Pre Otter

The dog is looking at me all side-eyed. There’s a duffel bag on the living room floor full of riding gear, just in case, and foul weather gear, also just in case. For the past few hours I have been pacing from around the house in a state of distracted forgetfulness, clutching a fistful of power cables and fretting about charging devices one minute, rummaging through gear bags looking for a raincoat last worn in 2021 the next. The dog knows something is up, and tipped off by the food and treats stacked by the front door, she knows that she’s not invited to this gig.

This gig being, naturally, the Sea Otter Classic. Kicking off Thursday-ish of this week, the 35th running of the event is luring me to the central California coast like some distorted siren song. I am, once again, powerless to resist its call. My decision to point the wagon westward fired up some inner conflict, though. That probably comes as no surprise, given my feelings toward Mustelidae in general. But there’s more to it; some mixture of “here we go again” combined with “damn it’ll be good to see some old faces” tempered by “jeez, the old guard is thinning out” along with a layer of “wherefore art thou, mountain biking” concern.

The Sea Otter has evolved over the course of its long lifespan. Once a weekend long compendium of bike races that included a few exhibitors hawking their wares, it grew into something of a huge consumer spectacle. The basic underpinnings of people riding and racing bikes provided a solid attendee backbone, but over the years the “expo” part of the event gained momentum and is now arguably THE reason people attend the ol’ Ocean Weasel. And with the relatively recent implosion of trade shows on this continent, the Sea Otter has assumed the mantle of the bike industry’s collective annual meet and greet. For more than a decade now brands have been aligning new product launches around the event, aiming to capitalize on the gathered international media and also pick up some consumer-end buzz along the way from the 70,000 or so members of the buying public who shuffle across the tire bridge and into the midway over the course of each Sea Otter weekend.

And herein lies my inner conflict. In some ways, I liked that trade shows used to happen in sterile conference centers – gigantic warehouse caverns in Anaheim or Las Vegas. There’s a time for cavorting out in nature on bikes, and trade shows are not that. Trade shows are work. Cavorting can happen later, after the meetings have been met, the news relayed, the hands shook. Bask in the ultra-white glare of the lights, breathe the recycled air, feel heels and spine disintegrate as four successive days of carpetwalking and handshaking erode the posture, inadvertently electrocute your fellow humans with successive jolts of static electricity, and Get The Work Done.

Meanwhile, there’s Laguna Seca Raceway, the venue for the Sea Otter. And by extension, Fort Ord National Monument – the sprawl of oak-studded hills that surrounds the raceway – and the 80 or so miles of trail etched through that landscape. Once upon a time, I considered Fort Ord to be a less-than-acceptable riding destination. There are no big mountains. No endless climbs. No half-hour forearm pumping descents. Then I spent the better part of a decade living a stone’s throw from the place, and rode there about a thousand times, and it grew on me. I learned the seasonal rhythms, the timing of the fog, and got pretty good at sliding the front in sandy turns. Lichen hanging ghostly from the oaks, the tangy mix of manzanita and coastal sagebrush in the air, pedaling into shifty headwinds.

The riding in Fort Ord doesn’t really constitute world class radness. It’s not the kind of place that people have aspirational destination travel dreams about. But damn, there’s a ton of trail in there, and you can pedal until you turn inside out and the place just absorbs all of your effort and implacably waits for you to push some more. And it is beautiful; a rolling, quintessentially California landscape that were it not for the National Monument designation protecting it from development would otherwise be studded with multi-million dollar homes. There’s an irony that it is also an old military base, so in between all this oak and moss and chapparal goodness there are stretches of barbed wire and signage of a more severe nature than most of us are used to seeing in riding areas. That just adds to the charm of the place in my mind. So, about halfway into that almost decade of riding there, I had really come to appreciate Fort Ord. We had some damn good times together, and some bad.

I was riding in Fort Ord on a baking hot day in 2021. It was August 16th. The night before an intense lightning event had sparked thousands of fires all over California. I fretted about my friends in the Santa Cruz mountains while I rode, wondering what was going on up there but also quietly thankful – this time at least – to not be in the path of the fire. I was thinking about this, head down, pedaling up Trail 82. Topping out on Pilarcitos Ridge, I looked across toward Toro Park, which lay between me and home, and saw the first plume of what would become known as the River Fire blooming into the clear blue sky to the east, sparked by the same lightning that had pounded the state that night. The 48,000 acres that it would eventually burn was a tiny ember in the entire 2 million or so acres that ultimately were consumed as a result of those lightning strikes, but it was the fourth big fire to scorch within a mile of my home in six years, and was instrumental in shaping my decision to sell up a couple years later.

Fort Ord had become my home turf, though. I had ridden there in sun, in rain, in biting wind, in the muffling quiet of thick coastal fog, in belting rain, and in smoke tinged air where the sun shone pale and ash fell from the sky. The place had become my known quantity, and I had grown to love it.

During the first decade of the Sea Otter’s existence, I had only ever ridden at Fort Ord when I came to race. The racing was invariably painful and did not instill in me any desire to come back and just ride. Then came a several year stretch when I didn’t ride there at all, and instead equated my annual visit to Laguna Seca with standing in a booth and talking until my voice went out. This also did not really endear the place to me. Basically, I equated Fort Ord with the Sea Otter. Then I got to know Fort Ord, riding there every week and, even though I still spent several days each year doing the handshake boogie in the confines of the Sea Otter expo, I no longer let the event define the place. Fort Ord had come to mean more to me than the Sea Otter.

That’s not to say that the Sea Otter has shrunk. It is still, in spite of the current bleak horizon in the bike world, the definitive get-together of cycling, the place where tens of thousands of folk come to race and ride their bikes, and then ogle the shiny new bits that the industry wants them to buy. In that sense, it kind of kicks ass in comparison to dead trade shows like Interbike, where the public were not included. The Sea Otter is the whole spectrum of cycling’s beautiful freakshow, all crammed into one place, outdoors, where, if you are paying attention, there’s some pretty damn good spring riding to be had.

The dog is right to be looking at me side-eyed. She knows. She’s poached some trails in Fort Ord. She doesn’t like crowds, but that’s a tough one to explain ahead of time to a dog. She just knows she’s being left out, and I am packing riding gear. For my part, I am reluctant to leave my dog, the high country trails opening, the first blossoms on the trees. But I am also really looking forward to catching up with friends, seeing what’s new in the bike biz, talking some shop, picking up a new test bike, and above all else, sneaking a few rides in the old oaky stomping grounds.