I had intended for some time to continue my description of California Route 130, the beginning of which you can read  here . The first opportunity came on May 1, 2001. The ride up to the observatory was quick, and the hillsides were green, with color provided by wildflowers here and there, unlike the more usual appearance shown previously. I did notice a brisk breeze as I drove through San Jose, and stopping for a brief break at the observatory, I noticed that their barograph showed that the barometer had been dropping sharply for an hour or so. It was already mid afternoon, so I started down into the San Antonio Valley. Unlike the previous set of pictures, these were taken standing beside the road, as I still had not devised a suitable camera mount for my new motorcycle.

I stopped a short way below the summit, and took these two pictures.

This is looking just south of west, past Mt. Hamilton (which is just to the right of this picture) across the Santa Clara Valley towards Loma Prieta, the peak on the far ridge, the highest point in the San Francisco Bay Area. The breeze I mentioned has cleared out much of the smog, but the valley floor is still pretty thoroughly obscured.

This is looking a little south of east, into the San Antonio Valley and the inner coast ranges. It's a little hazy this way, but not so bad as looking west. On a really clear winter day, the Sierra Nevada would be visible beyond the far ridges.

The road here is steeper and winds more sharply than on the other side of the mountain (according to the auto club map, it is not suitable for trucks or trailers). Unfortunately, there aren't many places to get a good picture of it. There are, however, occasional patches of loose gravel and of oil left from repairs. The highway on this side of the mountain is not so well maintained as on the other side, but it's not so heavily traveled either.

There is a hazard unique to cattle country known as the cattle guard. I couldn't stop for the first one I came to, but lower down, where there's room to pull off, I took a few pictures of this one.

This is what it looks like on the approach, and fortunately there's a warning sign, prominently posted on the right.

Up close, it looks like this:

These are just parallel steel rails, just like those used for railroads, spaced several inches apart over a cut anywhere from 8 inches to a couple of feet deep. The spacing of the rails is perfectly chosen to dismember anyone so unfortunate as to go down as they hit it, and to remove appendages from sliding motorcycles, so it's important to meet it upright and square.

In wet weather, it offers about as much traction as so much wet ice. Maybe a little less, because the spaces between the rails offer no traction at all. I've never had occasion to cross one in freezing conditions, but I'd suggest caution. These are spaced every few miles to limit the movement of cattle that happen to find gaps in the fences. Cattle may be stupid, but they aren't stupid enough to cross one of these things. In fact, they worry the cattle so much that once they're familiar with them, a set of parallel lines painted on the pavement is almost as effective in controlling their movement.

Cattle are a hazard if they get onto the road. It's not much fun coming around a blind turn at speed and finding half a ton of beef in your path. You know what you get when you cross a cow with a motorcycle?  Road rash. Luckily the cattle like to graze, and there isn't much green stuff growing out of the pavement, so even when they do get loose, they're usually off to one side, munching away, but not always.


The San Francisco Bay area has plenty of "micro climates" thanks to its varied topography. Here, CA route 130 crosses the extreme northwest corner of the great Sonoran desert.

There are no cacti in this scene (nor within a couple of hundred miles, barring those in gardens) but otherwise, you can find identical scenes stretching through the inner coast ranges right down to the Tehachapi mountains, and on into Baja California, Sonora, and much of the US southwest. The barren patch on the right is the road cut and berm.

The desert doesn't last long, and we turn north to follow the San Antonio Valley.

Originally the valley floor was probably wooded like the slopes, but the California Live Oaks get cropped along with the grasses by grazing cattle, and won't grow in grazing areas. The grazing areas here are mostly wild wheat, mixed with a variety of wildflowers. Glancing around, I spotted two varieties of Lupine (responsible for the blue-grey tint in the middle distance) bright yellow buttercups and mustard, and half a dozen others.

The San Antonio Valley is broad enough that the road runs in longish straight stretches from one spur of the hills to the next. This is the stretch where that last photo was taken, looking north, along my direction of travel.

Those with a serious need for speed may be interested to know that the highway patrol seems to run only one car a day over this road. On the other hand, one has to watch for trucks entering and leaving the ranches. Despite the narrowness of the road, big rigs are sometimes used to transport cattle and ranch equipment. Meeting one at speed in confined space is not fun. Those fences to either side are barbed wire, just in case you were thinking of the shoulder as an escape route...

The highway continues pretty much like this until a conspicuous discolored patch on the mountainside indicates the mine tailings of the old mine (manganese, closed at the end of WWII). This segment of CA 130 ends just before that. Here we're looking south, back the way we've come.

Turning around, we see the beginning of Mines road, which will take us to Livermore, and the Junction, a convenient break point.

Off to the right is Del Puerto Canyon road (strictly speaking the first couple of hundred meters are Del Puerto road), the continuation of CA route 130, which runs for 30 miles through the inner coast range to Patterson, in the Central Valley. While pausing here for a soda, I considered changing the film in the camera, and continuing that way, but I recalled that breeze in San Jose, and the falling barometer at the observatory, and reflected that if I did head out to the Central Valley, my route home would take me past the wind farm in the Altamont pass, so I decided to leave that for another day (you can read that section  here), and instead headed up Mines road, 30 miles to Livermore, and home from there.

Mines road is a pretty good ride itself, but watch out for areas where the gravel is indistinguishable from the pavement. The worst hazard I've encountered there was a dual sport motorcycle lying across the middle of the road where a guy had high-sided after one such patch. He was lucky enough to have hit the uphill side of the road, losing a couple of ribs and gaining a concussion. If he'd gone down the other way, he'd have landed at the bottom of the arroyo about the same time I came along.

Alan Moore
DoD 734
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The camera is a Pentax K1000, fully manual single lens reflex. I used two lenses, 50 and a 135mm. Fujicolor ASA 1600 film, typically exposed for 1/1000 sec at f8 to f16.