31-mile loop offers tenfold view of Orange County
Note: In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve decided to use headline-style titles for my blog posts. I just like the way they sound. And they allow me to use the comma as a substitute for a conjunction.
One of my favorite routes in Orange County is what I call the PCH Loop. You can see the route on Google Maps here. It includes a healthy mix of hills, descents, and flats, and passes through several different Orange County locales. Since I live in Irvine, I always start there.
As you may know, Irvine is a mostly suburban city in OC, but the route starts off by tracing through Shady Canyon, which is a gated community up on the hill (there’s only one tall hill in Irvine). There is a dedicated off-road paved bike path that runs through the entire community, winding along the street past large ponds, over bridges, and by a large variety of plant life (cacti included). This leg of the route culminates in a short climb to the top of the hill followed by a fairly rapid descent (I’ve pushed 45mph on this descent before, so remember to always wear a helmet).
From Shady Canyon, the route continues over the 405 freeway into the southern end of Irvine, which is a small urban hub surrounding the Spectrum (Irvine’s largest mall). After a short while, the route heads west, and after passing back over the 405, the road turns upward in one of the steeper climbs of the ride. It’s a short climb (no longer than two minutes), but it can wear you out quickly if you don’t take the right approach (I used to always drop into my smallest chainring on this climb when I was using my triple crank bike). After this hill is a short descent followed by a longer, easier climb up El Toro road into the Laguna Canyon area. Every time I ride through this area, I forget that I’m in Orange County. NorCal comes to mind, for some reason.
Laguna Canyon is, as the name implies, a canyon with grassy slopes that winds between the west end of Lake Forest and Laguna Beach. Since I ride west, the road slopes downhill for the five or six mile ride to the coast. This is an excellent leg of the route for time trialing: nice, smooth roads, very little traffic, and the wind is usually blowing to the east to make the downhill ride just a little bit tougher. This part of the ride can also get a little cold, so the armwarmers are always handy (army?) except on the hottest summer days.
The canyon opens up to the Pacific Coast Highway at Laguna Beach, and every time I take in this view I’m thankful for the legs that got me there. The rest of the ride is a northbound along the smooth rolling hills of PCH (about 10 miles or so), with beautiful ocean views and a pleasant marine climate that keeps you cool without chilling you too much.
For the last few miles of the ride, I take the Back Bay path past UCI and back to the familiar marshy area in which I reside. The Back Bay path is part of my favorite bike trail in Orange County: the Mountains to Sea Trail. You can expect a full entry about this trail soon.
So in the title, I mentioned that the loop offers a tenfold view of OC, since you on the ride you experience the hilly, pond-and-golf-course dotted Shady Canyon area, the urban center of Irvine near the Spectrum, the seemingly out-of-place Laguna Canyon, the lazy beach community of Laguna (kind of like OB, but with it’s own unique flavor, and not quite as lazy), and the serene coastal bluffs along PCH. Okay, so maybe I can’t name ten distinct regions, but you get the idea.