Rail Bikes
Started: 2024-07-30 20:52:38
Submitted: 2024-08-01 21:45:43
Visibility: World-readable
Walking along the Mendocino Headlands, and biking on train tracks
Faced with the prospect of coming up with a breakfast to serve while camping at Van Damme State Park on the Mendocino Coast, I fell back to something I remember eating while camping as a kid (and only while camping): an egg fried in a hole in a piece of toast. I don't actually know what to call this; Wikipedia calls it "egg in the basket" and gives a long list of names. I kind of like the name "egg in a hole" so maybe I'll go with that.
(The one other time I've seen egg in a hole served was at the Google data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa. In the Bay Area, Google's cafes trended towards lighter, performatively-healthy fare; in Iowa I noticed a distinct trend towards fried foods.)
After breakfast we drove to the town of Mendocino to walk along the trails on the headlands. The developed town sits in the middle of Point Mendocino sticking out into the Pacific Ocean, set back from the bluffs by a ring of undeveloped land. This land was saved from development in the middle of the twentieth century and turned into a state park; and I very much appreciate that I can now walk along the cliffs and in the meadows unencumbered by modern beach houses, but I'm still troubled by the framing of "saving" land from development without acknowledging that this also contributes directly to California's colossal catastrophe of housing costs.
We parked on Main Street and walked along the bluffs overlooking Mendocino Bay to the South. The fog had lifted somewhat from the previous day, giving us better visibility on the ground, but the clouds hung low over the town and lower over the water.
We climbed down a stairway carved into the cliff onto Portuguese Beach, a small patch of wind-swept sand on Mendocino Bay, relatively protected from the ocean. The beach was covered in driftwood that had been organized into forts of various sizes. Julian amused himself by reconfiguring some of the forts (I told him that he shouldn't demolish an existing fort, even if he wanted the lumber for something else); the rest of the family took advantage of the cell coverage on the beach to catch up in the weekend's developments in the news.
From the end of the beach, next to the stairs leading down to the beach, I could see a dramatic sea cave cut into the headlands. As we were getting ready to leave the beach, a group of divers surfaced in the water next to the cave, then swam to the beach, walked out of the water, and climbed the stairs ahead of us.
We followed the trail around the edge of the cliffs and soon found a large sinkhole in the headland, where the roof of the sea cave had collapsed giving a view straight down into the dark water below. The opening to the sinkhole was ringed by a low split-rail fence, itself surrounded by a trail with a wrap-around view of the sinkhole.
Around the corner from the sinkhole was a clifftop with several large wooden beams from the logging port that once occupied the bluffs above the protected bay below, which looked like they had been anchored by the large chains driven into the ground. At the visitor's center the previous day, we saw dramatic pictures of people riding an apparatus that looked like a chair lift stretching from a ship in the bay up to the cliff top, allowing people to disembark ships without having to go to the trouble of building a pier or negotiating the bar at the mouth of the Big River. At the height of the logging operation around Mendocino the port had long conveyer belts that would reach down from the clifftop to deposit milled lumber onto the decks of waiting cargo ships.
We walked along the top of the bluffs overlooking the ocean, following the jagged coastline with sweeping views of dramatic inlets and more sea caves. The rugged inlets were protected from the full force of the waves on the open ocean; I saw a kayaker paddling into one of the inlets gliding along the smooth water at the bottom of the cliffs.
Julian was growing tired of the arduous trek along the cliffs (or maybe it was the stunning coastal scenery) so when we reached the parking lot at the end of the trail we headed back into town and ate lunch at GoodLife Cafe & Bakery, then headed to a used bookstore on Main Street, packed with a random assortment of books. I spent most of my time at the railroad section and ended up with a small selection of books about trains in the Bay Area.
We left Mendocino and drove north towards Fort Bragg with a stop at the Point Cabrillo Lighthouse. From the parking lot on the old highway it was a three-quarter mile walk downhill to the lighthouse, through grassy fields with scattered trees and an expansive view of the ocean, past the old lighthouse keeper's house and several other houses, plus outbuildings originally built for the lighthouse's maintenance (some of which were available as overnight rentals for an exclusive night in a historic house) to the lighthouse itself, perched on a bluff above the ocean. The lighthouse was a small one-story building with a squat tower barely rising above the roof. The ground floor was open and had displays on the history of the lighthouse, and artifacts from the wreck of the Frolic that triggered interest in Mendocino in the middle of the nineteenth century (and a small gift shop). A new display showed the aftermath of a storm that inundated the lighthouse in January 2023. The lighthouse sits on the bluff 40 feet above the ocean but the winter storms were bigger.
We left the lighthouse and began the long walk back uphill to the car. I tried to encourage Julian to walk expediently back to the car because I had not left much extra time to make it to Fort Bragg for the rail bikes at the Skunk Train.
