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This past weekend, I attended the Newsong Men’s Retreat at Forest Home. The retreat was pretty good with speakers from the Newsong leadership team. The retreat site is well equipped and the food was slightly better than most camp food. It was a good time to connect with the men at church since most of the time we are too busy to meet each other in the regular church setting.

One of the things that we were also looking forward to was using our free time to ride the Santa Ana River Trail, which is supposedly one of the epic singletrack rides in Southern California.

We got up early Saturday morning for our first ride to do the loop from behind the post office. We were able to find the trail fairly quickly, but unfortunately, it was not as ‘epic’ as we expected. The trail condition was really loose and there were several trees that had fallen across the path, so we had to keep stopping to climb over the obstacles or walk through unridable patches.

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In the afternoon, we took a friend along for his first mountain-bike ride. Aside from falling off the trail at one point, he did great. This time, we rode further up SART from where we turned off in the morning. It had some short interesting sections, but for the most part, it was pretty much more of the same as the morning ride. One thing we didn’t account for was how quickly it would get dark, so at the end of the ride, I pushed up the fire road to get the van and drove back to pick up the guys who were trailing behind.

There’s still another section that I would like to try the next time I am up in the area. In the end, it was good to get out to ride, but SART doesn’t really standout as a destination ride.

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