Santa Cruz Mountains Flow · short arc

Waypoint introductions and full write-ups

1. 1. Fuel stop near Woodside

   Planning note

   Santa Cruz Mountains Flow is where the day begins. Next is Santa Cruz Mountains Flow high point.

2. 2. Half Moon Bay

   Half Moon Bay is where the Peninsula's mountains finally meet the Pacific. The town sits on a wide coastal plain, backed by the green flank of the Santa Cruz Mountains and fronted by a long crescent of sand, and it feels like a different state from the busy bay side only twenty minutes away over Highway 92. Fog arrives most summer afternoons, so mornings are your best bet for sun.

   Read the complete Half Moon Bay write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   You top out here; the road stops climbing. Next is Santa Cruz Mountains Flow scenic road.

3. 3. Bolinas

   Bolinas does not want to be found, and it has made that clear for decades. Locals have a long tradition of removing the road sign that points to the town from Highway 1, so you may have to watch for the unmarked turnoff at the end of Bolinas Lagoon. The reward is a small, eccentric, salt-weathered village at the tip of a mesa on the Marin coast, with a few streets of old wooden buildings, a beach, surfers and an atmosphere that feels decades removed from the Bay Area just over the hill.

   Read the complete Bolinas write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   about 112 km into the recorded legs you reach Santa Cruz Mountains Flow scenic road. Next is Santa Cruz Mountains Flow photo pull-off.

4. 4. Bodega Bay

   Alfred Hitchcock knew a menacing landscape when he saw one, and in 1962 he brought Tippi Hedren and a great many crows and gulls to Bodega Bay to film The Birds. The little harbour town on the Sonoma Coast, about an hour and a half north of the Golden Gate, has been living gently off that fame ever since, and the old schoolhouse that appears in the film still stands a few miles inland in the village of Bodega. But the real show here is the coast itself: a sheltered bay full of fishing boats, a long sandspit, and the granite headland of Bodega Head jutting out into the Pacific.

   Read the complete Bodega Bay write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Santa Cruz Mountains Flow photo pull-off, about halfway. Next is San Francisco Bay Area return.

5. 5. Near Lodi, on the way back

   Lodi is flat, hot, and full of grapes. It lies on the eastern edge of the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta in the Central Valley, where the land is so level you can watch weather move across it for an hour before it arrives. This spot sits near Woodbridge, just north of Lodi itself, close to where the Mokelumne River runs west out of the Sierra foothills toward the Delta.

   Read the complete Near Lodi, on the way back write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   San Francisco Bay Area return sits at 481 km, late in the day. Next is Food stop near Lodi.

6. 6. Food stop near Lodi

   Planning note

   The route ends here after 601 km.