We arrived at the Skunk Train depot in Fort Bragg with minutes to spare (and then I remembered that I hadn't filled out our waivers in advance, so we had to do that), then headed across the parking lot and across a street to the shed where the rail bikes were already lined up in a row heading down the track. We watched an orientation video in the shed, then climbed onto the bikes. These were minimalistic vehicles barely big enough to ride on standard-gauge tracks that: a tiny aluminum frame between two axles with big flanged steel wheels, with two seats to sit on, a basket up front for storage, and not much else. Each seat had pedals mounted in front with a fixed gear ratio connected directly to the front axle. The right-hand seat was the driver's seat; it had a small control panel and a digital display to control the electric pedal assist that looked like it had been borrowed from an ebike.
Julian's legs were not long enough for him to pedal comfortably, even with the seat pulled all the way forward. I pushed my seat all the way back so I could have enough room to pedal. To start moving from a dead stop, I pressed a variable-speed throttle on the electric-assist controller, which provided enough torque to start the rail bike, then I could pedal and the bike's motor would kick in to help me along. As soon as we got started we crossed highway one on a level crossing, with the rail crossing signal chiming and flashing and lowering the crossing arms on both sides of the highway so we could cross both lanes of traffic. (I got the impression that they had a remote control to operate the crossing guards; we slowed at each of the four level crossings on our way out of Fort Bragg.)
The train depot was on the north side of town and the tracks quickly took us to the edge of town. We started a gentle descent towards Pudding Creek, on the rail line originally laid out in the late nineteenth century, now traversed by excursion trains as well as rail bikes.
Peddling the rail bike was an interesting experience. My seat sat on top of the aluminum frame, with nothing below me except the rail bed itself. We had seat belts so I wasn't worried about falling out of my seat, but I didn't have any storage space around my seat. I was careful with my phone when I picked it up and took a selfie (but I took most of my pictures with my real camera, which I kept looped on a strap around my neck). It felt unlike any other vehicle I've ever ridden in; I didn't have to steer or balance; my only concern was keeping pace with the rail bike in front of me without getting too close. This gave me somewhat more freedom to watch the scenery around me as we descended to Pudding Creek, then crossed the creek on a low bridge and entered a second-growth redwood forest.
As we rolled along the tracks I could see up close how the flange on the inside of the steel wheel kept the wheel aligned on top of the rail. As the track turned the flange pushed or pulled the axle into the right position, though I could see that the opposite wheel seemed to be hanging on the edge of the rail. I wondered about the tolerance of the tracks and the axles, and how that affected the effective speed limit of the track, and how the construction of the track affected the tolerances (and speed limits), and whether the track I was riding on had been improved beyond its original nineteenth-century technology.
The control panel next to my seat had an adjustment to pick the level of assistance I wanted. The assistance worked by detecting that I was spinning the pedals at all, and then provided the full power at whatever level I had selected. On the outbound trip I stuck to level two It wasn't clear how much power I was putting into the wheels and how much power the motor was boosting; but I only had a single gear so I was unable to provide enough torque to get the rail bike started from a dead stop. At level two I could go about 10 miles an hour and then hit the point where I couldn't pedal any harder; at level two I hit 15 miles an hour and barely had to pedal at all.
Three-and-a-half miles later we reached the current end of the line, at Glen Blair Junction, near the site of the portal of the now-collapsed tunnel number one. On the other end of the tunnel the tracks continue to Willits, which used to provide connections to the rest of the US rail network. (Our guides told us that the railroad had received a grant to dig out the tunnel, so they hoped they would be able to run through trains again.) There was a large pavilion that dwarfed our small group of rail-bikers with picnic tables and chairs, and games including large-scale Jenga, corn hole, and large-scale connect four.
We took a walk on a short loop trail up the hillside above the valley, giving us a closer view of the mixed forest with redwood as well as deciduous trees. Our guides turned the rail bikes around, using a tiny portable turntable just large enough to hold a single bike at a time and spin it around so it faced back up the hill towards the depot in Fort Bragg where we had come from. After 45 minutes at the junction we returned to the rail bikes and headed back towards Fort Bragg.
We covered the same three-and-a-half miles to Fort Bragg, but we were going in the opposite direction so the scenery looked different. The guides turned our rail bikes around in place, so we faced the opposite direction. Kiesa and Calvin had been behind Julian and I on the way down, and now they were ahead of us.
On our way back up the track I spent most of the trip with the controller at level three, giving me enough boost that the rail bike shook on the steel wheels and I began to wish that it included a suspension. Before long we reached the outskirts of Fort Bragg, then slowed down to trigger the signals at the level crossings and return to the depot to wrap up our adventure biking on rails in the redwood forest.
We drove back to our campsite at Van Damme State Park for one last night before heading home the next day.
I took more pictures in Mendocino and on the Rail Bikes at Photos on 2024-07-14.
