Yeager Mesa

Bridge on Yeager Mesa:


We all rode across it ...


This last Saturday I was able to ride a new trail. Over the last few years the ability to ride new trails has become more and more rare. I don't always have the time to drive to trails outside of Orange County and sometimes I feel like I've done everything there is to do.

Yeager Mesa is part of the upcoming Ultra Quest ride on March 29th and I was excited on Saturday to check out the new trail as well as seeing what the first part of Ultra Quest would be like. This was important because I was trying to decide between racing Fontana and doing Ultra Quest.

The ride started at Trabuco Creek Road and Matt, Troy, Jason and I quickly split off from the fire road to start tracing the Ultra Quest course that Troy had downloaded on to his Garmin. (P.S. Mark and Scott also showed up but they did a trip up to Holy Jim instead)

The entrance to the Ultra Quest course was kind of a joke. We rode off to the right on Trabuco Creek and hiked up a super steep singletrack which eventually took us to Bell View. I had no idea Bell View went out that far. There are some really nice and scenic areas on the plateau above Trabuco Creek.

After riding up Bell View we finally got to the end of Bell Ridge. Nothing much to say about this part of the ride ... err I mean hike. We hiked up Bell Ridge for a while before getting to the Yeager Mesa trailhead. It is incredibly subtle to say the least. If you are going down Bell Ridge the turnoff to Yeager Mesa is a little before the "Can't See Bottom" descent.

Yeager Mesa was really steep and loose and I probably rode maybe 5% of the trail. I lowered my seat and tried to get into a groove on certain sections but it was just impossible.

Example of how steep Yeager is:


After spending several hours pushing and carrying my bike up Bell I was having two major problems:

1. My arms were tired. I didn't feel confident in my upper body strength on the steeper sections of Yeager.

2. I wasn't warmed up. Often times I need a good 10-15 minutes of grooving downhill before things start to click. I was never able to get into a good downhill flow and so that hurt my confidence as well.

One of the cool parts of Yeager however was a rather large meadow that we hit about halfway down.

Some hiker in the meadow:


There was even a campsite:


The end of Yeager was insanely steep and it took the four of us quite a while to hike down. I would have to wait for the person in front of me to finish getting down because when I came down I would cause a mini avalanche with rocks and debris flying down as I slid down the slope.

The final part was interesting because Yeager actually ends up feeding into Trabuco. Even if I was looking for Yeager on Trabuco I don't think I would ever be able to find it without already knowing where it is. It spit out on Trabuco about halfway between the end of Trabuco Creek Road and the bottom of West Horsetheif.

After getting to the bottom Jason and I decided to call it quits and ride back to the cars. Troy and Matt continued on to go up Trabuco and then back down Bell.

I'm still getting over my cold (it's been a week, ugh) but it was good to get out and do some exploring - even if I did get a bunch of blisters and scrapes.

(Oh, and I decided on Fontana. Hahaha.)