The west coast tour doesn’t have much in the way of all-day sustained climbs, so it seemed less important to do the local mountain climbs than it did for the Oregon tour. Still, we figured we ought to do one, and Mt Hamilton won out.

Mt Hamilton is the highest of the local hills, and has Lick Observatory on the top. The road was originally built for the observatory in 1875, with a steady 6% or so grade for the oxen to bring the materials. The climb is broken up by two short descents.

The day was physically tough, but really the challenge was all mental. At 6%, you just need to get in a low gear and keep pedaling. But we knew this would be significantly more climbing than we’d experience on the coast. That meant we didn’t “need” to do it, which made it harder to keep going.

But keep going we did. For the first part, you can’t even see the top of the mountain – other hills are in the way. As you get closer, it starts to peek through. It can look deceptively close, but there’s still a lot of up to go. Ruth would get pretty excited, and give us updates on how much bigger it was looking.

When we finally reached the entrance for the observatory, Anne started crying. At first I couldn’t tell if she was freaking out over the last 50 feet of climbing or what. It turns out she was just happy to be at the top. We made it just before they closed, so we could use the restrooms, the water fountain, and best of all, the Coke machine. Anne took the kids for a quick run through the visitor center. Ruth was excited to see the telescopes, although I think she was hoping she could look through them to space.

Ruth was even more helpful with pedaling than usual. She helped me whenever we started uphill, and kept going for quite awhile. One time she announced that she would count to see how long she could go. She got (with some help) to 114 before she started losing track and stopped. I heartily approve of as much help as I can get.

On the way back down, I wasn’t getting as much braking power as I wanted, so we stopped and adjusted them. That made me much happier for the rest of the descent.

The brief downhill sections we enjoyed on the way out became less brief climbs while heading back. At the top of the first, a biker stopped at the trailhead where we were talking a break to give us his approval. He said his biking friend just had a kid a couple days ago, and he hoped his friend would be able to bike with the kid sometime. He also did 875 miles of coast tour (Oregon to San Francisco) in 8 days. We won’t be that fast.

As the evening approached, the animals started coming out. We saw a few groups of deer, and a turkey crossing the road (“turkey up!”). We made it back to the car just before it got properly dark.

I’m glad we did the whole ride. Even though we didn’t need to demonstrate that much climbing, it would have been lame to go all that way and not go to the top.