Revisiting the Lure of a Trail 100 Years Later

“One of the early trans-mountain trails of the region went up this canyon, of which the present Cold Spring Trail is the successor – hence the name – although no appreciable part of it is any longer within the canyon. The change from the old route to the present one was gradual – piece by piece as it were. The upper part was first abandoned; then a stretch farther down, leaving still for some time about two miles of trail within the canyon. Then came the flood – and it is a canyon trail no longer.”

I could begin an article about trails being old and constantly evolving in myriad ways; however, a quote from Francis M. Fultz written for Illustrated Magazine (now the LA Times) on August 6, 1922 seems as encompassing and literal as any other introduction I could muster.

Simply put, trails are not solely the sum of their literal parts that we ride, rather they are simply the same as us – current versions of themselves, made up of complicated pasts. It is in seeing these intricacies and evolutions that we might find a way to ride deeper into trails rather than solely further or faster.

Cold Springs Trail (the “s” being added sometime in the 1960’s), bisecting the Santa Ynez Mountains above Santa Barbara, California, has existed in a number of forms across several centuries to millennia. Old maps, magazine articles, and oral stories tell of a route used for trade, hunting and gathering by California’s original stewards – in this case the Chumash Tribe – eventually turned to paths used for running sheep and mules into the backcountry by Spanish rancheros and miners.

As Santa Barbara grew out of its early roughneck heritage, further flooding and wildfires presented an opportunity to amend the trail corridor into a switchback heavy rock lined corridor built at grades a touch more conducive to human recreation instead of water laden equestrian predecessors. As simple as a few hundred years may seem, the stark periods of cataclysmic disaster and human willpower have turned a canyon river trail onto either face of its valley, adding mileage and accommodating a constantly changing societal need for varying resources.

It is here that riding Cold Springs Trail, a 5 mile, 3000 foot descent that could stand toe to toe with most Enduro World Series Queen Stages, is more than just a test of bike handling. It is a trip down several million years of marine geology from sandstone to shale to landslide deposits. It is a time warp past fire mosaic ecotones of chaparral and oak woodlands. It is a history lesson of where we come from, and that our legacy upon a landscape will always find erasure at the whim of weather.

Riding mountains bikes can often feel like a test of whether new innovation makes us faster, but more and more I find my judgments of new tire casings, braking power, and frame stiffness being relative to whether they allow my mind to drift elsewhere – most important of all to the last 40 years of a trail rather than its next 40 yards.