Day 3 – Sep 14

Day 3, Sep. 14, Valencia, CA to Victorville, CA – 90 miles, 3,700′

It was another good day on the bike.  We left Valencia at 7:30, and after getting out of town immediately hit a delightful, long-but-shallow climb (cyclists would call it a “big-ring climb”) up a canyon with ranches, scrub and trees, rock faces and cool air.  Riding with Jeff, Joseph and Austin, along with Michael Hughes and guide Dave Edwards, we knocked out the 2,000′, 17-mile climb at an average of about 15 mph.  At a rest stop near the top, I

Near the top of the Canyon Climb

 scooted ahead to take some pictures, and on the descent joined up with Jeff, Joseph and Austin for a very brisk run to lunch — predictably, Jeff did most of the pulling, Joseph ramped us up to 33 mph on one extended flat stretch, and Austin and I (who have established ourselves as the co-navigators for our little group) hung on.

One disappointment was that I did not spot the San Andreas Fault, which we crossed as we entered Palmdale.  No obvious deformation along our route, and it’s probably either covered by sediments coming down from the mountains we crossed, or is concealed by an aqueduct that closely follows the Fault.

From there, a good pace across Palmdale, which goes on forever, on flat high-desert land.  A mixture of scrub, cactus, Joshua trees, and housing developments.  By lunch, I was famished.  At 10:15.  Whatever was served

Desert scenery outside Palmdale

would have been just fine by me, but we actually had some very tastyvegetarian dishes (such as an eggplant pasta salad), prepared by Karl and Tara Clasen, our massage therapist and otherwise important person, all of which we enjoyed on the edge of a dirt parking lot in the shade of the Trek trailer.   And the lean-back folding chairs that Tara found for this trip mean we could actually kick back and stretch our legs.

After lunch, Michael joined back in and we proceeded across high desert terrain, in a mostly flat valley with the San Bernadino Mountains on our right and various smaller ranges on the left.  We (read Jeff and Joseph) backed off the spirited morning pace a bit, but we still made great time despite some rough road surfaces, at least until the last 10 miles.  At that point we encountered heavier traffic and a stiff headwind.  The speed then went way down.  All in, our group covered the 90 miles at an average of 17.7.   

Victorville seems to be a prototypical sprawling, modern California town plopped down on a pancake-flat

A Victorville landscape

 desert and with small mountain ranges providing some visual relief — pretty typical of the Range and Basin geological province that we entered at the San Andreas Fault.  The hotel and its staff are nice, but I think we will be happy to get back on the road for tomorrow’s 90-miler deeper into the desert, probably departing even earlier in order to reduce our mid-day time in the sun and winds. 

Geological Notes.

The San Andreas Fault is the dividing line between the Pacific and the North American Plates.  As I’m sure most are aware, it is the source of periodic massive earthquakes as pressure is built up by the Pacific Plate moving steadily to the north relative to the North American Plate, only to be released by sudden jumps along the Fault.  For the most part, the San Andreas Fault runs in the same direction as the relative motion of the Pacific and North American Plates (north-south), which means the Plates slip along the Fault rather than piling up against each other.  However, there is an east-west stretch in the Fault, and there the Plates can’t slip, so they pile up — and the result is the San Bernadino Mountains.  So today we were bordered on the south by mountains that were lifted up by those pressures, but on the north the various ranges we saw were created in a very different manner.  I will try to describe the geological forces that create the Range and Basin Province in the next day or two, as we get further into it.