wasn’t finished yet. Rocks were falling constantly and smashing across the road, and I needed to move or risk getting nailed. But it was mud! I uncleated and just went for it, hoping that nothing would take out my front wheel or worse, hit me from the side. It wasn’t like you could pick a line, the muck was black like death and a mix of silt, water, and rocks. And it was moving about 15 miles an hour over the side of the road.
Somehow I made it, but the sound of grinding rocks below ear shattering wailing wind is not one I ever want to hear again. I still had six miles to go. There were two more landslides on the way down, though neither as bad as the first. Though perhaps the worst was the landslide that let go and rushed across the road about 20 feet behind me. Also another boulder missed me by 10 seconds. I’ve ridden up Gib 10 time, and ridden part way another 10, but I never new Gib until today. There are high cliffs along most of it. All those signs of falling rock mean it, and there should be dozens more. I kept a constant look up as I rode down, but some of those cliffs are damn near vertical, and go up 80 feet or more. If a rock let loose, even a smaller one, I’d be powerless. I realized that I was clenching the brakes and pedaling at the same time. Water continued to blind me. Wind deafened me. Cliffs terrified me. I hear a huge slide give way below the road, and realized that I had a whole new angle to fear.
When I got to the hairpin, I breathed a sigh of relief figuring I’d made it. Just 2 more miles But in seconds I saw how wrong I was. Entering into one of the steeper parts of the lower climb, my bike started accelerating despite my death grip on the brakes. And the next mile or so is constantly overshadowed by the tallest, steepest cliffs of the whole ride. I screamed, let loose on the brakes and started pedaling. I figured a moving target would be harder for the mountain spirits to hit. I also noticed for the first time how many boulders line the road, and it occured to me that those boulders probably weren’t placed there for decoration, but were pushed out of the road when they fell.
I wondered what the paper would read after they found my crumpled body and bike (if I wasn’t simply knocked over the side, which entails a massive drop at that portion of the ride, just look at the car at the bottom if you don’t believe me)? How long would my family worry before calling for help (I prayed that they wouldn’t actually try to drive up and look for me, because today you wouldn’t have been safe at all in a car on Gib)? Even as I got closer to the bottom and safety, I kept a worried eye upslope and saw with dread every falling rock sign.
Yes, I finally made it down. I might have actually cried when I got to Mountain Drive, but the rain would have made it hard to tell. I will never ride Gib in the rain again.”