Day 59 - Silver Lake, CA to Folsom, CA - 98 mi

This morning everyone slept in and left super late in the morning - we didn't get out of camp until around 9:30 am. This turned out to be both a great thing and a bad thing. The great part about it is that we all hung out a little in the morning and we met again at the top of our morning climb. Today's morning climb was something special as it was our last real mountain climbing of the trip. After the summit, we were to descend around 7,000 - 8,000 ft of elevation to camp at around 200 ft above sea level. The even more amazing part of the morning was that we rigged the BUS4Ms video camera on the back of my bike rack (one of the few remaining racks left on the trip) to capture everyone drafting and crushing it down the mountain. Hopefully this made for a lot of great footage that you will be able to see in our final video.


Our daily mileage was made even longer than anticipated because about 7-8 of our group that were really ripping it downhill missed a turn! We were definitely not the only ones to miss the turn, but we did travel about 10-12 miles out of our way down extremely steep mountains only to find ourselves at a super market with a daunting climb back to the turn ahead. The clouds split and an angel descended to give us a ride back to the top! An extremely sweet woman from the grocery store offered to drive us halfway up the mountain in her truck after I told her what we were up to. We even sweet talked her enough during the ride that she took us all the way to our turn!

Phew, after knocking out a bunch of miles, we finally made it to Folsom, CA which we celebrated this morning with some Johnny Cash tunes with breakfast. Our ride took us right next to the Folsom Dam and extremely close to Folsom prison (I hope to get some sweet pics tomorrow).


After arriving at the campsite, I fulfilled a promise to Bridget and Liza by shaving my facial hair to mimic what's-his-name from Moulin Rouge! This will have to be my celebration facial hair for arriving in San Francisco.