The Castaic Lake Loop

Thanks to SingleTrackMind.com for turning me onto this ride. This website is really excellent and contains all sorts of maps.

This is a 30 mile loop that has a couple of good climbs along the way. I appear to have ridden it backwards, or counter-clockwise, to the way described on SingleTrackMind.com. It does make sense to do it clockwise. There's a significant single-track section in the middle which is much easier to ride down, than push up.

To reach the trailhead, drive north out of LA on I-5. Exit at Lake Hughes Road and drive 13.3 miles east, passsing Castaic Lake on your left. You'll be deep into some pretty good remote countryside already. Park at the junction with Warm Springs Road. The start of the ride is the fire road on the left side of the road which looks like this.

You proceed along here for a couple of miles or so. The first part is pretty flat, then it starts to climb but nothing too steep. You'll come to this junction - a big open expanse. Straight ahead you'll see 7N31 which you don't take. To the left is where you want to go, and then almost immediately there's a fork. This is where I took the "wrong" turn, but there's really nothing to stop you going either way. The right fork goes down, the left fork up. I reasoned that at the end of the ride, I'd be wanting to be coming down, so I elected to take the right fork. This drops down fairly gently, with occasional short climbing sections. You reach Cienega Campground after a total of 7 miles, where I actually saw some people who'd camped there but driven in. The trail continues to drop and eventually you reach a flattish plateau and a T junction. The right fork has a "no trespassing" sign. You go left, towards Lake Castaic.

In a while you're skirting the upper reaches of the left part of the "V" shape of Lake Castaic and you can't fail to see some wonderful watery infrastructure. This is the water coming from the California Aqueduct coming down penstocks to a hydro station at the bottom before being discharged into the lake.

This picture shows the trail along the side of the lake which is pretty rutted in places, but very passable. This next section is very pleasant, and just follows along the lake. After a few inlets, the trail start to take you inland and away from the lake and up and down some quite steep sections. You start to gain some height such that you can look over and see the main part of the lake where all the boats go. Along here somewhere the map shows a "T" junction where you'd be wanting to turn left. In reality it's nothing like a T. I was riding along and saw an obvious single track go up to the left, but I noted it and kept on riding. After a couple hundred yards when I was facing due south, I realized that the trail all of a suddenly had almost no tire tracks at all, which I'd noticed all the way up until this point.

I looked around and thought: if that turning is NOT the left turn I'm looking for, where the hell is it? I could see all the land between me and the lake, and I couldn't visualize a trail down there. So fortunately I made the correct assessment that the single track was in fact what the map shows as just more fire road, and reluctantly took it. Reluctant because it was steep and rocky and not at all my idea of fun having to push up it. It was very steep and the day had turned rather warm by this point. It just seemed to keep on going up and up, and there was barely any place I could ride faster than I could push for a good 45 minutes. It did eventually top out and I could ride the descents and the trail got wider.

One of the crazy features of the last stretch was passing this abandoned car. The trails between it and civilization are really rough so you wonder how it got there. The trail undulates and gets a bit vague in places but eventually sweeps up to the right and you end up at a T junction and a sign showing Warm Springs Mountain off to the right. It has a lookout tower of some kind. I didn't have the energy to go and explore it. Instead, I took the left turn which was pretty much all downhill. You can see you're obviously approaching the junction where you started. Just before the junction, there is a fast and furious singletrack to the right which I took. It drops down steeply and crosses a stream a few times, and eventually just joins the initial fire road, about 1 mile from the start. The rest is all easy cruising back to the trailhead.

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