Destination: Kernville, California

Hidden in the Southern Sierras, sleepy Kernville, California, has some amazing riding, with multi-thousand-foot descents from lush alpine forests to brush-littered high desert, all along narrow, untrammeled singletrack. Bike magazine is spending the week here, exploring the trails and sampling local brews such as the Just Outstanding IPA, named after one of the area’s best trails. Check back for more photos and trail coverage.

Though the quiet Southern Sierra hamlet of Kernville, California is best known as a whitewater rafting hub, the high desert mountains that surround it are liberally laced with trails that cut through a wide range of terrain and feature just about everything but crowds.

Just to dip our toes in, the Bike magazine staff started our exploration of the local trails with a 20-mile tour that included a six-mile section of “Just Outstanding,” which lived up to its name. Our guide, Mountain & River Adventures owner John Stallone, named the trail in 1986. In the 20-plus years since then, Stallone has been guiding riders on single or multi-day trips through the maze of trails that runs through the Sequoia National Forest.

On our first day out, we followed up a speedy descent of Just Outstanding with a mellow climb along Wagy Flats before detouring down the narrow, steep and sandy singletrack of the Maki trail—a series of steep-and-loose fall-line descents through scrub-littered high desert. After missing a turn, we tried our luck down a loose network of animal paths, dirt-surfing our way back to the floor of the Kern River Valley.

Here’s a snippet of the upper Gooseberry connector leading into Just Outstanding.

For more information on these trails check back at Btrails.com for the full report, or go to mtnriver.com.

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