Mt Tam revisited

I rode up to Mt Tam and the Seven Sisters from Fairfax with a group of experienced riders before (just realized it's two years ago. I've learned a ton from them that time) and I kept bragging about it in front of my biking buddy. So the only right thing to do was to ride up with him too :) (BTW, I've also bragged about my Mt Hamilton and Mt Diablo rides before so eventually we would go all big 3) I found this route on MapMyRide and it seems more fun for an all-day ride than the morning ride I did before. Learned from last time, we parked in the narrow but long free public lot opposite to a garage (auto mechanics) on Sir Francis Drake road in Fairfax (the lot is on the intersection of Bolinas Rd between Sir Francis Drake and Center Blvd) The ride started from Bolinas Rd, through the neighborhood via some local streets to Olema Rd and back onto Sir Francis Drake towards North. Then we turned right into Nicasio Valley/Reservoir. Quiet and open country road there. Nice! Next, we turned West to Point Reyes Station, which I haven't visited for more than 10 years! Last time we came here for oyster. Actually the whole area has quite a few restaurants and we passed by many of them, e.g. Bovine Bakery, which was highly recommended by my co-worker but was closed that day. Instead of going South on Hwy 1 immediately, we took a detour northbound to Inverness. Again, nice ocean view! We turn back from there and passed Point Reyes National Reserve on Hwy 1, which was famous for bird-watching. I saw a black bird with a big red dot on each of its wings (probably a red-winged black bird.) Doesn't seem to be common everywhere! Finally we saw the ocean again (~40 miles into this route) and it was time to turn left and ride up Bolinas-Fairfax rd (small entrance, easy to miss!) It's a long 4-mile climb 'til we reached Ridgecrest, i.e., the famous Seven Sisters. Each sister represents a rolling section of the road (more than 7 of them!) The last "sister" was a hard 3 mile stretch before reaching the East peak. The original map didn't have this section so our planned 64 mile ride became 70! Nevertheless, we really needed to go up East peak because of the water fountain there to refill our emptied bottles. We still have 16 miles to go after the East peak by retracing the Seven Sisters in reverse and go down the other side of Bolinas-Fairfax rd. This part overlapped with what I rode 2 years ago but my memory was vague. I still remember the dam at Alpine Lake. That was a steep downhill with lots of sharp turns. Our arms were tired because of the descent but it was only ~2 mile long! Then we had 2 more Cat-5 climbs after the dam. Those are usually pieces of cake during our regular training rides but they felt like killers after riding 63 miles (including 1 Cat-1 climb!) We were completely exhausted after we made it back to the car. Nevertheless, we had a great time. This will be one of the rides that we talk about for years to come.

So here is the map of the route we did:

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