There are many joys to traveling, but we often must remind ourselves: other folks take vacations to visit our “back yard”. Living in coastal California might have its down-sides, but also many advantages. For one thing, it’s a cyclist’s paradise.

For quite a while now, we’ve allowed ourselves to be spoiled with dedicated bike paths. These tiny little roadways have no motorized vehicle traffic, and only occasionally cross regular roads. They’re quiet, smooth (for the most part), and they are constructed in beautifully non-urban areas with a lot of natural scenery and even occasional wildlife.

COYOTE CREEK TRAIL

One of these is the Coyote Creek Trail, which runs down the valley just south of San Jose. Meandering along its namesake creek, it runs about 19 miles from Hellyer Park, down to Anderson Lake. Depending on what source you look at, the distance varies a bit. On Google Maps, it’s shown as 18.5 miles (one-way).

As of early June, 2017, we had done very little cycling for several years, so we elected to ride only the middle portion of the trail. Our total ride for the day was about 19 miles, and even then our muscles and butt-bones were getting pretty weary. It’s pretty common to be a little saddle-sore when just starting to ride. Yup.

Due to its paralleling the Creek, there really aren’t any bad-scenery spots along this trail. But the experience does vary considerably, from closed-in brushy creek-side woods, to open meadow-like areas. On warm days (it was 85F), those open areas can make a rider long for the cool shade again — and it is soon forthcoming. Just pedal.

There are two bridges across the Creek, both very soundly and charmingly constructed of iron and wood. The planks make a nice rumbling sound as bikes roll across them. Also quite photogenic.

In the mid-section, we rode past the Aerodrome, a nice little R/C airstrip with windsock, picnic tables, and (even on a weekday afternoon), a few guys out flying their various model aircraft low in the skies overhead. Noise restrictions are strictly observed by R/C flyers these days, and the planes were beautifully graceful and quiet.

The wildlife consists mostly of waterfowl and rodents (although I’m sure there’s a host of nocturnal creatures we’ve never seen). Most are pretty tame, like this family of ducks.

The winter rains of early 2017 really made some dents in the Trail, and one section was officially closed on the day of our ride. But although there were fenced-off sections, the power-station road afforded an easy detour, and there were also places where “soft” closures had simply been ignored or moved aside. The worst spot we found (what with all the water having long-since subsided) was this crossing, with lots of debris where we had to walk the bike past it.

In general, there were huge amounts of storm debris to be seen, and the Creek itself had obviously found new pathways in several locations. But we had seen much more water across the actual trail on previous trips along the path, so it appeared that the worst was well over. We found some areas of loose dirt that we decided to walk through as well, but overall no biggie at all. Parks and Recreation are working still on repairing the damages, and updates are on their website.

At several points along the trail, there are picnic tables, and even the occasional porta-potty restroom. We stopped at the Walnut Rest Area for a lunch snack and turnaround point.

I should mention that the trail is very popular with hikers/walkers as well; although we regard it as a “bike path” for us, it’s very well used by foot traffic, skaters, and very occasional boarder. Most people are courteous and polite, but of course there’s always the hot-rod racer out practicing for the Tour de France or something. It pays to have a rear-mirror and keep an eye on it.

As you might note from the photos, weekday usage is very light. We saw maybe ten people in a couple of hours. Weekends are another story entirely.

Despite our out-of-shape weariness, we had a grand time, enjoyed the woods and scenery, and are looking forward to getting cycling-fit again. There are other bike paths within an hour’s drive our our home, and I’ll write about them in future posts.

Life is good.

STILL CURIOUS?

NOTE: there are other Coyote Creek’s across the country, so don’t be confused. This one is in south San Jose. Also, there are tiny sections of this trail up to the north of San Jose; these are not (yet) inter-connected, and not discussed in this post.

You can find dozens of videos on Youtube (too many to list here) — just do a search for “coyote creek bike trail”.

• Coyote Creek — County web page
• Trails.com web page
• Traillink web page
• San Jose gov web page
• Alltrails web page